The Reflections of a Newsosaur blog has an interesting post on newspaper ad share vs. audience. He documents how newspaper readership is going down, faster than their ad share is shrinking.
From the blog:
The good news for newspapers in the above data is that they have clung to far more advertising share than their share of audience would seem to warrant. While newspapers today have only 3.1% of the media audience, they are getting 11.5% of the ad revenues.
The bad news for publishers is that markets tend to be rational, correcting such imbalances in the fullness of time. The plunge in newspaper ad sales from $49 billion in 2005 to $24 billion in 2011 – a decline that has continued unabated all of this year – indicates the market is behaving as anticipated.
This is just another data point that tells us that old advertising habits are hard to change.
On the local level I see the problem primarily as local dealers simply not having the knowledge or the skill set to move away from traditional advertising to digital media. The solution for someone in charge of local advertising for a brand, is to provide dealers with the tools necessary to reach consumers who now spend most of their time online. Things like customizable landing pages, Facebook content, mobile sites and e-promo pages to name a few.
And, the best place to make that happen is inside of your online marketing portal or ad builder.