How do circulars compare to other forms of advertising?
In terms of building traffic and sales, circulars are superior to both. That’s proven. Newspaper ads are second. Then radio, television, direct mail, and outdoor advertising. Radio is probably the next-closest competitor to circulars. The advantage to radio is that if you need something on the air tomorrow, you can get radio done. Radio can be really appealing because someone will say they can get you 30 spots for $1,000, and a newspaper ad might cost $2,000 for a full page. But radio just doesn’t get the same amount of attention and inspection that newspapers do. The Newspaper Association of America would tell you that two-thirds of the population gets a weekend paper, and half read a daily paper. To get that reach in radio takes a lot longer and a lot of spots. Just because you get 30 spots on the radio doesn’t mean everybody hears it 30 times. You have to do reach-and-frequency analysis and figure out how many spots you have to run to get a certain percentage of the population a cer
