Express jobs pull-out heralds £30m push
The Daily Express launches a weekly, eight-page pull-out recruitment section (Thursday 24 January), in an effort to attract classified advertising revenue and increase readership.
Owner Northern & Shell also claims it will be spending &£30m on advertising the struggling Express newspapers this year.
The new recruitment section will be flagged up on the front page of the newspaper and will appear in the Thursday edition. The initiative consolidates the previous Thursday and Sunday Express recruitment pages, which were not pull-out sections. Recruitment advertising will still be carried on a Sunday.
Northern & Shell joint managing director Stan Myerson is confident that recruitment advertising sales will hold up this year, and says: “While we hear about jobs being lost, many sectors are still suffering severe skills shortages. These include retail, construction, engineering and transport.”
Myerson also claims that the increase in the papers’ ad spend is merited because the company now has a product worth such heavy investment.
Northern & Shell bought the Express in November 1999 and indicated it would spend &£20m in its first year on advertising the daily and Sunday editions. However, it spent just &£6.9m in the year from October 2000 to September 2001 (AC Nielsen/MEAL).
Myerson says that he has no plans to review the paper’s agency arrangements. Northern & Shell has handled the Express ads in house over the last year, while media is bought by OMD UK.
The newspaper saw a year-on-year drop in circulation of 7.25 per cent – to 957,574 – for the period June to November 2001 (ABC).
