Lotto Won’t Save the Newspaper Business

I love a good salesman, and it sounds like Ed Mahlman’s a good one. His last job was selling hopeless dreams, where he pumped up revenues for the Pennsylvania Lottery by some 16% in a year’s time. You know, the lottery, a dollar store for those who would rather trade their buck for a temporary vision of life on the perfect island than take home six more pencils, another Tupperware knockoff piece or flip-flops recycled from dubious substances.

Before his lottery stint, Mahlman worked for Brian Tierney. Now Tierney is CEO of the Philadelphia Media Holdings, the local company that picked the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News. He has tapped his friend to bring some lottery panache to the papers, naming Mahlman CMO. Maybe Mahlman’s fresh approach – he apparently hasn't marketed media – will give birth to some new ideas, though Philly’s never been short on cool marketing, witness the Philly.com cabtops that adorned city cabs in the ‘90s. I’m sure he’s going to go beyond the Northeast staple of lotto that has sold millions of tab newspapers over the decades, but now seems tired. 

Mahlman faces several basic truths of this age of info marketing: 

• Selling paid print is an increasingly uphill battle. It’s not like there’s not enough sales pressure to push subscriptions or even coinboxes, newsstands or hawkers. It’s that almost all those who are happy to buy and read print already are doing it.

• Free print is another thing entirely. It’s something daily newspaper publishers are learning about slowly and fitfully.  Alternative weekly publishers learned it 25 years ago, saving their businesses. Traders and shoppers of all kind have built great businesses on free. Metro (in Philly, Boston and New York City in the U.S., and 66 others around the world). Clarity Media (the Examiners in San Francisco and Baltimore) and the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye and the Washington Post’s Express are proving it anew.

• Web marketing has its own set of evolving rules: While in print, it’s all about Page One, many daily publishers are learning too slowly, that on the web it’s not all about the home page.  It’s not a browse medium; it’s a search medium. And that means getting      deeply educated about search engine optimization and search engine  marketing. Publishers have dabbled in SEO and SEM, often bringing in one or two smart newly-minted MBAs who get it. One or two don’t cut it though.  Web marketing in SEO, SEM, virality in general, is whole other mindset and needs to be embedded deeply into news marketing.

 

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