The cost of one full-colour ad on the front page of The New York Times.

Did you know that the the cost of one full-colour ad on the front page of The New York Times is around $50k/£40k. To appear on the Times’ front page, though, marketers must commit to a certain frequency, such as front-page ads every Tuesday for six months; the total cost of running frequent page-one ads would likely top $1 million/£800k.

Is that really worth it?

Without meaning to take away the value from other forms of advertising, don’t you think you’d get more for your money if you were to spend it on ANY form of online advertising? How do you know how many people saw your ad on the front cover of The New York Times? How do you know how many people actually read it? Can you reach them again with a re-targeting offer?

For example on Facebook: with just one weeks budget, you could produce a video(s) and make it go viral (Post Engagement ad +Video Views). 2-million+ views, and the results would be measurable. You’d also be able to retarget the users who engaged with the video and watched it until the end. On top of that, you’d still have enough to develop a flawless sales funnel that gets you email addresses and sales.

Online ads Vs anything else…

We’ve worked with organisations in both the private sector and the public sector that have been running TV and Radio ads at the same time as having us run their social media. In all instances there has been what we would consider an awkward moment at the end of the campaigns where the TV and Radio companies would send their reports about total website visitors during the campaign etc, and we would account a large percent of those visitors to our social media campaigns and be able to prove it with hard figures. Would you rather speculate with your data or have it laid out for you?