Ad sales in recovery at News Corp Australia: Thomson

NEWS Corp chief executive Robert Thomson says advertising revenue is recovering at the company’s Australian newspapers.

NEWS Corp chief executive Robert Thomson has revealed advertising expenditure is recovering at the company’s Australian newspapers, with local advertising newspapers revenues bolstered by a new sales model.

Speaking at the 23rd Annual Goldman Sachs Communicopia Conference in New York, Mr Thomson said: “It is fair to say the rate of decline in advertising revenue in Australia has indeed declined from around 15 per cent in Q3 to around 11 per cent in Q4”.

Julian Clarke, chief executive of the company’s Australian’s operations, reinstalled local sales teams a year ago in a bid to improve relationships with local advertisers and bolster ad revenue income.

“At a local level we weren’t doing enough to develop advertising revenue,” Thomson said. “At that level there have been fundamental changes and quite honestly we’re starting to see improvements in local advertising.”
Mr Thomson heaped praise on a new management team. “Julian Clarke and the team have really energised the business,” he said.

“We’re reasonably confident that over time that the extra focus in Australia but also the borrowings of successful ideas from around the world and elsewhere in the business will indeed transform the business.”

Mr Thomson said the national advertising market has been slower to recover. “At a national level, the improvement hasn’t been of the same order,” Thomson said.

In the recent reporting season, a raft of local media companies said a drop in government expenditure had hit national ad spend levels hard.

The company’s national and metropolitan mastheads, which include The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier-Mail, and Herald Sun, have been challenged by a cyclical downturn in the advertising market, which has been more unforgiving for media companies with print assets.

But a series of initiatives have boosted the media agency bookings for national newspaper The Australian, including AccessOne, which automatically extends print advertising campaigns to the masthead’s newly launched tablet app.

Since May, when bookings surged 35 per cent, the paper has experienced consecutive months of year-on-year growth in print advertising.

Mr Thomson also emphasised the benefits of the historic split of Rupert Murdoch’s media company into two new entities, which has put “extra focus” on the publishing assets and enabled more shared knowledge between different markets.

Last year, News Corp was divided into two entities: 21st Century Fox, and a company retaining the historic name, with publishing assets including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post in the US and The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun in Britain.

Echoing comments made on a recent trip to Australia, Mr Thomson underscored the company’s commitment to print as part of a multi-platform strategy.

“The reaffirmation of the power of print, that is important, because print’s role is changing, and the intensity of the print relationship, frankly, is much more so than that of the discursive digital relationship,” he said.

“That’s clear to readers and I think it’s becoming increasingly clear to advertisers.”

The message was endorsed last week by Telstra chief executive David Thodey, who told a small business summit in Sydney that printed papers have a long future.

Telstra revealed that efforts to migrate people from print directories to digital catalogues were resisted by a large number of customers.

“I personally do agree with (Rupert Murdoch) that print still has a long future, I think there are a lot of people who still enjoy reading it,” he said. “Good content, good articles and good news will always win out.”