The Canberra Times Wonders Why Advertising Revenue Is Down

They printed an add for my business out of focus by not matching the resolution from the submitted artwork despite several assurances from their salesperson that they would correct it.

Their response was rude & dismissive when questioned on why they did this.

This occured in 2004 and I refused to use CT for any advertising since which is just as well because I had a huge response from my Yellow Pages adds.

That’s outrageous.

jake555 said :

‘Ad’ is short for advertisement and ‘Add’ is short for addition. Come on people.

Anyway, are the contents of Births, Deaths and Marriages ads or notices?

‘Ad’ is short for advertisement and ‘Add’ is short for addition. Come on people.

I used to advertise in the Chronical, part of the CT group, but gave up when the delivery system changed to throwing them out of a car window into the gutter instead of delivering them properly! I am now in yellow pages and that works great!

Nambucco Deliria said :

Maybe you could get the government to help you out in your time of financial distress.

That’s the best you’ve got?

Well I like the Canberra Times and have been reading it for 30 years. Sometimes I even check Saturdays Births Deaths and Marriages. I assume few people have to pay the $56.80 too often to make a public announcement that is reproduced 60000 times and possibly read by twice that number. And I bet you still placed the add which unless you have misled us about your circumstances is but a pittance.

And whenever a story is posted here there are numerous gloats about how CT’s circulation is falling and the paper is lousy and it’s death rattle wouldn’t be a bother.

So why bother commenting if the paper is totally irrelevant to you. You wouldn’t buy it regardless of the quality.

I like to polish my shoes over the broadsheet pages, and the Canberra Times is good for this. In fact, I just signed up for their deal of 5 weeks delivered for 10 bucks, so I can have some paper to line the cats litter box and start my backyard chiminea.

It’s a shame it’s so expensive as reading the births, deaths and marriages is about the only thing the Canberra Times is good for (apart from nice wide sheets good as kitty-litter tray liner). Surely if they dropped the price more people could advertise then more people related, or friends, with the people being born, married or passed away would buy the paper to read the ad? For $56.80 there are SO many other things I’d rather buy especially when, these days, you just send out a group email with as many banners and pictures as you want letting people know of lifes events and it’s free.

Last time the business I work for put an ad in the Canberra Times, I don’t think it was worth it. Full page, full colour for around $11,000 in the Saturday edition. To put this in perspective, a television campaign over a weekend sets a business with a long term account back around $30,000 plus production costs. The ad though didn’t seem to do much, there was no apparent increase in through traffic of phone enquiries and the customers who did come in didn’t seem to be aware of our specials.
When we put catalogues though in the paper, that definitely increase both customer awareness and traffic to the store. Problem for the Canberra Times and other media outlets is they charge far less for inserts than printed ads.