OK, I'm in publisher, not editor, mode, right now, at my small town paper.
Somebody from corporate drafted (for my predecessor, actually) details for a sales proposal presentation to one of the two new car dealers here in town.
It said that, if you the dealer bought X amount of advertising, you'd need just one new car sale to more than pay for the ad campaign.
What was wrong?
It assumed that the dealer gets 100 percent of the car sales price.
And the dealer ain't looking at it that way, of course.
He's looking at his net. Smaller community, fewer luxury vehicles sold, with the partial exception of a "loaded" SUV or truck, and we'll say his average margin is 6 percent.
That means he's got to sell 15-16 vehicles or so to pay for that ad campaign -- 15 or 16 that he's reasonably sure he wouldn't have sold without it. (This doesn't count any increased volume in used cars, service contracts, etc., so I may be skewing things a bit heavy his way.)
That said, you get the general picture.
And, this is coming from somebody from higher up my food chain.
Sorry, even if coupons aren't great, and people don't always bring them in, I can see how, on a higher-dollar product, especially, a business is looking for some way to track metrics. And, if I use one of those lines as a sales line, that people sometimes forget coupons, or don't always remember where they saw a special, and use it too openly, then I'm actually discounting our newspaper's potential ad reach even more.
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