HDRKID
Senior Member
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- 2,585
I have noticed a lot fewer ads in newspapers after CRAIGSLIST did emerge. This lack of ads has forced the closure of many papers. Media depended on this ad money. Well, most of it is gone. However, there are still a few who refuse to smell the coffee brewing in our new morning.
TAKEN FROM "THINK LIKE A FREAK"
“Yeah,” said someone else, “it’d be like that kid in Pittsburgh.”
What kid in Pittsburgh?
They told us about a summer intern who was supposed to call in the Sunday ad buys for the Pittsburgh newspapers. For whatever reason, he botched his assignment and failed to make the calls.
So for the entire summer, the company ran no newspaper ads in a large chunk of Pittsburgh. “Yeah,”
one executive said, “we almost got fired for that one.”
So what happened, we asked, to the company’s Pittsburgh sales that summer?
They looked at us, then at each other—and sheepishly admitted it never occurred to them to check the data. When they went back and ran the numbers, they found something shocking: the ad blackout hadn’t affected Pittsburgh sales at all!
Now that, we said, is valuable feedback. The company may well be wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising. How could the executives know for sure? That 40-market experiment would go a long way toward answering the question. And so, we asked them, are you ready to try it now?
“Are you crazy?” the marketing executive said again. “We’ll get fired if we do that!”
To this day, on every single Sunday in every single market, this company still buys newspaper advertising—even though the only real piece of feedback they ever got is that the ads don’t work.
TAKEN FROM "THINK LIKE A FREAK"
“Yeah,” said someone else, “it’d be like that kid in Pittsburgh.”
What kid in Pittsburgh?
They told us about a summer intern who was supposed to call in the Sunday ad buys for the Pittsburgh newspapers. For whatever reason, he botched his assignment and failed to make the calls.
So for the entire summer, the company ran no newspaper ads in a large chunk of Pittsburgh. “Yeah,”
one executive said, “we almost got fired for that one.”
So what happened, we asked, to the company’s Pittsburgh sales that summer?
They looked at us, then at each other—and sheepishly admitted it never occurred to them to check the data. When they went back and ran the numbers, they found something shocking: the ad blackout hadn’t affected Pittsburgh sales at all!
Now that, we said, is valuable feedback. The company may well be wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising. How could the executives know for sure? That 40-market experiment would go a long way toward answering the question. And so, we asked them, are you ready to try it now?
“Are you crazy?” the marketing executive said again. “We’ll get fired if we do that!”
To this day, on every single Sunday in every single market, this company still buys newspaper advertising—even though the only real piece of feedback they ever got is that the ads don’t work.