Too many national advertisers with important messages and operating updates affecting all Australians are overlooking key regional audiences hungry for information through the coronavirus crisis.
That’s the message from Australia’s largest independent news publisher ACM as new audience data shows ACM’s trusted voice delivering readers at record levels.
A statement from the regional publisher release this week said:
With a network of newspapers and news sites across the country, including 14 daily titles such as The Canberra Times, Newcastle Herald and Illawarra Mercury, ACM is playing a vital role as the primary source of COVID-19-related breaking news and essential information in Australia’s largest non- metropolitan population centres.
ACM chief revenue officer Tony Kendall thanked leading national advertisers who are continuing to reach out to regional consumers however pointed out that many advertisers are missing a very large engaged audience; “if businesses only advertised in the metro newspapers they would miss out on up to 2 million* Australians who read ACM publications across the country”.
“Our trusted environments and audience volumes provide the perfect opportunity for message cut- through,” he said.
“But many important messages and operating updates from advertisers are not reaching much of the 36 per cent of Australians** who live outside the 5 major capitals due to their ongoing focus on metropolitan publications.”
ACM chief marketing officer Paul Tyrrell said ACM’s internal audience data showed “web sessions for March were up by 99 per cent year on year to just under 50 million for the month.***”
“We’ve certainly hit the mark with what readers are looking for,” Tyrrell said.
“As well as free rolling coverage of essential COVID-19 news updates, we’re focused on finding the good news stories from around the country as well as offering readers stuck at home our Living in Lockdown pages to beat the boredom”
The Living in Lockdown pages include puzzles, recipes and fitness advice, as well a weekly history column by Australia’s premier national institutions, such as the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian War Memorial and the National Film and Sound Archive, celebrating treasured items in their respective collections that help tell the Australian story.
“Across our digital assets we’ve seen incredible audience growth across the board,” Tyrrell said.
“Even with the amount of free digital content available, our online subscriptions continue to grow with a jump of 13 per cent in new digital subscriptions in March.
“As more and more readers self-isolate or work from home we’ve also seen a spike in new home delivery subscriptions of our printed daily publications with March new delivery subscriptions up 195 per cent from February.”
To make it even easier for advertising clients to reach ACM’s 7.7 million-strong**** audience we have changed the way we are doing business including:
• Daily mastheads supplied material deadline has been extended to 6pm on day of print.
• Non-daily supplied material deadline has been extended to two hours before print
• Our design resources can assist on the day of print should you need help.