A RANDOM review of advertising in the free newspaper, the Metro, has found that – in addition to six reader offers and a dozen in-house ads, including for the Daily Record – over a quarter of the paper was taken up with adverts.
The review, of last Tuesday’s edition of the paper – to be found on buses, at rail stations and in Scotland’s major cities – found reader offers involving pizza, a mobile telephone recycling initiative, a hotel chain, cycling and balloon flights.
The review is part of an allmediascotland.com snapshot of both indigenous titles and London ones operating as clear Scottish editions, such as The Daily Mail but not the Daily Mirror which, despite its Scottish branding in its masthead, last Tuesday contained only a couple of Scottish stories, both by Maggie Barry.
Already, allmediascotland.com has found that last Tuesday’s edition of The Scotsman comprised 12.69 per cent of display and classified adverts, while the figure for The Herald – on the same day – was 24.65 per cent. Even including in-house ads, The Courier’s total, also for that same day, was 14 per cent.
allmediascotland has still to reveal the amount taken up by adverts in last Tuesday’s editions of the Scottish Sun, the Daily Record, Press and Journal, the Daily Star of Scotland, The Times (Scotland), The Daily Mail and The Express.
It was not possible to say whether any of the adverts recorded were appearing at massively-reduced prices or even for free. And, of course, the Scottish editions of London-based titles included adverts sourced for UK-wide consumption.
The snapshot follows last Tuesday’s reporting on allmediascotland.com of the quarterly, Bellwether, survey of company marketing budgets which recorded the biggest decrease in ad spending plans in its nine-year-history.
Only seven per cent of companies reported plans to increase their marketing, while 49 per cent said they were planning to decrease.
The advertising breakdown in last Tuesday’s 40-page edition of the compact-sized Metro included in-house ads for the Daily Record’s directory, its car cards promotion (a quarter of a page), its careers website (half a page) and its cars website (a full page).
The Metro is a joint project between Daily Mail publishers, Associated Press, and Daily Record publishers, Trinity Mirror – the former responsible for editorial, the latter for advertising sales, printing and distribution.
Excluding the reader offers and in-house ads, some 26.49 per cent of the paper’s content was given over to advertising.
