How important is the sports section to the paper?

You would think several sports bars would advertise in sports, or electronic stores with a half-page ad listing HDTVs or something like that. But the ad reps don't know what's going on, except Podunk is going to the playoffs and they need to hit up the local drugstore and cafe for a 2x2 ad.

 

As the immortal Nancy Nall wrote on her Web site, newspaper sports section ads are "tires and tits."

 

In re to this: "Regarding the lack of ads in sports, check out the ad reps in your building. Most of them don't know about/have no interest in sports. Therefore, they don't sell their clients on putting the ads in probably the best-read section of the paper."

This is true to an extent. But the upside to sports advertising is limited compared to other areas of the paper. Compared to other sections, sports is the most read for news content than the rest. Many will look in the A section for the large department store ads before they are looking for what happened at the city council meeting. In other words, readers of other sections are far more likely to be specifically looking for ads than they are in the sports section. Many will look in the entertainment section for ads with movie times, music venue schedules, etc. Very few people will specifically look in the sports section to see how much a sit of Bridegestone tires cost today or whether Chesty Canyons is at the Gold Club.

In that regard, selling sports is a tougher sell to advertisers than other sections. Dillards, Macy's, AMC theatres, these ads fall in your lap. You can sell those by accident. There are very few ads geared towards sports that are that low-maintenance. So when you are comparing ad sales in sports to other sections, that's your starting point. Then, you factor in why advertisers don't target sports -- they know sports readers don't respond to the advertising in the same way as, say, readers of the A section. So they are less willing to buy ad space they don't know will help. It's a tougher sell.

So do ad reps tend to be lazy about selling sports? Yes. That's human nature. You can beat your head against the wall trying to sell a sports ad or you can go get a quick, easy commission selling sections where the advertiser wants to be. And you can be pretty comfortable telling an advertiser his ad will be seen in the A section, or metro, etc., compared to sports, because that's the truth. If you advertise in metro, the readers are LOOKING for your ad. If you put it in sports, readers are ignoring your ad in favor of reading about who is paying Cecil Newton what and who knew.

Now, having said all that, I agree that ad departments often can do a better job selling sports advertising. One thing they don't tap into well is brand association. There are a lot of businesses who will want their advertising in sports to associate their business name with the favorite team (it's why corporations will waste money on stadium naming rights). If you can't sell a prep football tab just by selling ads to each school's business boosters (a chance for said businesses to publicly show their support for the school) then you have no clue what you're doing. And I agree that while sports will never generate the direct ad revenue of the A section, it is a huge, huge, HUGE factor in those A section ads being seen by the number of people they get seen by. Even an ad-free sports section should be seen as a huge seller of ads, if that makes sense.

 

I work at a small weekly in Texas (2,000 circ.) We have one high school in the county. We average over $2,000 a week in football related advertising during the season. That may not seem like a lot to most, but for us it's huge. The smartest thing we ever did was start selling our "Football packages" before the season starts. We had over $20,000 worth of advertising sold before the team even played a game.

 

I agree. And it diminishes the importance of the stories that need to be on A1.

 

It depends if you're asking the readers of the guys in the glass offices. Two different answers.

 

Last Saturday my wife threw the sports page into recycling around lunch time.

After searching the house for it (the shitters and the tv rooms) I asked what the hell she did with it. She said she put it in recycling because she thought I had read it.

I had read it, but I was not finished with it. She had no idea what I was talking about.

In the glory days, I would keep a Sunday sports page around four three or four days.

 

As the publisher of a small-city daily told me, "Sports is by far not the largest part of our readership. But it's the most passionate."

 

Most of those comments I wouldn't want in sports. It seems like a great share of the news-side comments are some variation of, "WAH! THIS ELECTED POLITICIAN DOESN'T COMPLETELY AGREE WITH MY WORLD VIEW AND IS A COMMIE/BUSH/HITLER!!!"

 

My paper recently did a reader survey. They listed several tiers rating importance, and all the various aspects of sports coverage was in the bottom.

My guess, the people most likely to respond to a survey like that won't be people who read sports, but unfortunately, I think that will go under the heads of our betters in management.