Ran across a fairly recent NAA study (performed by Scarborough Research in 2008 and MORI Research in 2009) and given all the not so great news that came out this week around newspaper circulation, thought a counter point of view would be worth while to explore.
Overall newspaper inserts are still being used by those that have access to them.
- 75% of all U.S. adults read a newspaper in print or online in the past week; over 170 million adults. For shoppers, newspaper advertising is an opt-in medium in an opt-out world.
- 59% of adults rank newspapers first as the media used to help plan shopping or make purchasing decisions in the past 7 days.
- 80% of newspaper readers report looking at advertising when reading the paper.
- 41% say newspapers are the medium used most to check out ads, more than all electronic media combined. (TV, radio, Internet)
- 77% of newspaper readers took an action as a result of a print newspaper ad in the past 30 days. 59% clipped a coupon, 52% bought something advertised and 45% visited a store.
- 60% of newspaper readers followed up a newspaper ad online in some way. 44% went to a website after seeing a print newspaper ad and 28% conducted an online search after seeing a newspaper ad.
- 82% of readers used a preprinted insert in the past 30 days.
- 59% used to compare prices, 55% used to compare one circular to another, 52% saved until visiting the store and 43% used to make an unplanned purchase.
- 4.4 days is the average time frame that an adults keep an inserts.
Meijer yesterday unleashed a real great addition to their weekly ad site called Full Screen browsing. Just like a YouTube video when maximized that takes over every inch of a user’s monitor, now when browsing the circular a user can see the largest possible circular page images. It also reduces all of the noise that comes with a full site header, footer and browser menus and toolbars. All of this clutter instantly disappears within full screen browsing. It does make for a more enjoyable, simpler experience.
This will really help improve the readability factor that from time to time be an issue for some users. The only constraint that is inherent to utilizing this type of Adobe Flash player type full screen presentation style is that any keyboard inputs of any kind cancel / end the full screen browsing experience.
Within the typical browse by circular page view that most shoppers choose to use, a new view option has been added called Full Screen.
Once full maximized, everything included the browser bar and skin is covered up. All that remains is just the weekly ad pages. This offers a great, simplified and focused user interface that excels at text readability within the circular.
Thank you Mr. Smith. Not exactly sure who you are, but we know you are a real and very helpful person in terms of aiding the ShopLocal team recently around site accessibility tuning and testing for the Publix SmartCircular site. We could not have gotten where we are without your gracious help.
Within the recently relaunched Publix SmartCircular 4.1 site, there is a corresponding HTML version of the site. Within this simpler version, the ShopLocal team has created a sub-version that offers an even more enhanced level of accessible (Mr. Smith approved of course). The team here has learned many valuable lessons from the accessibility building, testing and tuning experience with one practical nugget of wisdom being to use a list style presentation of content that does NOT contain item thumbnail images, graphical buttons or other visual embellishments. Rather to use very simplified HTML formatting and structures to display the content.
Publix has made a constant commitment to helping reach out and embrace those with visual impairments, that their HTML version of their weekly ad actual defaults to this simplified item information list type presentation.
This is a fairly typical HTML style, category browse result page that has NOT been formatted for those with a visual impairment.
This is a the same HTML category browse result page that has been specifically formatted for those with a visual impairment. Notice how simple and condensed this view is when compared to the more dense and elaborate view state above.
Within the Deal$ area of the search engine Ask.com, a new beta area called ‘Local Only’ is appearing that is currently nearly exclusively powered by the localized what’s on sale content that ShopLocal houses in it’s many SmartCircular sites.
Lots of SmartCircular retailer clients are showing up within the search results of this Ask.com beta area like Office Depot, Best Buy, Kmart and Target to name a few. Luckily this local content is not siloed, as it is woven back into the overall Deal$ result set, as I am guessing not many users make it into this specific beta area. One of the coolest things that Ask.com is doing in this beta site is calculating the percentage savings from the original price to the sale price.
Example results page for "Digital Cameras" within the Local Only Beta area of Ask.com's Deal$ part of their search index.
However the only current down side to the Ask.com beta implementation is that the landing page URLs are 100% generic and are not product or deal specific, which leaves plenty to be desired on the user landing page experience. So a user that is looking a specific digital camera within the beta area of Ask.com that clicks off is routed to the main “home” landing page. It also appears that the store filter doesn’t account for all retailers that are included within the results set.
Over at the Sears weekly ad site, a circular personalization trial has been running over the past week or so. A small percentage of site visitors are given the opportunity to be part of a test group that can “personalize” their weekly ad experience to a limited degree based upon some user inputted category preferences.
Calling it a weekly ad or circular site is a stretch, as it most of the content is regular old eCommerce content that is pulled from the Sears.com product catalog. With this massive amount of content, the site get’s pretty overwhelming, as the level of “personalization” that is applied to the site is literally entire category level filters. So when a user that has self-identified as having an interest in appliances, all 6,000+ appliances are brought back, which is the farthest thing from what the promise of personalization holds.
It’s also not clear what level of localization this test site uses. Users are asked to enter their ZIP code, but other than what appears to be a non-functioning closest store address being displayed, nothing is being done with this location data.
For those lucky weekly ad visitors, this is the opt-in screen to try out the new "personalized" circular. There is a nice video demo that helps explain the value proposition of this concept as well as some on screen visuals and messaging.
For those users that opt in to become part of the test group, they are immediately hit up by the site to input which specific categories they are interested in. These category level interest preferences are retained for those site visitors that return, and can be changed at a later point.
Then once a user inputs their categories of interest, this is where they are taken to an Apple-ekse 'Cover Flow' presentation of an an odd hodgepodge of content that is pulled in across all the various user identified L1 category level interests.
There is another view state possible within the application that makes use of the very typical grid presentation of products. Also along the way, there are guided navigation filters that appear in the left hand navigation area that allow users to refine the content that is being shown in either view.
Overall, its a very alpha effort. There are many ways to improve the “personalized” ad experience (such as creating a real value add difference that is evident to normal consumers between this “personalized circular site” and the regular Sears.com eCommerce site because as is, the normal Sears.com site is actual easier to use. However, it still is great to see the experimentation with some very basic levels of site personalization. Looking forward to seeing the next iteration that improves from the metrics and learnings that this test will generate.
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(3.50 out of 5)
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