I frequently tell customers that I have worked with businesses as far north as Taihape and as far south as Wellington, helping to get more customers through the doors of the shop.

I have the unique distinction of having started my advertising career in digital marketing and having progressed (or some would say regressed) to community newsprint.

Over the span of the last ten years I have worked on SEO campaigns for high performance ecommerce websites. I have audited over 400 websites across the Wellington region. I have worked on radio campaigns for major franchises and measured their results using Kepler Analytics. I have worked on compelling community newsprint campaigns and have helped use these campaigns and the interview process that results to get to the unique line of poetry at the heart of each business, and helped build these out to radio and digital campaigns as well as print.

I love to learn and the world of advertising is one of data. I love to collect data and distill principles about what makes for a successful campaign for a business.

Below are some of the services we offer.

Advertorial

I talk to journalists a lot about the Columbo question.

The entire basis of the SPIN sales methodology designed by Neil Rackham, which was for decades the dominant methodology for training new salespeople how to sell, focused on perfecting the type of questions used to extract information from potential clients. SPIN broke down questioning into four areas – Situation questions, which probed for specific factual information, Problem questions, which asked more specifically about the problems experienced by the answerer, Implication questions, which explored in more depth the relation between those problems and other areas of the business, and Needs-Payoff questions, which asked the answerer to put into their own words a benefit for the service or product being solicited.

What SPIN led to was a revelation in sales thought: that the salespeople who asked more questions during a sales interview were more effective at gaining the sale. Moreover, salespeople who asked a very specific type of question, the Implication question, were as much as 70% more effective than other salespeople at obtaining sales.

The link between sales and journalism has always interested me because it seems to me the skillsets associated with the two professions are highly transferable. Which is curious, given that journalists are often thought to be introverts and salespeople to be extroverts.

Yet it’s that one question, the one you reach at the very end of the interview, that sometimes turns the entire interview on its head. In our business in Levin, we don’t call this the Implication question – we call this this Columbo question.

The Columbo question has thrown open many stories. I recall a sit down meeting I had with the owner of Zaaffran food truck in Levin, who was introduced to me by his partner and my former client Emily Griffin from Caravan & Co. We had reached a point in the interview where I had already asked many questions, but something told me to sit there and keep asking. It was only after a few more questions that the truth was revealed: At the age of eight, facing drought and food shortages, the owner had left his family farm in Morocco and travelled hundreds of miles to the nearby city of Casablanca to seek employment, landing work with a spice merchant. It was that journey that became the basis of the brand he later built, and that line became the first line of his advertorial.

An advertorial should not simply say something about a business. It should attempt to strike at the emotional core that drives the business. This can be something very difficult to arrive at through your own writing and, in my experience, is only elicited through dialogue.

An advertorial can take a long time to produce. Between interview, writing, and design, I have been known to spend 12 hours on an advertorial. Yet it remains to this day one of our most popular and effective advertising products at Horowhenua Chronicle.

And yes, the Columbo question is a nod to Lieutenant Columbo, an indication that questions are relevant not just to sales and journalism, but also to law enforcement!

Trades & Services – or the things I learned from one unhappy builder

The truest insight into the effectiveness of these ads campaign early in my community newsprint sales career.

We were contacted by a builder who had moved to the neighbourhood and wanted to place an ad in the paper.

He was difficult to deal with.

When we sent him his ad proof he replied by leaving a voicemail message where he swore at us and asked if we couldn’t get the bloody text of the advert right.

We again sent him the ad proof and he approved it. But he soon changed his mind, because he cancelled his ad run after the first time it ran in the paper.

Needless to say I wasn’t that keen to hear from him again. But soon Covid-19 struck and we found ourselves having to call people we wouldn’t usually want to call ever again.

When he picked up the phone I asked him about the ad. Surprisingly, instead of receiving an earbashing, he was sweet on it. It had now been 9 months since the ad first ran, and he surprised me by admitting he had just received his third job off it, for a $20,000 deck replacement.

So three jobs totalling $20,000 each. Not bad from an ad that cost him $45 to run.

And all because some people around Levin had clipped the ad out of the paper and stuck it on their fridge.

In our industry, people are often chasing that 1000% return on ad spend. If an ad campaign generates $10 in sales for every $1 spent, it’s considered to be a pretty good campaign.

So, what was the return on ad spend for a campaign that generated $60,000 in sales from $45 investment?

The answer gives me a headache – it’s something like 1,333,333% – over a million per cent.

Were I to project that during a sales meeting, it’s the sort of number that would get me laughed out of the room, being told that my forecasts were too optimistic.

And of course I never forecasted it. How could I have?

In reality though, the true value of the ad campaign is the profit it generates for the company, not the revenue.

Tradespeople are notorious for running businesses that don’t get this right, and the owner ends up with barely minimum wage after paying for his tools and his crew.

But there is no question that the ad ‘worked’. Even though we never heard from the bugger again.

Case Studies

I am the first to admit that community newsprint suffers from attribution problems. (In the world of online advertising, “attribution” refers to a form of campaign tracking whereby you attempt to identify the sources of a campaign using tools such as Google Tag Manager, in order to ascertain the relative contribution of each campaign source – often with varying degrees of success.)

The benefit we have had in the Horowhenua market is that we have often had to work with communities and causes that have little to no budget and can only focus on one or two things. Unlike markets such as Auckland, where you will be asked for a monthly advertising budget of $4000 or told to go home, we have been able to do more with less, and as such, have been able to reap the informational rewards.

Community Newsprint Case Study – Stocks’ Roses

Now well into his eighties, Stephen Stocks has built a successful rose growing operation that he has run for many years. But he is well aware of the challenges – like many small growers, the business can pay enough to keep the lights on but not much else. With decades of experience behind him, Stephen knew his business well, but also knew that as a small grower he had to account for every dollar.

There had previously been no advertising at Stocks’ Roses, apart from a sign at the gate – not even a website.

When we first met, I went through with Stephen all of the different ways that he was able to advertise his business, in order to find out what he had tried in the past and what could be worth pursuing. Some of the options that came up through the discussion were website development, radio (as the business was located along a major highway with a lot of road traffic) and print. It took a lot of convincing, but Stephen finally relented and agree to create a small advertising budget to promote his roses for the duration of the growing season.

Fast forward one year – and the business has flourished. Stephen reports having seen a steady amount of long term growth: “While I can’t put my finger on any one specific sale (having come from the advertising campaign), I have seen an increase in orders of between 10 and 15%.” It would appear that many of these are new customers, who have started to replace some of the older customers who have left the district, including one customer who was leaving for Australia.

The method selected? A simple, small regular print advertisement in the Horowhenua Chronicle. The paper goes out to a local readership of 13,226 households (including 2,662 rural delivery addresses), and with a small, impactful ad that emphasised the benefits of buying direct from a local grower at a great price point, the ad campaign delivered results. Often finding itself on page two of the paper, the campaign is well within the public eye, and is especially useful when Stephen knows he is about to encounter a ‘spring flush’.

There is much to be said for Stocks’ Roses. While I am waiting to talk with Stephen, another customer tells me that she loves the business because it reminders her of the flower markets in Paris. ‘It’s very peaceful here,’ she tells me. ‘Go in there,’ says Stephen, pointing jokingly to the cool room, ‘it’s cool as well!’

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