In their ongoing search for the most prominent newspaper real estate, advertisers in this country have rarely obtained the most coveted space: the top of the front page.
That changed recently in the Chicago Sun-Times, which has been running front-page advertisements promoting a contest sponsored by a suburban appliance company and a car dealership. The ads carry the logos of the two contest sponsors and are running in the upper left or upper right corners of the tabloid.
It’s not unprecedented for newspapers to run front-page ads–the New York Times has done it for years, and USA Today recently began doing it. But the Sun-Times ads are more prominent and far bigger, for example, than the tiny agate ads that run at the bottom of the Times’ front page.
“First you have USA Today running ads across the bottom of the paper. Now we have the Chicago Sun-Times running them at the top. Is this the start of a trend? I don’t know,” veteran newspaper analyst John Morton said Wednesday.
Officials at the Sun-Times and Hollinger International Inc., the parent company, did not return phone calls seeking comment. The Sun-Times has daily circulation of 468,170, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
An official at one of the sponsors buying the Sun-Times ad, Harbor Pontiac/GMC Truck, said the ad will run through the NCAA basketball tournament. He said the dealership had earlier bought a front page ad at the Post Tribune, in Gary, which is also owned by Hollinger.
For most of the 20th Century, large newspapers have avoided placing prominent advertising on their front pages. The argument against ads has been that they consume news space, upset visual display and undermine the journalistic credibility of the page. That is still the sentiment among many journalists; the New York Times’ one-column, small-print ads have been a consistent exception to the rule.
As financial pressures have increased on publicly traded newspaper companies, the taboo against prominent front-page ads has weakened. Last October USA Today began running ads at the bottom of its nationally distributed paper. The sponsors, including AT&T Corp. and General Motors Corp., paid a total of $5.25 million for the ads, over the time span of one year, according to a newspaper spokesman. USA Today’s Steven Anderson said the ads are not consuming space that would be devoted to news.
Industry data on the use of the newspaper front page as a parking spot for advertisers is not available, industry observers say, but anecdotal evidence suggests the practice is slowly gaining favor. Steven Duke, project manager at Northwestern University’s Media Management Center and a former deputy managing editor at the Sun-Times, said a sampling of 100 newspapers found seven with front page ads, all at the bottom of the page. Advertisers included car dealers, hospitals and mortgage services.
Duke said some newspapers are publishing early Sunday editions–those distributed on Saturday–with front pages dominated by pictures, graphics and a promotion telling readers that coupons inside the paper are worth a certain amount of money.
Duke said the industry’s reaction to the USA Today ads suggested the taboo is fading. “I expect to see a lot more of this [because] a lot more publicly traded newspaper companies are expected to produce ever increasing profits.”
U.S. newspapers are distinct for their lack of front-page ads. Duke and others point out that European, South American and Canadian publications have been putting big ads on their front pages for decades. “I don’t think the public really cares about this,” said David Cole, publisher of the Cole Group, a California-based newspaper consultant.
Morton said he, too, expects to see more front-page ads on newspapers. “It’s sort of a jarring thing, because the front page is a newspaper’s face to the public,” Morton said. “This does introduce an element that disturbs that, but newspapers are trying to make money any way they can–not that they haven’t been making a lot of money anyway.”
