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Selling Your Publication Shoppers and Pennysavers
Whatever you call them, shoppers, pennysavers, free sheets, etc., these free papers containing mostly, if not all, advertising are certainly major contenders in the fight for advertisers' money. The huge advantage of these newspapers is that they typically are delivered to every home in the area in which they circulate. This total coverage of the market is typically called TMC, which stands for total market coverage. The advantage of total market coverage is obvious. If you want to reach everybody then put an ad in a shopper and it'll get to every home in the area. At least that's the argument that can be made. Some shopper publications aren't delivered to homes at all, but left in restaurants and other locations around town. Some do very well with this type of distribution. Another big advantage shoppers have is their low rates. Because there's little or no editorial content in shoppers, there's virtually no editorial staff to pay. At least part of this enormous savings is passed on to the advertiser, providing total coverage on the cheap. Although this sounds like a huge advantage, others will argue that you get what you pay for. Sure, you're saving money, but the competing weeklies and dailies (unless they have their own TMC non-editorial product) will say you're sacrificing a lot. The argument goes that unlike most dailies and weeklies, subscriptions to shoppers aren't paid for or even requested in most cases. Which means many people will throw it away without even looking at it. Others will question how legitimate the circulation figures are that they quote. Almost every newspaper I ever worked for has the same story circulating around its advertising department. Invariably, a friend of a friend saw a huge bundle of the area's shoppers in a dumpster behind a supermarket. The assumption was that one of the shopper's delivery people got tired of delivering papers that day, so just threw them away when nobody was looking and knocked off early. Shopper publications will counter that they no longer use schoolchildren to deliver their product, instead they hire adult carriers, who are supposed to be more efficient and reliable. Whatever the arguments for why a shopper really doesn't reach the amount of people it claims, there is a simple way for shoppers to avoid this problem--get an audit. Some shoppers use audit companies but many others don't. Unfortunately, the anti-shopper campaign doesn't stop there. Besides the quantity of readers being questioned, some question the quality of the readers. There's a general feeling that shopper readers have less desirable demographics--lower incomes and less expendable incomes. While it does make sense that the people who actually pick up a shopper full of ads are more bargain-oriented perhaps because they have lower expendable income, still, proving it might be another issue. In fact, we worked with a large shopper group in one area who's readership study showed that they did indeed reach a good amount of higher income readers. And, besides, what's so wrong with reaching bargain-oriented
customers? They're ready to spend money, and while they may be not the
most loyal customer, many advertisers do well with these products. Next: Your Products: ROP
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