Great newspapers, shame about the advertisements

LONDON - British advertising boss Tim Delaney spent hours evaluating the advertising in a month's worth of UK national newspapers - and was deeply unimpressed.

Only two or three ads did what they were supposed to do, he said.

"The ads are appalling. When you look at them objectively and say,'Is this an interesting ad?', you've got to say that 95 per cent of them don't seem to use the medium in a way that's likely to be interesting to the reader."

As head of the Leagas Delaney agency, which has BlackBerry, the United Nations' World Food Programme and Reebok among its clients, Delaney knows what he's talking about.

His task as the chairman of this year's UK Awards for National Newspaper Advertising is to help inspire a resurgence of advertising interest in a medium increasingly seen as being on the way out. That is not a view Delaney shares.

He says Britain has always been "peculiar" about its newspapers.

"Go to Germany - they don't have national newspapers," he says.

"We've got all these national newspapers and they're all really important to the national landscape. We've got to resolve how we make the most of this incredibly important medium."

Delaney says one of the key misconceptions in the advertising world is that newspapers are merely purveyors of facts and data, and cannot relate in any more personal way with their readers. He believes that is nonsense.

"Newspaper advertising and print advertising in general can and should create an emotional response."

He believes the Independent's single-issue front pages generate a strong emotional response from readers, and big-selling newspapers, such as the Sun, which has an eight-figure readership, offer advertisers the kind of mass market they used to look for in television.

But the quality of the newspaper ads has got to improve, he says.

"You've got to set out to create an emotional response, and impact is part of that. The Sun's readership is around 12 million. What a medium. What a thing to have.

"And the best people can do when they want to advertise razors is say, 'Let's put a strip underneath the England match report'. That's not what it's about."

- INDEPENDENT