Thanksgiving is the year’s biggest print advertising day in the USA because it comes immediately before Black Friday, infamous as the day throngs of Americans arrive at shopping malls before 4 a.m. to enter overflowing stores and emerge either with the newest gadget at a 70-percent discount or with a black eye.
Although there has been a shift in recent years towards online shopping, 63 per cent of Americans still say newspapers are the ultimate holiday shopping guide, according to Nielsen research.
Thus newspapers continue to provide the main link between retailers and consumers – and today they are taking special advantage of it. In North Dakota, the Grand Forks Herald’s Thanksgiving paper weighs a record (for the paper) 3.91 pounds because of the advertisements and inserts. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution paper also weighs a back-breaking four pounds.
A study by Wanderful Media revealed that 67 per cent of shoppers research and develop of plan specifically for their Black Friday shopping, using their local newspapers to build the plan. Newspapers also offer a wide audience with 71 per cent of Americans reading newspaper-generated content.
Newspapers begin planning for this holiday issue well in advance; Grand Forks Herald began planning for its Thanksgiving paper on November 10. Production Manager Keith Haus told Grand Forks Herald that the extra work required an additional 300 hours of labor.
Although Thanksgiving Day papers are heavy on advertisements, they are soft on news. The Grand Forks Herald Thanksgiving paper will include 52 news pages and 714 advertising flyer pages. Arizona’s The Star has more than 900 Black Friday ads. The Southern also published its biggest paper today, with some 40 inserts.
The lack of news content on Thanksgiving Day is attributable mainly to the added weight of advertisements; heavier papers challenge the delivery system. However, newspapers crowd pages with advertisements on Thanksgiving Day in order to be able to charge more for the paper. Of course it costs more to produce and distribute a heavy paper – but the higher price can help float papers through January and February. As Herald Publisher Mike Jacobs told Grand Forks Herald, those are the slowest months for shopping and thus also for advertising.
Therefore Thanksgiving Day papers are the biggest of the year packed with unmatched deals and savings but often very little news.