Innovative advertising in newspapers: reader distraction or advertiser satisfaction?

Over the past few days, the New York Times Company and the Tribune Company announced that they will begin to integrate new types of advertising onto their pages. A New York Times Company press release reads that its flagship will begin to print "branded watermarks that will be superimposed over a Tuesday to Saturday page of its public company stock listings in the Business Day section of the newspaper" accompanied by the "advertiser's message on the bottom of the page." BtoB, a business marketing website reports that the Chicago-based Tribune Co. is launching a "marketing campaign this month to promote new print ad formats, including watermarked logos and cascading stairs" which will "coincide with enhanced color printing capacity at several Tribune papers."

These two different types of advertising have different implications.

Watermark ads, also known as shadow ads, are generally frowned upon by newsroom employees who opine that they blur the line between editorial and advertising (see former posting.) As of now, they don't appear to be affecting content too much as most are reserved for stock listings and movie pages. But seeing as both of these sections of the paper are rapidly losing readers to up-to-the-minute Internet stock tickers and movie schedules, one must wonder how long it will be before these subtle ads start sneaking behind columns.

"Cascading stair" advertising, on the other hand, does not necessarily confuse the reader as to what is advertising and what is content. Borders between columns and ads are easily distinguishable. However, large adverts that use the cascading stair model seem to seep into parts of pages that normally would not show advertising. Check out page 2 of this Tribune Co. Quarter 2 report PDF (click on August 2005). In effect, this model allows the advertiser greater visibility by spreading what would once have been a full page ad, easily ignored by the reader, onto part of another page of content. Instead of their eyes being immediately pulled towards the headlines, readers are more prone to first glance over the colorful promotion. But will that which is good for the advertiser further annoy readers, their daily lives already bombarded by flashy advertising, that even more will stop buying the paper? What do you think?

Sources: New York Times Company, BtoB, Tribune PDF (August 2005)