Media Forum: Are newspaper ads engaging?(Newspaper Marketing Agency)

Will the NMA campaign get the industry to re-evalute papers?

When the Newspaper Marketing Agency launched a couple of years back, there were those who wondered whether it might be too little too late for a medium with its confidence near rock bottom. Circulations were continuing their long history of decline and, in advertising terms, the medium was being increasingly regarded as irredeemably dowdy - home to mundane retail spreads rendered in poor repro quality.

So, national newspapers were not only low on the agenda in media planning terms, they had almost dropped off the creative agenda, too Expecting a generic marketing body such as the NMA to address such deep-rooted problems was a tall order. And, interesting though the NMA's case studies were back in the early months of its existence, it was hard to imagine it stirring the blood or changing many minds.

In that context, its latest initiative (an ad with a brain wired up to a switch) can claim at the very least to have got the media industry talking.

The ad's tagline is: 'Newspapers: the attention channel' - a claim that takes its cue from some recent findings by the leading academic behavioural researcher Robert Heath in association with News International. The study used sophisticated monitoring techniques to measure attention levels when people read newspapers as opposed to their level of engagement when watching TV.

Lo and behold, newspaper advertisements gained up to seven times the attention of TV spots. It's not exactly earth-shattering to find research commissioned by media owners showing their medium in a good light, but surely it's unsurprising in other ways too. We sort of knew this anyway, didn't we?

Maureen Duffy, the chief executive of the NMA, says one of the primary aims is to ignite a debate. She states: 'This is a fantastic medium, with great complementary qualities in a multimedia campaign. The response from advertisers themselves has been superb. They are very keen to understand the mechanisms of consumer engagement and it makes sense to them that a medium that is actively chosen will have consumers who are more engaged.'