It’s not quite Nancy Kerrigan and Jeff Gillooly in pairs figure skating, but Canadian newspapers have created an unlikely Olympic alliance of their own. Forty-nine dailies from seven different publishing companies, including Torstar, CanWest Media Works and Gesca, have joined together in what is described as an “unprecedented coalition” to package Olympic news and advertising.
Among the participating newspapers: the National Post, Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun, Calgary Herald, Montreal Gazette and Halifax Daily News. The papers boast a combined daily circulation of 3.5 million.
The consortium will produce up to 62 Olympic-themed supplements-published quarterly in non-Olympic years, weekly as the Olympics draw near, and daily during the Games-between now and the end of the 2012 Games. Each paper will supply its own content, supplemented by stories, photos and graphics from Canadian Press.
The group’s first publication, an eight-page edition entitled “One Year to Beijing,” will run Aug. 8. The debut edition, themed “A Celebration of Canada’s Olympic Athletes,” was originally scheduled to appear July 1. However, Jim Byrd, a former CBC executive who is chair and senior partner of the Sports Media Marketing Group (SMMG)-the group overseeing ad sales for the consortium-says advertisers “asked for a little more time” (the issue will now appear in September).
While a release announcing the alliance carried endorsements by agency heads including M2 Universal president Hugh Dow, some buyers, while lauding the concept, have concerns about the cost of running ads across 49 publications. “It’s very, very expensive,” says Brenda Bookbinder, print portfolio director at PHD Canada in Toronto. “I’m not saying they’re charging through the nose, [but] every time you’re [advertising] it’s 49 papers.” And a one-time ad, she says, probably isn’t going to generate enough awareness for clients.
“If you want to have your name attached to it and want people to recognize you’re involved in it, you would want to be there on a fairly consistent basis,” says Bookbinder.
Bryd pegs the cost of a full page, colour ad in the supplements at between $300,000 and $400,000, depending on the advertiser and their rates with individual papers. “Even if you did a quarter page in every single one, that’s still a lot of money,” says Bookbinder.
Byrd says clients will be able to customize their plan by ad size, number of markets, etc. “If somebody wanted to buy everything in every one of those editions, that’s a fairly daunting task,” he says. “We assume people are not going to do that.”
Len Kubas, president of Toronto newspaper consultancy Kubas Consultants, surmises that if the Olympic-themed initiative is a success, the model could be used elsewhere. “It looks like it might have some legs, and if you can do it for this, then you might be able to do it for the next Stanley Cup series if we get the Maple Leafs in there.” The Leafs and the Stanley Cup-now there’s an unlikely partnership.
