London Evening Standard promises to do better but can they compete with free?

The newly rebranded London Evening Standard is currently embarking on a campaign to help win back readers from the freesheets. Launching with the "Sorry" message last week, the campaign is due to evolve into a series of promises that will see the paper attempt to move away from its image as being negative and complacent.


While the campaign will no doubt get London's media & advertising community talking, it will be interesting to see if this campaign is able to reach out and connect with its broader target audience. The key question is whether the campaign can persuade an ever-increasing number of Londoner's to ditch their free and easy freesheets and fork out 50p for their end of day dose of news and entertainment.


With both the londonpaper and London Lite boasting readerships of around the 1m mark compared to LES's paid-for circ of just 144k the size of the task is clear. In this context, LES's circulation woes can be viewed as structural rather than the result of a poor product. Put another way, the real problem facing LES is whether there is a sustainable market for an evening paid-for newspaper in London at all. Accepting this as the key challenge, is the new campaign likely to be a success?


The key strategic question facing paid-for content providers in a context dominated by free providers is best summarised by Kevin Kelly in his blog Better than Free. Although this discussion relates specifically to the digital world where copies of all sorts of content are freely available at no cost, the parallels with LES are clear. When the freesheets can credibly claim to be more convenient (Accessibility, Findability, Immediacy) it seems that it is in the areas of Interpretation and possibly Authenticity that LES can best demonstrate it is adding value.


The freesheets are famously light on detailed comment and analysis, so this must be a central pillar for LES. I am not sure the "Sorry / Promise" campaign can be said to deliver against this. Furthermore, judging by todays headline of "City Tycoon: My Secret Lovelife" it appears that is not where editorial policy is heading anyway. If LES is going to attempt to beat the freesheets at their own game then they will surely fail.


Thinking about Authenticity, can LES lay claim to being the title for London and derive value from that? Clearly the rebrand to include the great city's name in the title is a move towards this, but can the same be said of the "Sorry / Promise" campaign? The freesheets vibrant (albeit lightweight) editorial take on city life & celebrity culture feel like a much better representation of London in this day and age and for me only the ES Mag really competes with this.


In a world where convenience is key it feels that both the new campaign and rebrand in general will not do enough to change the reading habits of the majority of London commuters. While I don't doubt there is still a market for a paid-for title I think the reality is that this market is likely to be structurally small and declining and that this campaign will not be able to affect this trend in the long term. Worse still I fear the marketing activities and change in direction will actually be a turn off for the last few remaining loyal LES readers and actually hasten its decline.