Media Matters

Today’s announcement (http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,,1987151,00.html) that Johnston Press is using a new free paper called City Lite in Leeds to target affluent young professionals through content and distribution targetted via hand delivery to inner city apartment blocks tells you how much the role of the new breed of free papers has changed from the traditional ones.
Until now most deserved the title “freesheets” – advertising-driven rags with minimal “press release leftovers” editorial content designed to mop up as much spare advertising revenue in the market as possible and, often, play a strategic role in making sure there wasn’t enough left for competitors to be tempted to launch into a market enjoyed by the incumbent.
For readers, frankly, most were rubbish and deservedly went to the bin, or cat litter tray, pretty quickly. There were some exceptions, though.
Not least the two papers I edited in the mid-’90s — the Lakeland Echo and the Southport & Formby Advertiser — which tempted readers with positive, features-based paid-for-quality editorial.
I chose not to try to take on our long-established incumbent competitors (with staffing many times ours) head-on for news as it was their strength (through being front-of-mind for key contacts to go to with stories) when we could play to our own – doing what they weren’t doing — like publishing school sports results, treating people decently, rather than with arrogance and complacency, and misquoting them. We could gain all their readers for different reasons.
The result was that the Lakeland Echo was so popular that when it was moved from door-to-door free distribution to pick-up only VFD, the print run had to be increased to fill demand! Equally the Advertiser was very well read and, although it ultimately didn’t meet the commercial targets it had been set, did enough damage to the incumbent Southport Visiter that its parent Trinity Weekly Newspapers was prepared to make a new bid for the whole Advertiser group (which it had done previously, when UPN didn’t want to sell it) and in the process kill off this thorn in its flesh.
But they were the exceptions, along with a few rare others.
The new breed of frees, and freely-available full editions of paid-fors, like those of the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Daily Post, are entirely different in their purpose. They’re also about getting eyeballs for advertisers, but they don’t want just anyone, they want the hard-to-get, affluent younger people who don’t currently buy those local papers and whom advertisers are increasingly finding it hard to reach.
So they’re targeting a group, just as magazines have done for decades, and by a channel which fits in with their life – in a medium they can consume it, when they have the time.
And, according to Lynne Anderson’s piece in Marketing Week on January 3, they’re succeeding – the MEN’s free’s readers are either new, of increased frequency, read the paper for an average of 26 minutes (the same as the paid-fors), 70% are aged 15-44 and 75% are ABC1s.
Johnston’s targeting of City Lite is much more narrow than that of the others (and the new London frees) and has to be commended for its commercial savvy (using postcode data to identify the best homes to hit their target group,as direct marketing can do).
But they may have missed a trick – the act of accepting a paper offered by a vendor is very different psychologically to picking one up off your doormat. Acceptance breaks the personal space barrier and will increase the likelihood of the paper being read. City Lite will have to work hard on its cover to convince these young affluent folk that it’s worth their time reading it, rather than doing something else with the precious time they don’t spend working for their hard-earned cash.
The other role all of these ‘new-frees’ play is to promote the paid-for product – each plug content worth buying in the paid-for edition. Hopefully getting some free readers to trade-up to the paid-for. Data on conversion rates would be interesting to see.
The final interesting thing about these new frees is the way they’ve changed the perception of free papers, particularly among young ABC1s. Where once “free paper” was an insult, thanks to these and, of course, Metro (which started the whole commuter frees race in the last few years), it no longer is – more and more readers increasingly see free papers as something worth reading which just happens to be free. Which is exactly what they should be.
Which makes the quality of the editorial in them even more crucial then ever. If it isn’t worth their time, the advertisers won’t be getting them. So while frees are still advertising-led, editorial is on longer the junior partner in them.

# posted by Unknown @ 10:08 pm