Junk ads have put the nail in the coffin of Orange County’s fiercest media rivalry.
Last month, longtime newspaper rivals the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times raised eyebrows with a joint plan to let advertisers distribute preprint inserts to nearly 1 million OC households.
The two papers fought each other for advertisers and readers in OC for more than a decade until about 2000, when Chicago’s Tribune Co. bought the Times and started pulling back from the block-by-block battle.
Now the two are taking aim at a common competitor: direct advertisers. Those include the OC operations of San Antonio-based Harte-Hanks Inc., publisher of the Pennysaver.
Privately, some salespeople at the publication of garage sales, coupons and local services say they’re concerned about the Times-Register alliance.
But Pete Gorman, president of the Pennysaver in Brea, said he’s not fazed by the move.
“Frankly, we’re not surprised,” he said. “It’s not a new strategy.”
True. The move isn’t new for the Register, which had a three-year distribution pact with direct mail house Advo Inc. of Connecticut. That deal expired in January, according to Keith Gilpin, the Register’s director of direct mail sales.
The arraignment had some holes, according to Gilpin. Ads were delivered on weekends, he said, and advertisers wanted deliveries on Thursday and Friday.
The effort by the Register and Times, dubbed Local Community Values, is set to delivers ads on those days.
“We adapted a program to fit the delivery window customers wanted,” Gilpin said. “This was the best fit for us.”
The advantage to working with the Times is the Register can offer advertisers “higher penetration” by also tapping the Times’ distribution and direct mail operations, Gilpin said.
The often brutal war between the Times and Register seems a distant memory, faded by pragmatism and economics.
“It’s a valuable way for advertisers to reach,in one buy,readers of both the Register and the Times,” Gilpin said. “The direct mail market in OC alone is probably at least $300 million. We want to grow our share of that.”
But that doesn’t mean the rivalry is entirely gone. The papers still are competitors “both inside and outside the program,” Gilpin said.
“Whoever sells (the ad insert) gets the revenue and the costs associated with it,” he said.
The move stands to step up competition for Harte-Hanks, Advo and other direct mailers. Some advertisers may go with the Times and Register instead of using multiple distributors for their ad inserts.
The Pennysaver’s Gorman downplayed the threat. The Pennysaver deals with a wide array of advertisers, from local contractors to large grocers.
The publication isn’t “dependent on one particular category,” he said.
“It’s always been a competitive marketplace,” Gorman said. “We reach all the households in Orange County and 75% of households in the state of California. We saturate and target very well.”
Some of OC’s print and mail houses, which offer direct mail among their services, are waiting to see how it all plays out.
Bruce Carson, president of Irvine-based The Dot Printer, said he sees the move as good for the industry.
“On the surface, anything that generates additional printing as this will do is good for the printing industry,” he said.
Bill Rivera, president of Irvine-based Mini-Mailers Inc., said he’s not expecting a big impact. Most of his customers aren’t looking to saturate a region, he said.
“We do a few of those but not very many,” Rivera said, of mass mailers targeting specific ZIP codes.
Sam Kim, manager of Anaheim-based Corporate Mailing, which does direct mail and printing, also isn’t expecting to feel a pinch.
“That’s more bulk mail,” he said of the Register’s and Times’ new service. “Our clients would have a more targeted approach.”
The Local Community Values program is part of a larger regional, advertising distribution pact called the Value Network, which includes the Register, Times, San Diego Union-Tribune and other papers.
