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AdMedia,  Sep 17, 2003  by David McNickel

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Twenty-five years after the NAB's launch, big changes in media ownership have radically altered New Zealand's newspaper advertising landscape. Incoming NAB boss Sonya Crosby tells David McNickel how her organisation plans to move with the times.

With the bulk of New Zealand newspaper ownership now being with eitherAPN or Fairfax, the first question to ask new NAB executive director Sonya Crosby is whether her organisation is somewhat redundant - given that with two companies dominating, it should be easy enough to buy a spread of papers from either APN or Fairfax - negating to some extent, the value of the many papers/one invoice service the NAB has offered for years. The answer, she says, is there's still more to the market than just the two big players. "If you count APN as one and Fairfax as another," she says, "there's still another seven independents [see list below]. So a buy across all newspapers would still mean up to nine invoices - but with the NAB it's only one."

Despite this, however, Crosby says now is a good time for the NAB to examine its business model. First thing on the change agenda she says, is the inclusion of Sunday papers in the NAB mix. "That's up for discussion right now. My belief is that we should be representing all newspapers and if we're going to offer an independent solution we need to be able to offer whatever is required to get that solution to work. Sundays are currently not on the list - we're looking at paid dailies only. In the past the newspaper business has been quite regionally specific and essentially non-competitive between NAB member papers. But the environment has changed from when the NAB started, so the question now is has the environment changed to the point where we should really be considering adding Sundays to the mix."

Also up for discussion says Crosby is the future of the Metpac and Regional Max packages that have proved so successful for the NAB since they were launched in 1996 and 1999 respectively. The reason for the rethink she says is a new approach to how papers are sold - as marketing, rather than regional solutions. "We're having a look at changing the way we put our packages together," she says. "We have some good packages but they're pretty much based on geographic spread and readership. What I'm interested in doing is finding ways to talk to the target more effectively.

"The TV analogy is that you don't advertise across the whole station, you advertise within the programmes that your target market are watching. For newspapers, if you're a media planner, you don't think Fairfax or APN, you think 'where are the people that I want to talk to, and how am I going to get to them? Then we can come back and say 'these are the sections these people read, these are the positions available - and these are the papers'. It's all about what's the most effective use of the medium and what's really going to grow the newspaper industry is to think smarter about the way we target people - and shape our packages to respond to that."

Moving these ideas along she says is a focused 'marketing services' approach. "Our mission is to grow effective use of newspaper advertising and to do that we have to make sure we're pushing effective solutions. That's where research comes into it - really getting into the psychographics of how people use newspapers. It's marketing expertise, going past column centimetres and discussing how can we reach people in the best way. What the NAB does best is independent thinking. We don't have any individual agendas - we take an holistic view of the industry. So media buyers can be confident, in coming to the NAB, that we're objectively recommending the best solutions."

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