Edmonds: Printed inserts 'under siege'

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on February 15, 2010 at 4:48 PM

Throughout the advertising downturn over the past couple years, preprinted inserts, which often contain coupons along with ads, held up reasonably well. However, inserts are increasingly facing digital competition, and because they make up half of retail advertising, newspapers need to address this issue, the Newspaper Association of America stated in a white paper published in late October.

The report was little-noticed, Poynter's Rick Edmonds wrote today, but newspapers are beginning to put strategies in place.

Gannett and the Dallas Morning News, for example, are offering special products for free to customers in specific postal codes who opt in to the offers. Gannett gives away its Sunday Select (all the preprints without the newspaper) while the morning news gives readers a compact news report with the inserts.

"However sound the logic, proposals for a collective response to an obvious industry problem tend not to happen. Blame inertia, blame the big papers and big companies who want to do it their own way, blame executives who can't stomach the expense of abandoning a current vendor or internal system and creating a new one," Edmonds stated.

The report, published by the NAA and Kannon Consulting, also points out that circulation losses and poor penetration among younger readers are another big concern amongst advertisers.