The revenue model of newspapers in India is skewed towards 65% in favour of advertising and the balance from circulation. This obviously puts a high demand on advertising revenues. The newspaper market in India is dominated by languages – 9 of the Top 10 newspapers in India are in languages other than English. An interesting feature of language newspapers in India is the degree of local editorial customization. A main edition emanating from a city will cover the relevant city news. However, the same paper also has to go to the nearby upcountry districts and sub-districts. To cater to these upcountry markets, they create sub-editions of the Main Edition – each Sub Edition caters to a particular geographical area, and has content pages that are relevant to that area.
This does 2 things
– It gives a local reader content that is relevant to his area
– It gives a platform to a local retailer to advertise
At Dainik Jagran, they publish over 200 such Sub editions to cater to millions of readers, and thousands of potential advertisers. To reach out to these several small advertisers would be a time and resource consuming affair. To tap into the local retail revenue opportunity, this created a programme called Retail Guru.
Retail Gurus was a programme where all the advertisers were invited to one venue. Here, a film about Excellence in Retail was played. This covered trends of modern day retail and shopper behaviour. It suggested ways of growing retail business. They were educated about advertising and how consistency in advertising pays back. There were testimonials from other large local advertisers. There were sales executives who were trained to share various advertising packages with the invitees, and were prepared with advertising contracts which were to be signed immediately. The packages were of different price slabs and the benefit offered to retailers was consistent advertising in Dainik Jagran.
The programme achievements
Since the packages were about continuous advertising, it helped the newspaper tide over any seasonal fluctuations in advertising. The payment mode was Post Dated Cheques on an Equated Monthly Instalment (EMI) basis. This opened up 1750 new advertisers in a short span. In the normal course, to convert this number of advertisers, it would have taken a long time and many more sales staff. This gave a huge base of advertisers to grow in the future.
If you, too, have executed exemplary campaigns in the last one year, go ahead and submit your nominations for the ICL Awards 2018 – India’s most sought-after Content programme of the Year.
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