There isn’t much good news for printed newspapers when it comes to their remaining relevant to today’s consumers. The last hope seemed be that older people (55-plus) were still loyal to print and that fact has kept a lot of advertisers spending money in print.
A recent study now may be breaking down that last bit of good news for printed newspapers.
This image is from a blog post at Reflections of a Newsosaur and comes with a caveat that this survey was conducted online so there is a certain bias built in. However, it still paints a pretty dismal picture for printed newspapers and therefore for advertisers looking to reach consumers of all ages. The tried and true printed newspaper may be in its last days of relevancy.
The challenge for companies using online ad builders connecting dealers to co-op advertising funds is to recognize the way consumers are moving online and adjusting their ad builder technology to make it as easy to build and publish digital outputs as it is to build printed pieces.
The advantage for dealers and brands to publish online content is that many of the most effective sites are free of publication costs. A dealer’s facebook page, his own site and a brand site (dealer locator results pages) are all perfect examples of very effective sites that are free of publication costs.
The best ad builders, like ours, also host the landing pages that a dealer builds in the system. By hosting the landing pages a brand can save the cost of monitoring the pages and sites that dealers want to apply for co-op reimbursement. It’s almost impossible to check every page every day to make sure it continues to meet brand guidelines. That’s not a issue when we host the pages and insure that only approved content gets reimbursed.
When we host the pages it also helps the brand and the dealer track the results and share best practices across the entire dealer channel.
It’s time to rethink how your ad builder and your co-op ad dollars are being spent. If you’re making it easier for your dealers to build printed pieces without having equal or better ways for dealers to publish online pages you may be wasting a lot of time and money.