Can You Believe That The Times Of London Is Promoting Its Revamped Web Site With A Poster Showing A Well Endowed Lady’s Black Lace Bra Stuffed Full Of Cash? This Is The Times, Not The Sun!

Philip M. Stone February 22, 2007

These are hard times at Rupert Murdoch’s Times Newspapers that owns the UKs Times and The Sunday Times, The two have reported a £80.7 million ($157 million, €120 million) loss for the last fiscal year, so apparently that means desperate measures for desperate Times.
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Having invested £10 million ($19.5 million, €15 million) on the Times’ new web site, management wanted to ensure that the word got out. And how better to do it than having large billboards displaying not much more than a pair of breasts covered by a black lace bra stuffed with cash. There was some very British verbiage to go with it  --  “Money and rumpy-pumpy are the twin engines powering everything we do.” You figure out what rumpy-pumpy is!

Now, this is The Times of London. This is not its sister tabloid, The Sun. This is The Times that calls itself, in British parlance, a quality newspaper, if not the quality newspaper. Well, perhaps the time has come to judge a newspaper and its web site by its advertising poster!

It only takes one person to complain for the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to investigate an advertisement and ASA says it is considering whether to launch an investigation based on breaking the advertising code for taste and decency. The Times of London possibly breaking the code for taste and decency? Just what are these times coming to?

The Times Newspapers losses are for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, so the Sunday Times’ debacle of raising its price to £2 in September and the corresponding 100,000 slump in circulation is not a part of that. The Sunday Times is thought to still be very profitable; it’s the daily Times that has always been the big money loser. Since the five-year loss for Times Newspapers is around  £200 million that must mean very large annual losses for the Times. Maybe its management should try and grab some of that money stuffed into the lady’s cleavage.

The Evening Standard, on the other hand, has launched a very clever ad playing on the fact that readers dump so many of the competitive free newspapers on city streets and in the underground (subway). The ad shows a commuter getting off an underground train dropping her copy of thelondonpaper (Murdoch) -- naturally it couldn’t be London Lite she dropped for that is published by the Standard’s parent, Associated Newspapers.

For those who have traveled the underground you’ll know there are safety signs at many stations painted along the edge of the platform reading “Mind the crack” because there is sometimes, especially on a curve, some distance between the edge of the train and the edge of the platform. The Standard changed that wording cleverly in its ad to  “Mind the Free Sheet” with the tagline “London never drops its Standards.”

The Standard needs all the help it can get these days, thelondonpaper says it has increased its print run to 500,000 copies a night, and London Lite is distributing around 400,000 and some of those do end up staying with commuters on the way home rather than being thrown right away. Thus the Standard’s circulation is down to around 276,000 copies, including some 50,000 bulk sales, and its year on year decline through January was nearly 18%. Management believes, however, given the circumstances, the paper has actually done quite well.

The Standard ad does pick up, however, on what is actually becoming a very serious problem for the free newspapers.  The subway system is complaining that since the launch of the two free newspapers in August it has cost an additional £730,000 ($1.4 million, €1.1 million) just to clean up the mess. And the various borough councils are now also getting fed-up with heavily littered streets and they are said to be fining both newspapers while at the same time urging them to ante up the cash to increase the number of litter containers on the streets.

So it was with more than a twinkle in the eye that Associated Newspapers roundly condemned News International for announcing an increase in the run of thelondonpaper from 400,000 daily to 500,000.  Associated said News International was being “irresponsible”. It continued, “The most likely outcome of this latest increase in free newspapers is an increase in litter.” At least that’s what they hope.

And then over at the Daily Telegraph it had some fun at the expense of The Guardian and The Times – both of whom are locked into a battle for supremacy by a UK newspaper on the web -- by running an ad campaign claiming its web site is Britain’s number one quality newspaper site. ASA is now checking that out after receiving at least one complaint.

Apparently the Telegraph used statistics from the HitWise Internet research company that measures a website’s share of UK visitors, rather than the world as a whole. According to ABC Electronic, which audits website figures, The Guardian, for instance, had 13.8 million global unique users in December 2006 compared to The Daily Telegraph's 6.4 million.

What’s a few million visitors between rivals?

ftm Follow Up & Comments

ASA Not To Pursue Case Against Times - February 22, 2007

No sooner did ftm write its story than ASA advised The Times that it will not be pursuing any case against the newspaper for violating the advertising code for indecency or lack of taste.

Anoushka Healy, Times editorial communications director, emailed ftm, saying that ASA has informed the newspaper,  " We have advised the complainants that we shall not pursue their complaints on this occasion because, in our view and on the facts available to us at present, there does not seem to be a case to investigate under the British Code of Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (the CAP Code)."

ftm comment:

That, of course, still doesn't answer the question of whether The Times, with its pedigree, should be running posters showing  a lady's bra full of cash and with suggestive verbiage. As we said, The Times is not The Sun and if a newspaper calls itself "quality" then that should include everything it does, including  advertisements for its own product.