Mistruths and bragging

While eating my Wheaties this morning, I open my grey old Calgary Herald to see the latest mistruths being thinly veiled as promotion or bragging.

Bragging is great, but only if you have something to brag about. I guess you could selectively brag.

It is also rather telling or coincidental that I also for the Canadian Press feed telling me that, “Time Warner Inc., the world’s largest media company, is paying $300 million US to settle fraud charges... for overstating online advertising revenues and the number of its Internet subscribers.”

I wondered to myself what would happen if the same sort of investigation was launched into how our media companies in Canada tell all those who will listen, how well their circulation has grown, or that their listener ship numbers and viewer count is the best, the greatest, and the most.

In Calgary we have the Herald, grey and boring.

They state their readership is now at 275,000 readers, and that is 68% of the local newspaper readers. That is not the population of Calgary but only those that pick up a newspaper, a daily newspaper. It discounts the reality of Calgary in that we have more printed media than that, let alone on-line and on the airwaves. This does keep the gene pool awfully small in which to use your numbers to boost the shallow egos of the media sales people, and does allow hairs to be split in case anyone ever calls them on their boasting.

In fact the 275,000 readers of the Calgary Herald only represent 34% based on the total population of Calgary (Calgary census zone), not the 68% horn they toot in the add. Shouldn’t the bragging be based on reality? Base them on the reach your media channel has, not only those reading a daily newspaper. That gives a false sense of reality to any that read the advertisement. You can bet this page was the cause for the weight in the briefcases of the eager clean cut advertising salespeople for Canwest first thing this morning.

It also brings to question how the people at Cameron Strategy or NADBank actually compute their numbers.

The former being the people to come up with the boasting numbers for today’s particular ad in the Calgary Herald. Peter Menzies the general manager of the Herald tells me the numbers for those people who read the paper “yesterday,” and are only for adults 18 years old plus, but does not include readers in satellite areas and the total circulation zone. Peter goes on to state “these numbers do not represent people who may have read it once in the past three days, once in the past five days, once in the past seven days,” etc., despite the fact that there is a small tag line below the bragging piece that states the source of the information is a period between April 2004 and January 2005. This is not really “yesterday,” but a yesterday sometime in that nine-month period.

How do they figure out who reads the newspaper, because they do not ask the responder what they read, or did they read the entire newspaper, or did they actually read more than the front page?

The issue I have with this sort of self-promotion is that any other advertiser caught producing an advertisement like this would be found in contravention of most of the false or misleading advertising laws in the country. Is there a different manure shovel law for the newspaper industry in Canada?

There are two things that make my Wheaties go limp now.

One is the incessant bragging of all of the major daily newspapers about their meagre readership gains that do not even meet the growth in population in Canada, and the over use of the meaningless new marketing term “branding.”