PS&L Blog

Used to be automatic that we’d incorporate print newspaper advertising in the mix for college and universities that wanted to market to non-traditional age and graduate students. The only question was how much and for how long. Not so anymore.

To begin with, newspaper circulation has dropped 30% from an all time high of 63.1 million in 1973. For the last five years, the average circulation has decreased 13% annually and 144 daily newspapers have closed since 2002. Ad revenues for print saw a 9.5% drop in last year alone. It’s been brutal.

Most of the major metro dailies have been focusing their attention online and this is the only bright spot for these newspapers. Up until this quarter, newspapers recorded 14 consecutive quarters of double digit growth for their online revenue. But as anyone can tell you, there’s a big difference between what you can get across in print vs. what you can say online advertising. Online ads act like billboards. You’re limited to how much you can say and your viewership is “driving by” them faster than they would on a highway.

Then there’s the readership. Your average graduate, adult education or degree completion prospect is between 25 and 35 years of age, and this group has not been raised to read newspapers. They like to get their information on demand rather than having it preselected.  For many of them information from a blog is as credible as the same information from a traditional journalist. Furthermore, in their minds news is free. They can’t conceive of paying for a subscription or a daily paper for their commute.

There is also the pressure from more and more institutions to evaluate the ROI for advertising. I’ve written about how online has grown at the expense of print in large part because of its promise of better tracking and measurability (Measuring Marketing Return on Investment for Higher Education)

So does all this mean that higher ed advertising in print newspapers is dead? No. The answer is look at your market area. In certain areas the small town paper is holding its own because it offers the only way for people to get their local news. It used to be that I’d recommend more ad dollars to the metro papers for greater coverage and then a smaller percentage to the local papers. Today, for the same area, I would probably move some or all of the newsprint dollars to online banners, pay per click, roadway billboards and radio, while keeping my print creative for the local papers. We conduct major advertising programs for our clients with no dollars for newspapers, and this would have been unheard of seven years ago.

What we are finding is that a mix of online, radio and billboards is effective for attracting non-traditional students. And don’t think that what used to go to newsprint is all going to online. Radio listenership has remained stable and can be very effective, and while advertising higher ed on billboards used to be considered low-brow, that’s not the case anymore.

Personally, I still like the feel of opening a newspaper and reading the printed page. I don’t enjoy seeing the demise of metro dailies. But then I am not the target audience for continuing ed or graduate programs.