The ad placement in question from the Globe’s Friday Real Estate section.
Every once in a while, real estate and media conspire to allow me to write about both of them at once.
Like Friday, when the Globe and Mail decided to sell the cover of its real estate section to a phone company.
The four-page wraparound ad looked like the cover of the real estate section, anyway, complete with all the top-of-the page business, the editors name printed where it always is, and even the top few centimetres of the main picture, which was interrupted by an almost-full-page ad trumpeting some “new” and “amazing” product or service.
It’s awkward enough to look a bit like a printing error, awkward enough, that is, to make you look twice and wonder about it, devote a couple of thousand synapses to it, to be, in other words, a quite effective ad.[1]
They would not have done this on the cover of the news section, or the business section. (According to a source at the paper, the only sections that are off limits to this sort of ad sale, by order of the publisher, are news, ROB and Style on Saturdays.) But the real estate sections, along with the cars and to a lesser extent the travel, are considered “service” sections — ones that exist to create platforms for ads. They work, too, bringing in the lion’s share of the ad revenues.
It should be pointed out at this juncture that ads are not evil things, nor ad sales people traitors to the cause of journalism, truth and justice. Quite the reverse — they make it all possible. And if ad people are told they can sell something juicy like the front of a section, of course they will, to make more money for themselves and for the paper. (In this instance, a source at the Globe tells me the agency for the advertiser in question came with the need for a big splash, and the ad rep is the one who suggested the wrap.)
Metro runs these sorts of ads instead of covers all the time. We’ve grown used to them. The Star did something similar to their entertainment section in December, and I found the extent to which people didn’t like it heartening. It meant people still think of the real newspapers as serious, important things.
But that was entertainment, which though also the generator of much advertising, is considered a content-driven section. So I don’t know whether people are going to care at all about this new adventure in advertising, but whatever the furore or lack of furore turns out to be, it’s a bit of a shame.
First, because there’s something fundamental about selling a cover, of anything, whether it’s a book or a magazine or a newspaper. It’s like getting a tattoo on your forehead, which is, and probably should remain, a social misstep. What it’s even more like, perhaps, is a journalist leaving the field and going into PR, taking their skills and insights acquired to inform and illuminate, and using them to sell and obfuscate. The front page is where the important stuff goes. The biggest news of the day, the stuff the paper wants to call your attention to especially. On Friday, the Globe had decided that the Alberta budget, the difficulties of the phone book business, We Need to Talk About Kevin and the amount of police resources devoted to issuing traffic tickets were what would lead off. The Star chose the premier’s reaction to the transit vote, the acquittal of a pastor who had 500 sex charges laid against him, the Leafs losing, the Oscar nominees for short films, Air Canada’s labour disputes and jewellery for men for theirs.
These selections define these papers. They give us a sense of how they see themselves, and how they’d like us to see them. The Globe likes to be a national newspaper that talks about serious issues. The Star likes to be Toronto’s go-to paper that talks about matters of quotidian concern and social justice. It’s how we know what paper we want to read, whether we’re Star people or Globe people or Post people or (heavens forfend) Sun people.
So when the Globe decides to sell its cover to a company, our view of the paper changes by necessity, and not for the better. (Here’s something called a “French door” ad they did a while back for the Life section.)
But the other problem is the way these papers see these sections. I admit to being mostly in agreement with them on the car thing: there’s not that much to say about cars on a daily or even weekly basis, and what car news there is tends to be covered in the business section. But real estate, the industry that builds the cities up around us, that defines the nature and extent of our personal wealth and sense of security, that supports architecture and encourages design? That’s your throw-away section?
Look at John Bentley Mays. He used to be the art critic and, was transferred over into the real estate section, where he reviews new houses and whatnot. Except, he never stopped being a serious critic. His piece in this very section, a review of a proposed townhouse development that could, in other hands, have been as disposable as the Globe seems to think its section is. But in his, it becomes a meditation on modernism, a chance for an about-face on an architect he’s publically reviled in the past, and a peak into the mostly unconsidered fact that Torontonians seem to have mother and father issues when it comes to Victoria, Edward and their architecture. True, much of the section is, as usual, devoted to particularly attractive or interesting listings, and pieces founded on questions like “Why the white ceiling?”, but the subject matter is of almost universal interest, for reasons great and small. Papers could do more with these sections, but they’re of great editorial value even as they are, and it’s sad to see the Globedemote them so roughly.
[1] The awkwardness is the direct result of a Globe policy that no more than two thirds of a section front can be advertising, and that the banner — the bit that says “Globe Real Estate” – must appear.
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Bert Archer writes about (you guessed it!) media and real estate for Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter @bertarcher.
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