Ash Backwards

Alternative papers face an ongoing decline in tobacco advertising.

Alternative newspapers, like City Paper and Philadelphia Weekly, might not be frantically buying out and laying off workers in a desperate bid to prevent profits from slipping from obscenely high to just high. Still, they are feeling the effects of a decreasingly media-friendly economy.

Some of the reasons — the sharp increase in the cost of newsprint, the general decline in national advertising — are the same as those with which daily papers have been grappling. But alternatives have also been stung by a second straight year of declining tobacco advertising.

Just two years ago, it seemed that tobacco companies couldn’t get enough of alternative weeklies and their young-skewing demographic. Alternative Weekly Network (AWN), a nonprofit entity that coordinates national media buys for 100 or so alternatives, including City Paper, handled $18 million in cigarette advertising in 1999, says executive director Mark Hanzlik. In 2000, that figure slipped to $12.3 million. Defections from AWN contributed to this decline, Hanzlik notes, but the bulk of the loss came from tobacco companies’ decreased spending.

And even with slight gains in May, tobacco ad revenues for 2001 are down 50 percent to 60 percent from 2000. This, Hanzlik says, is the largest single factor in the 30 percent decrease, from last year, in national ad revenue passing through AWN.

City Paper didn’t begin to feel the drop-off until this year, says publisher Paul Curci, but so far the losses have been roughly the same as those described by Hanzlik.

Susan Belair, national sales director for the Ruxton Group, a similar network serving 28 papers — including Philadelphia Weekly— declined to comment for this article. Calls to Michele Laven, president and COO of the New Times alternative chain and overseer of the Ruxton Group, were not returned.

Advertising restrictions were imposed on the tobacco industry in 1998, as part of the multi-billion-dollar settlement it reached with states. But those dealt primarily with billboards and sponsorship deals — which may explain why print advertising shot up in 1999 — and Hanzlik says AWN has no reason to believe restrictions, or fear of new restrictions, has played a role in the two-year decline.

"We’ve asked about that," he says, "and we’ve never gotten an answer like that. [The rises and falls are] more about the whims of [media] planners and buyers, and their clients."

Hanzlik describes what you might call a cigarette-pack mentality: It seems that when one company pours more money into a given form of advertising, others follow suit. This phenomenon was at work when the buys shot up in 1999, and has now hastened the decline.

But Mike Pfeil, spokesman for Philip Morris USA, suggests it’s more involved than that. Speaking only for his own company, Pfeil says that to "address issues that society has concerning tobacco," like youth smoking, Philip Morris has "made a commitment to reduce the overall profile of tobacco advertising in the United States." The company’s spending on things like print and point-of-sale advertising are down as a result.

The focus now, Pfeil says, is on direct mail and other efforts in which the company can be fairly sure that it’s reaching only adults. Philip Morris "continue[s] to look at the issue of youth readership," and has suspended advertising in numerous magazines, like Rolling Stone and Spin, that may be read by minors, but he could not say whether the decrease in alternative newsweekly advertising was part of that strategy or simply a result of the overall reduction.

He also couldn’t say whether money might start flowing to alternatives again, but notes, "I don’t anticipate that commitment [to reducing the profile of tobacco products] diminishing in the future."

Whatever the reasons, Hanzlik also expects tobacco advertising to remain comparatively low. "We will not reach the kind of volume we had" in 1999, he predicts. New buys in recent weeks nudged the figures up only slightly, from a 60-percent decrease in the first five months of 2001 to roughly a 50-percent decrease at the mid-year point.