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News Corp’s Damian Eales says retail offers have helped slow newspaper circulation decline

News Corp is selling mini Hasbro board games for $3.50 alongside a number of its newspapers in an effort to boost print sales.

hasbro

From tomorrow, News Corp kicks off the promotion which will see 14 board games, including Twister, Guess Who? and Monopoly, available for purchase with a newspaper from participating newsagents and supermarkets.

It is the third retail offer the company has sone in recent years, offering Disney books and CDs at the start of 2015 to customers and Mr Men books in 2014.

Speaking with Mumbrella, Damian Eales, News Corp Australia’s managing director of metro and regional publishing, said these promotions help to bring new customers to News Corp’s products.

“They’ve been enormously successfully and have exceeded our expectations in many instances. It’s a classic case of when you give customers great value and promote it well, they respond well,” he said.

“Every time we run one of these promotions our regular sale increases quite significantly, in fact many of our papers trade in double-digit qualitative circulation during the promotional period. It does bring customers in who buy a paper infrequently and it encourages them to buy one of our papers more regularly.”

Damian Eales:

Damian Eales: Sales do drop off after any big promotion

Eales did admit the sales do drop off after the promotion period.

“There is a drop off in sale after any big promotion occurs but what we’ve found over the past three years of running this type of promotion and others is that it constantly brings people back to newspapers and gets them to reconsider the value that a newspaper offers,” he said.

“It brings new customers to the table and, over time, we think it has substantially slowed the decline of circulation we’ve experienced.”

News Corp is expecting to sell three million game boards over the two-week promotion period.

“That’s an enormous quantity and it goes to demonstrate the power of newspapers and the power that remains in news agents throughout Australia to promote and sell products en masse,” Eales said.

The promotion is supported with a marketing campaign across TV, social media, print and digital while a radio partnership with ARN has delivered an on-air competition in lead-up to the launch weekend.

Participating newspapers are:

  • The Daily and Sunday Telegraph
  • Herald Sun and Sunday Herald Sun
  • The Courier-Mail and The Sunday Mail
  • The Advertiser and Sunday Mail
  • Mercury and Sunday Tasmanian
  • NT News and Sunday Territorian
  • The Sunday Times (WA)
  • Gold Coast Bulletin
  • Townsville Bulletin
  • The Cairns Post
  • Geelong Advertiser
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