A SNAPSHOT of advertising in the Scottish Sun has found that almost 30 per cent of the paper was taken up with adverts.
The review, of last Tuesday’s edition of the paper, found three full pages for Tesco supermarket plus six consecutive pages of adverts for the likes of mobile phones, loans and sex chat lines. There was an ad feature too for healthier scotland and four in-house ads, including two pages for sister organisation, Sky.
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. The corresponding figure for the Metro was 26.49 per cent while The Courier’s total, even including in-house ads, was 14 per cent.
allmediascotland has still to reveal the amount taken up by adverts in last Tuesday’s editions of 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 review follows last week’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.
Last Tuesday’s 60-page edition of the Scottish Sun also included a four-page, ‘TV Biz’ supplement, which included an in-house ad plus a display one taking up the best part of a quarter of a page. In the main section, there was a reader, holiday offer.
Excluding the reader offer, the TV supplement ad and the in-house ads, but including the healthy scotland ad feature, some 28.05 per cent of the paper’s content was given over to advertising.
The Scottish Sun retails, Monday-Friday, for 30p.
