Taking in today’s coverage of the Super Bowl ads, I cringed when I saw the Boston Globe sports section today. Used to be you’d see follow-up ads in print as the major ad campaigns kicked off during the Super Bowl, but zero evidence of that here.
To wit: There was only one ad in the Globe Sports section today – a quarter page ad for a fishing show in Worcester.
This is scary to newspaper folks because of the ad-to-content ratio: Newspapers, when they were healthy, never dipped below 60 percent ads and 40 percent content. Today’s Globe sports section itself was only 10 pages, so that means the ratio was less than one percent ads.
To be fair, there was a full page ad for boston.com/cars and a half page for boston.com/jobs. Likely strategic partnership deals where ads are provided in-kind as part of a larger joint agreement (Read: not full retail value). Even counting those ads at full value, that’s a 17.5 percent ad hole for the section.
That’s not a super start to 2009.
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