Let's make it hard ... and then let's bellyache

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The Newspaper Association of America's Marketing Conference, held here June 21-24, covered circulation building, branding, positioning, pricing and more. But we also found some zingers about a basic marketing concept: making it easy for customers to do business with you.

We newspaper folks don't even seem to know what we don't know -- we make it hard for advertisers to do business with us, then we come to conferences and complain to each other about retail migration to other media.

Harry Tropp is retail media manager for BBDO New York, which handles the Intrepid account. Dealer associations can buy television cheaper, which makes newspapers a hard sell. Agencies view newspapers as an insufficiently dynamic creative medium for cars. But BBDO frequently receives calls from newspaper comptrollers who argue for a different rate than the one quoted by their sales rep. Instead of honoring the rep's negotiations, the comptrollers often pull the agency's ads and thus anger the dealer. Worse, comptrollers sometimes pull ads from one agency branch because another branch didn't pay a bill for a totally different advertiser.

Tropp urges a little customer friendliness about issues such a registration problems. He calls it the newspaper "tough" attitude. Not so radio. Radio reps come to BBDO with total "value-added packages" for weather advertising, festivals, holidays and specials, rather than just selling time. "The newspaper is the premier local medium. You are not taking advantage of it creatively. Worse, you have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude," he said. Tropp describes it as a monopoly mentality in an era when advertisers know there are other media.

Dayton Hudson Corp. had similar stories. Media Manager Terry Prill says too many newspaper ad reps fail to return quarterly advertising forms sent to newspapers about their calendar and runs. Reminder calls often yield a two-week delay. Prill dramatically described how she "literally begged one newspaper rep, please, please, send this to me right away ... I have only one hour to make the buy." The rep faxed it back 24 hours later. With its store credit card database, Dayton Hudson -- a retail company that includes not only the Dayton Hudson chain, but also Target stores -- can work with a newspaper to see what can be done to build circulation by ZIP code if the paper is willing. Prill says broadcast reps are exactly the opposite, offering -- does this sound familiar? -- "value-added packages."

K-Mart's Ed Stine reassured attendees that the retailer is taking serious steps to reposition and strength itself, but he was not shy. K-Mart will convert to direct-mail if a newspaper's rates are five to 20 percent above what K-Mart estimates is reasonable for that geography. Stine also complained about being charged more for distributing a 24 page pre-printed tab versus a 20-pager. He cites $43 per 1000 as the average national rate for tab inserts.

As one presenter asked the attendees, "is your attitude 'we own your business' or 'we want your business'?"

-- Roger S. Peterson