Newspaper advertising leads to better ROI

Presented at Newswork’s first Effectiveness Summit, the new ROI study provides hard evidence of the impact news brands have on advertising campaigns. The results show that newspapers increase overall campaign effectiveness as well as boost the ROI of other media when used in the media mix. Television’s effectiveness doubles, while online display becomes four times as effective and radio 10 times more effective. The study also measured the increase in effectiveness of adding newspapers to a campaign for different sectors, it was almost six times more effective for finance; about three times for retail and travel; almost twice for automotive; and 1.2 times for FMCG.

Benchmarketing’s ROI study presentation which can be downloaded from the Newsworks website represents an unprecedented insight into how advertising works for newsbrands. It is a bespoke analysis of Omnicom’s econometrics data vault which uses 500 statistical models and identifies immediate and longer term impact on revenue and ROI, using models across categories for the last five years combined with UK industry adspend (Standard Media Index and Nielsen). It focuses on the impact of newsbrands in a multimedia and increasing digital mix, in terms of incremental sales and ROI.

Over the last five years in the UK adspend on newspapers including print and digital has been decreasing, some of what has been lost to print has gone to digital, but overall there is still a decrease. Yet the data from this study shows that as the percentage of print newspaper advertising increases in the media plan mix, so does the effectiveness and ROI of the entire campaign. The results show that it is always best to have print newsbrands in the media mix.

Sally Dickerson, managing director of Benchmarketing, presenting the data at the Newsworks Effectiveness Summit in London, highlighted how some categories are significantly underspending on print. Finance brands should be allocating about 21% of their adspend to newspapers for maximum campaign effect, but in reality in the UK in 2015 the figure was closer to 8%. A similar trend was noticed for supermarkets which should be spending 27% of their budget on newspaper advertising and they were only allocating a little over half that amount. The sweet spot for the average spender in the automotive category is 11% on newspaper advertising, yet the actual spend sat at about 8%. Her conclusion was that the pendulum has swung too far for the decreased adspend on newbrands and advertisers are missing out by not allocating larger portions of their budgets to newspapers. Dickerson says, “It’s always better to spend in newspapers.”

This data is most relevant for the UK, however, [www.ads24.co.za Ads24]] have media strategy consultants who can work out the optimum percentage of adspend that should be allocated to newspapers in the channel split for any given brand and budget; within a multi-platform journey. Agencies can ask Ads24 to find the sweet spot for client brands and for customised presentations that recommend not only the optimal percentage of adspend for newspapers, but lay out a tailored media plan.