Front page ad on WSJ not necessarily good for companies

Advertising Age’s Nat Ives wrote Monday about how General Motors had a front-page ad on the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 29, the same day that there was a negative article about GM directly above the ad. The same thing happened to Hewlett-Packard earlier this month.

Ives wrote, “Advertisers are finding that the front-page ads in The Wall Street Journal — now available for nearly $100,000 a pop — may be a great way to reach the business world, but they can also be disastrous if bad news about their companies appears on page one the same day.

“‘We know that when there’s negative editorial in a newspaper or magazine, that does have a negative impact on our ad,’ said Ryndee Carney, manager for advertising and marketing communications, General Motors Corp.”

Later, Ives reported, “C. Gordon Crovitz, Journal publisher and an exec VP at parent Dow Jones, said no advertisers had complained. ‘This is a tribute to the understanding among advertisers that the marketing messages in the Journal are as valuable as they are in part because of the authoritative, honest and independent editorial environment that we provide.’

“The Journal isn’t the only paper offering new high-reward, high-risk real estate. The New York Times began selling ads on the bottom of the front page of its business section in July, but so far advertisers there — such as Bank of America and American Express — haven’t been scraped up by same-day, same-page bad news.”

Read more here.