8/18/2005

THEY MADE A PLAN, IT WORKED, NOW THEY'RE GOING BROKE

Drudge links to this column in the commie lefty scumbag LA Weekly, a free paper in LA that actually publishes some very good stuff once in a while.

In a what goes around comes around deja vu all over again piece of irony, all the major newspapers, led by the Tribune companies, made a conscious decision ten years ago to aim their product strictly at the high income liberals in the big cities and freeze out the working slobs with no money. The theory, which worked like a charm, was that high end advertisers like Saks, Tiffany's, Ritz Carlton, and the movies wanted to reach the people with the most money to spend. When taking a family to a movie costs $60 it makes movies high end.

Now, it turns out that movie goers are 18 to 39 and they think papers are for birds to shit on, not to read. Retailers have merged so there aren't nearly as many of them, hence not as many ads. The automobile business wants to dictate news content. Since the audience for movies is in a demographic the papers aren't interested in reaching----perhaps til this morning---the movies will cut way back on advertising.

These Ivy League MBAs can be too smart.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Technorati updates their Top 100 list
Technorati has updated their Top 100 blogs list. Rather than rewrite what I've previously written, I'll just paste in the comment I left on Jason Calacanis' blog : Niall hope your reading this as well, but I've ...
Love this blog! Going to bookmark you!

I have a pheromone review site. I review pheromone that are proven to work to attract women.

Love to see ya' if you get time :-)

Anonymous said...

Ahh, more comment spam!

Back on topic, we spotted this trend in the late 70s when I worked in the movie business (theater chain in a top-25 tv market, second run/art & classics mix). The local fishwrap raised its rates for movie/entertainment ads while increasing its discounts to department stores and grocery chains. We decided to try droping all of our display advertising (no co-op from the film companies for subruns) and going to a 1-agate-line-per-screen directory-style list with a chain logo at the top. Guess what? We didn't see any change in attendance!

Jump ahead thirty years (same paper): The daily department store ads are mostly gone (all merged/closed), the grocery ads come on preprinted inserts, and the entire weekday movie page ad block usually consists of 36 column-inches of agate type (for over 160 screens). Yeah, you'll see displays on Friday and Sunday, but very seldom (and very small) during the week. Guess it sucks to be in the newspaper business :-P