Communicate

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Communicate distinctly remembers the day The National was launched two years ago. April 17, 2008 was much anticipated by news junkies, and we remember the excitement of seeing the purple and blue masthead at our local supermarket. Although The National reporters wrote in a wide-eyed “I can’t believe I’m in the United Arab Emirates, oh look, there’s a baby camel” style for a good few months, we felt there was finally a newspaper that spoke to us.
“Through our research, we found that The National’s readership is what we thought it would be: up-market, affluent, educated, and international,” said Gavin Dickinson, executive director of publishing at the Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC) at the newspaper’s two-year anniversary press event at Abu Dhabi’s suitably swanky Yas Hotel. The description sums us up perfectly. We like to think.
While The National’s style has always been more coherent than the other local broadsheets, its owners and editors knew they were going up against longstanding competition. “One of the most challenging things with this paper is that we were forced to fight an unnecessary fight with the market leader,” says Dickinson. (The market leader is Gulf News.) “Anybody who goes up against a newspaper that’s been around for 30 years or more is looking for an unnecessary fight; but what we’ve tried to do is define our own sector of the market and readership, which is educated, worldly, and looking for first-hand copy and information created by people in this region.”
The National has since tried to position itself as the thinker’s newspaper. “About five years ago, another newspaper said that they were the newspaper that tells the truth, and everybody will recognize some of the challenges in that statement,” says Dickinson. “We went down the path of: We provide the news, and we’ll do our very best to put the story in front of you; you define the story and your truth.”
Founding editor Martin Newland says the distinction between tabloids, middle-market papers and broadsheets – staple segments of the British newspaper business – didn’t exist two years ago. “As I saw it, all there was was a newspaper market; there was no such stratification,” he says. Broadsheets in the UK can charge more than red-tops, since their readership is more affluent. And the National has tried to bring this philosophy to the UAE.
While setting itself apart from the competition, The National also had a very clear advertising strategy: quality over quantity. Dickinson says he expects The National will make around 120 million dirhams – compared to 350 million dirhams for Gulf News – in advertising revenue this year, and will take 15 to 18 percent of advertising in the local English daily market. But one look at The National will show that, in comparison to other English dailies, it is not saturated with display advertising. “People ask us, ‘How are you making money?’” says Dickinson. “One of our biggest issues is people not understanding broadsheet pricing, and the sheer capacity of a daily newspaper to take money. The National will always be ad-light; we launched the paper at a 30 percent advertising ratio, while some of our competitors can run up to 60 to 80 percent. We will never do that, and we will never sell the cover. We have only just started doing belly bands, but we’ll never take a wraparound.”
Dickinson says the ad ratio is now at 40 percent, and that’s enough. “You’ll never see news pages with adverts on top of each other and a small story,” he says. “It’s not what we’re setting out to do; you can’t be the leading quality English broadsheet on those terms.”
Adding to its quality-over-quantity advertising strategy, Dickinson says The National started out “aggressive” with its pricing, doubling that of the market leader. “We did that to define ourselves,” he says, but concedes, “We’ve now dropped the rates, because the point has been made.”
The National has grown into a more mature, less wide-eyed newspaper over the past two years. It has started to win over advertisers as well as readers – it recently persuaded luxury goods brand Cartier to advertise on non-glossy news print for the first time – and its publishers hope it will make around 250 million dirhams in advertising revenue by 2013, the year it is meant to break even. The National’s management must be hoping it can reach that benchmark with dignity, sophistication and immeasurable wealth. Just like us.

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