Selling ads for the community newspaper, l contact the Big health providers.
I learn corporately owned means anonymity: the name of head of marketing is not given out to the the public. People like me.
I submit a letter to their info email. I never hear back.
Marketing decisions are made internally, kept secret.
I was surprised to receive an unusually candid response which told me what was happening behind the scenes:
“Our Corporately owned Company rarely does newspaper advertising these days and major campaigns (if any) are handled through a media buy team at our corporate office, who work with an agency, which mainly targets magazines and BIG NEWSPAPER.
Unfortunately, we are seeing advertising budgets grow tighter, despite how much we (in Portland) value our local neighborhood papers.”
The crux of the problem is twofold
An Authority of Knowledge Mismatch: Decision makers don’t deal directly with the customers. That’s what social media managers in their 20s and 30s are for. For them, online engagement is the metric to measure.
A Credibility Mismatch: Taking cues from social media managers, decision makers decide advertising decide in local newspapers isn't worth the money. Newspapers are so 20th century!
Front line customer service workers and Marketing decision makers have different perspectives, but only one perspective is being consulted.
Social media managers are not the newspaper's readers or its advertising base.
I talked to an electrician that said many of his customers are older, not the generation who reads the menu from a OR code. It’s nice we agreed, to hold an actual menu in your hands. Neither of us are senior citizens.
It’s a knowledge mismatch.
Also, a generational mismatch
It’s the soup we’re all swimming in.
Supposedly the future will be better. We accept, even feel grateful that there's an expert out there who knows what to do.
We have lost trust in our own ability to know what to do, how to proceed.