Sponsored by
THE FINAL WORD ON INSERT MEDIA
press inserts as a volatile, high-risk ad channel. We are now down-weighting our expenditure on press inserts by eliminating certain titles which have proved unreliable.
When Times Newspapers tells you that the Extinction Rebellion blockade of their print works on 5th September gave rise to a shortfall of 47 per cent and your figures suggest the shortfall was between 67 per cent and 70 per cent, you suffer a big loss. After 40 years as an insert advertiser with them, we won’t be advertising in TNL newspapers in future.
When the Radio Times tells you, at the last minute, that they want you to remove a product (a fully-certified FFP1 mask) from your printed catalogue and you are forced to re-deploy 500,000 catalogues, it tends to induce instant sense of humour failure. Bye-bye Radio Times, after 43 years of inserting. Your rates are way too high now and your conditions unrealistic and uncommercial.
When TV Times ‘loses track’ of 139,000 of the catalogues we’ve delivered, it causes havoc with our planning. With just 4 customer orders received rather than the usual 400+ they recognise that something went horribly wrong. But their ‘generous offer’ to let us have a full run of inserts to make up for lost copies is wholly inadequate as their insert fee represents no more than 25 per cent of our promotion cost. Should we be expected to fund the £5,000 cost of lost print? This is what makes press inserts such a high-risk game. The catalogues we deliver for insertion generally cost three times as much as the insert fee!
And when The Daily Mail proposes a 14 per cent increase in its insert fee, you cancel and resolve to remove the titles from future schedules. That’s all an advertiser can do, but that’s 30 years as an insert advertiser with the Daily Mail up in smoke!
Even the most honourable and reliable press insert partner of them all, the Telegraph Group, managed to place four competing catalogues in the same issue this Autumn, in contravention of long-standing agreements. That decimates response.
68
WEB VERSION: Click Here
These are just some of the issues we’ve faced this season. As a company, we are now concerned that too many of the catalogues we book for insertion in newspapers and magazines never reach the readers’ hands. You can’t even trust certificates of insertion as they mean very little. Certain printers freely acknowledge that machine minders are told to simply copy-across all details of insert materials from the delivery notes to the COI without verification of the number of copies inserted.
As experienced catalogue retailers, we can identify and measure the damage caused by circulation shortfalls and high rates of returns on publications. I am concerned though for general advertisers, who are unaware of the extent of these shortfalls and are oblivious of the scale at which they are being short- changed. My colleagues in DCA who may be new to the game may also be unaware of the extent of this problem.
Direct Commerce |
homeofdirectcommerce.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70
