Newsonomics: Macy's Cuts $120 Million Out of Its Newspaper Advertising
In 1858, R.H. Macy, learning from his failed dry goods businesses in Massachusetts, opened R. H. Macy & Co. on Sixth Avenue between 13th and 14th streets in Manhattan. One year earlier, across the continent, the Sacramento Bee was born. One year later, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News started publishing. Within a decade, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Antonio Express-News each began rolling the presses.
It was a century-long marriage made in heaven, as start-up department stores and start-up newspapers fed each other, and both became wealthy.
First published at Politico Media
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Now, once again, their fortunes are fused — as both suffer epochal declines.
Macy’s has recently slashed its “run of press” newspaper advertising by about 50%, I’ve learned in numerous interviews with publishers. In total, the newly lost newspaper revenue this year will exceed $100 million.
Asked to comment on the budgeting changes, Macy’s hasn’t yet responded. But challenges in the department-store business, as well as the dilution of value to clients in print advertising, are surely the twin factors driving this decision.
The Macy’s cut, in turn, helps explain the deepening print ad losses recently reported by public newspaper companies in the first quarter. For that quarter, publishers reported double-digit year-over-year declines in print advertising. McClatchy reported a 14.7% drop in the first quarter, Tribune (pre-tronc) 12.4% and even the New York Times, its nose seeming a bit above the storm, came in at 9% below last year.
How much money are we talking about?
In a large metro market, Macy’s ROP – or run of press, the ads running with the newspaper pages – would generate $1 million to $1.5 million in ad revenue a year. Now, with that number cut 40-60%, depending on the market, a publisher would see a drop of as much as $900,000. Figure that’s the equivalent of at least 10 newsroom jobs. In fact, at some companies, these cutbacks will mean a fairly commensurate cut in newsroom jobs, unless digital ad growth can offset the print losses.
While Macy’s, the country’s largest department store chain by far, continues to buy about the same dollar volume of “preprint” ads – those standalone Sunday circulars that often have a comics section wrapped around them —that business, too, is changing. Publishers try to keep up with those changes, as they become more “targetable” to more specific audiences. At a large metro paper, Macy’s preprints might bring in another $600,000.
Macy’s helps lead a category called General Merchandise.
Newspapers’ share of that $698 million in 2016 will lose about lost three points of market share over a single year, according to Borrell Associates, a local media advertising consultancy that tracks the industry.
Macy’s has literally cut its share of ROP newspaper spending in half. In 2015, according to Borrell, it allocated 32%, or $233 million, of its overall ad budget of $1,172,000 to newspapers. This year: Macy’s is projected to spend $112 million. Bottom line: newspapers will take in about $120 million less from Macy’s, alone, this year over last.
That’s a drop of 51.2%.
Over the same period Macy’s digital spend increased 23% to $681 million.
Broadly, newspaper companies categorize Macy’s spending as “national retail” and report it in their “retail revenue” results. Buying decisions are made on a national level. Though national ad rates run higher than retail rates, Macy’s, and other department stores, long ago negotiated retail-like lower rates as they committed to massive “double-truck” advertising – two facing pages – and full page buys. Now, they ask for, and receive, still lower rates, as newspaper companies do everything they can to retain every Macy’s dollar they can.
Macy’s cut in print spending is nothing new in the retail sector, of course, but the size of its spending marks a new nadir. Macy’s ad spending would make up between two to five percent of a metro’s print advertising, so its move has big consequences. We can see the stairstep down in the Macy’s case: the company made a large Great Recession era slash in 2009, as reported by analyst Alan Mutter. Macy’s move follows Walmart’s major exit from newspapers last year.
While in years past, Macy’s might spend 25% of its overall ad budget on run-of-press newspaper advertising, it now spends about 15%, says Kip Cassino, a long-time newspaper researcher who now serves as executive vice president of Borrell. How does that compare to the good old days? In those times, newspapers would take about 80% of the old Macy’s ad budget.
What’s Behind the Cut
Macy’s struggles parallel those of the newspaper industry, which now hasn’t seen year-over-year growth for eight years.
Macy’s first quarter numbers now seem uncommonly parallel:
· Sales at stores open at least a year dropped 6.1%;
· With Macy’s closing 41 stories in 2015, overall sales declined 7.4%;
· Its guidance for the year—down another three to four percent
In short, Macy’s finds itself in a newspaper-like pickle. It’s a legacy, terrestrial, analog, general-interest business trying to get digital as fast as it can, and failing.
Macy’s spend on digital is heavy on social media like Facebook and Pinterest, while putting bigger money into the flavor of this year – messaging and specifically Snapchat advertising. In addition, Macy’s puts money into its own loyalty programs, digitally targeting its own customers to increase their spending. In that sense, Macy’s has become both a retailer and a publisher, as is common with many big brands.
As one savvy newspaper strategist puts it, “The change in the large retail brands like Macy’s, Kohls, Walmart, and JCPenney is to hold onto TV while investing into digital video and to spend more on digital, especially heavy programmatic advertising.
“They tell us,” he continues, “that print spending is the most expensive medium, and delivers the lowest ROI versus almost all other media. They study media mix modeling and attribution.”
In fact, Macy’s conducted a test in some metro markets for the 2015 holidays, dropping ROP spend. With holiday sales overall problematic, Macy’s significantly cut back its ROP advertising in a few markets, and measured the results. Kip Cassino describes that test:
“When they saw what was happening at Christmas, they tried some experiments with some of their stores in some of their larger metro newspaper markets, and they kept track of what it cost them in terms of monthly sales. When they were pretty sure they couldn’t cost them anything, they went ahead and cut it.”
That test led to this year’s big cut, which is taking on full force in this, the second quarter.
As Macy’s moves from print to digital spending, relatively few of those retail dollars are going to newspapers’ own sites and apps. Publishers tell me they have been able to “save” a small portion of the lost print dollars by “down-selling.” That involves putting together packages of digital advertising, with some print thrown in – ironically the inverse of how they sold advertising at the beginning of the Internet era.
For Macy’s, it’s a fight for survival. Mass-market department stores once sold everything under the sun — from pliers to popcorn and toys to tennis racquets — on many floors.
It was a wonderful serendipity, one we often hear also associated with newspapers, as described by Julia Child. “In department stores, so much kitchen equipment is bought indiscriminately by people who just come in for men’s underwear.”
Now, the few survivors have turned largely into apparel sellers, and face brutal terrestrial and digital competition in that sector. That, too, parallels department stores’ longtime cousin, newspapers, as they come to grips with being niche players as Google and Facebook have become the purveyors of mass audience.
Four years ago, I calculated the relative fortunes of department store Sears (“Newsonomics of the Long Goodbye: Kodak’s, Sears’, and Newspapers’”) as compared to daily newspapers, to gauge how similarly difficult legacy transition to the digital world has been for once-iconic American brands. The parallels continue apace today.Today, Macy’s is the largest department store chain. The new Macy’s has been built on massive consolidation, as it absorbed Broadway, Emporium and I. Magnin, Jordan Marsh, Bloomingdale’s and The May Company in a long march to supremacy in recent years.
Another parallel here: that consolidation aligns with the current strategies of Gannett, as it pursues Tribune Publishing. It’s a Last Man Standing strategy, built on massive cost efficiencies, as it too suffers deep declines in revenue yet aims to buy up its brethren.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer recently connected these many dots, after listening to Macy’s first-quarter earnings.
“In many ways, the decline of Macy’s, as well as the pulverization of the stock of discount chain Kohl’s after a terrible quarter and guidance today, is like what happened to the newspaper industry and the book store space,” he said. Cramer explained that “both Macy’s and Kohl’s saw the Internet coming, but assumed it wouldn’t impact them because they thought they were ‘something special.’ Then they thought they could beat the web by joining it.” Sound familiar?
Cramer then called out what he said was the invisible elephant on the call: Amazon, the place where so many former terrestrial retail dollars is going. Just as Amazon takes dollars from Macy’s, Google and Facebook and eight other platform companies take 75% of all the digital ad spending in the U.S. with newspaper company digital ad market share declining year by year.
Is It Surprising?
Just consider one of the venture capitalist Mary Meeker’s slides that maintains primacy over the years: time spent with media compared to ad spending on media.
As publishers complained about young media buyers trading print spending for unproven digital spending, Meeker’s numbers showed, on the contrary, that print spending significantly outpaced time spent with print. In 2016, she says, legacy print still commands more than four times its relative “time” value. Now, with newspapers down at 60% from its prime, that gap still has a way to go before it’s closed.
It’s not just the decline of print volumes, or questions about its relative effectiveness that dog print advertising, it’s the nature of the audience.
Newspapers command gray and graying audiences, as ad spending disproportionately targets core shopper demos, often found among women, 25-54.
While digital obviously does a much better job of targeting than print ever can, publishers say that those preprints we get on Sunday are increasingly “targeted.” What’s that mean? Retailers now usually increasingly precise geographies to determine to which households they do or don’t want the inserts delivered. They take into account both neighborhood demographics and proximity to a store.
Still, preprints are themselves threatened by digital competition, and the cost of that physical resource itself, paper.
Finally, many local newspaper companies have made peace with the notion that they no longer will receive much in the way of national print dollars. National firms lead regional ones in the sophistication and measurement of their spending, so it’s gone digital faster than local spending. It’s that regional and local spending that every newspaper company is now focused on.
“When you look at the double trucks and full-page ads that are being sold, more of them are local advertisers than national advertisers,” says Cassino.
Of course, much of the action has moved to digital. Almost all newspaper companies offer an array of digital marketing services, and some, like the Dallas Morning News, which has led the pack with its investment in local digital marketing firms. (“What are they thinking? Jim Moroney’s digital-reaching Dallas Morning News”) make that a prime strategy.
Amid this great change, it’s vital to remember that these eras don’t end quickly. Print, like department stores, is reaching its end days, and will end up in the archives of our culture.
