MY VISIT TO THE OTHER SIDE

I visited the Other Side, and now I know why newspapers are struggling…and why New Hampshire Business Review changed its name to NHBR and started NHBR Network.

The Other Side for any reporter is public relations. Yes, in my day job I’m still a reporter of NHBR, but at night I masquerade as an actor for the Community Players of Concord. And this year, given my years in the media and the Players lack of publicity director, I stepped in to take on that role. I was soon trying to sell our first two productions: Tom Sawyer and Godspell
( I wouldn’t be doing my volunteer job if I didn’t tell you that Godspell is playing this weekend (Nov. 20-22) Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Click here for detail and tickets).

Now once upon a time, the Concord Monitor automatically plastered whatever production by this 82 year old theater company came up with across the front page of the weekend section, complete with a huge color photo. This guaranteed a decent crowd for Thursday night. No longer (and as a result, no more Thursday nights). The Monitor did some surveys and found that people aren’t so much interest in local stuff. They drive. So these days Monitor readers get enticing articles about things happening all over the state, which makes producing local theater more challenging then ever.

Selling it is, is also a major challenge. It’s not enough that a local group of people are putting on an amazing show. It has to be marketed like a package, the way museums market blockbuster exhibits. It has to be an EVENT. Tom Sawyer morphed into the centennial of Mark Twain’s death, with a marathon reading of the book in the Concord Public Library.. In Godspell it was a coming together of the religious and theatrical community, with a discussion group on Jesus in Theater and Film (Saturday, November 21 at 2 pm at the Audi. Free with refreshments!)
Reaching out to churches was also an alternative marketing strategy, given the uncertainty of media coverage.

Now, I’m not about to go on and on about the lack of local coverage as the reason behind the decline of local newspapers. I think that has something to do with it, but the larger reason is that there are other ways that advertisers can target their audiences….seemingly better ways.
Just as for years we counted on the local paper to cover us, the Players put nearly all of its limited advertising dollars to buy ads in local papers. But this year, we tried doing something else. We started advertising on Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

We still advertised in the Monitor: close to $700 in fact, but this time we diverted about $250 to the internet ads. In the Monitor we put a $1 off coupon, if someone brought it in the box office. After three newspaper advertisement, only two people submitted coupons
On the internet however we paid by the click. So that $250 resulted in more than 350 clicks. And these were clicks by people who lived in our market area, and who had an interest in either religion, or theater or gospel music. And they all clicked on an ad that read something like this:

• Get Godspell Tickets Here
See it in Concord NH, this weekend
Only $14-$17. Good seats going fast
www.communityplayersofconcord.org

When they click on the ad, it takes them directly to our website, where they just have to click buy tickets, and then they can pick out a seat and give a credit card number.

Now, not everybody bought a ticket…but not everybody who sees the Monitor ad will go to the show. In Internet advertising, there is the equivalent of newspaper circulation. They are called unique impressions…and our ad have about 80,000 of them, more than our local papers circulation And in the case of the Monitor, we are reaching people who don’t care about religion and theater, whereas with Internet advertising you can target your reader.

Finally it’s a lot harder for the reader of a newspaper ad to take action….action at least that you can measure. For someone to click a coupon, it means they have to stop what they are doing, find a scissors and tear apart what they are reading and remember to bring it in. Whereas all an Internet browsers have to do is click on the ad that brings them directly to your web page (where they can go one step further and buy a ticket). That’s partly the reason that the Players has only a few coupons and hundreds of clicks.

Of course, you know a clipped coupon at the box office means a sold ticket…and a click on your website does not have that certainty. But if your ad is specific enough with words like “Get tickets here” you can conclude that a good percentage actually is clicking on the site with at least the thought of buying a ticket. Even if only 10 percent actually do so, 30 is a lot more tickets than 3.
This is why dollars are fleeing print media for the Internet. It seems as if you get ten times the results by spending as third as much. More astute member of profession on this network may point to studies about whether that is actually true (and I hope they do in the comment section) but appearances count for more than reality in this business.

New Hampshire Business Review – as does most of the print media – realize this, of course, and that is why they are shifting more and more resources into the Internet. It’s why I spend as much time writing for our daily web page NHBR.com as the print product and why I am writing this blog.

The problem however is that the advertising dollars don’t follow us as much as we like. They are going to sites like Google and Facebook where the vast amount of Internet traffic is. The paradox is that much of what people are searching for actually comes from newspapers and other media for free, which is why papers are now struggling with the idea of paid internet content. However, as we all know, papers who have tried to do that have found a drastic drop in readership, and they risk becoming irrelevant. And nothing is more deadly to a media outlet.

Meanwhile the advertising dollars keep on coming into Google because there is a lots of other media willing share content for nothing.

I don’t pretend to have a solution to this. But my brief foray into publicity made me realize what the print media is up against, and how important it is forit to develop online products.

Comments anyone?