Interview with Len Kubas

newspaper techniques: In your speech at the WAN advertising conference last month you said that newspaper should restore their ‘price integrity.’ You have been in the industry since many years, would you say that regarding this issue, the situation is worst now?

Len Kubas: Concerning the ‘pricing integrity’ of newspaper advertising rates, I would say that the situation is most definitely worse today than it was when I began working for The Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper in 1969.

Since then, newspapers have faced a growing array of competing media. In response, newspapers have had to become more flexible when setting prices for advertising. As a result, pricing integrity - integrity of the rate structure - suffers.

There is little pricing consistency among different advertisers in the same classification (e.g., automotive dealers or motors) or between classifications among advertisers that spend similar amounts (e.g., a furniture store chain and a clothing and apparel chain.).

Restoring pricing integrity takes time. However, there are special occasions when one can change the rules of the game.

Specifically, this can happen when one introduces a new rate structure - for example, moving from linage-based contracts to Annual Revenue Contracts, or moving from linear pricing (selling ads by the inch, line, mm or scc) to modular ad units.

nt: You advocate for modular ad units (versus mm or lines) and for the promotion of visual impact: Do you need to adopt a compact format toswitch to modules and should newspapers also apply modular approach to classifieds?

Len Kubas: A newspaper does not need to change format in order to move to modular ad units. In fact, we advocate this for all our clients - even those which wish to remain a broadsheet. Examples include The Palm Beach Post, West Palm Beach, Florida (U.S.A.) and The Times-News, Erie, Pennsylvania (U.S.A.).

There should be no revenue decrease when switching to modular; in fact, revenues per page should go up!

Our approach is to combine modular ad units with Visual Impact Pricing, or non-linear pricing. Modular ad units in classified facilitate page layout and can help decrease the number of ‘house,’ ‘filler,’ or promotional ads that newspapers use to plug the holes in their pages.

Page first published: 07.03.2006