P. Allen Smith greets visitors and viewers at Moss Mountain Farm near Roland.
If you needed a handy metric to illustrate how far newspapers have sunk in the new media world, ponder this:
Of the nearly $7 million a year Arkansas spends on media marketing to promote state tourism, only one one-thousandth — about $7,000 — goes to newspapers.
A peek into master gardener and public TV personality P. Allen Smith’s battle for more pay from the state also offered a glimpse at where the ad agency CJRW puts the yearly media spend. Last year that amounted to $6.9 million, according to CJRW CEO Darin Gray.
Smith, who had been getting $200,000 a year from the state for his promotional efforts, was seeking $845,000 a year for an expanded role. Gray and Stacy Hurst, secretary of the Department of Parks, Heritage & Tourism, had other ideas.
But in discussing the Smith saga, Gray broke down advertising amounts by various media: The $6,891,541 total media spend was a thousand times what went into newspaper ads, $6,917.
Compare that $7,000 to the $3 million that went into digital marketing, $2.8 million in television, $632,000 for magazines and $352,000 for radio. Outdoor advertising, at $46,000, was still more than six times what newspapers reaped.
The decline is “based on research that tells us where consumers spend their media time,” said Mark Raines, CJRW’s PR chief. “Consumers spend about 1.5% of their time with newspapers these days.”
For comparison’s sake, the spend devoted to newspaper ads 10 years ago was $600,000, about 10% of the total.
An Influencer for Less
CJRW also broke down the pay P. Allen Smith Garden Home has reaped from the Parks & Tourism account over the years, starting with $50,000 in fiscal 2013, when social media marketing was nascent. “What used to make sense doesn’t always make sense,” Gray told Whispers. “The marketing world has changed.”
Smith’s state pay went to $100,000 in 2014 and 2015, $125,000 in 2016 and then down to $75,000 for a single year in fiscal 2017. In each of 2018 and 2019, the amount was $200,000 a year.
Another paid Arkansas tourism promoter, Seth Alvo of Seth’s Bike Hacks, reaped less than $24,000 over three years but became a leader in directing eyes to Arkansas travel, gathering 318,000 “engagements” in 2016, 205,523 in 2017 and over a million in 2018. Alvo’s work focused on mountain biking and adventure riding in Arkansas, featuring new trails in northwest Arkansas and Hot Springs.
Other influencers like Shelley Coates of HowDoesShe.com, Krystel Spell of ArmyWife101.com and Michiel Perry of BlackSouthernBelle.com reaped fees of $4,500, $3,500 and $3,000, respectively. Alvo’s $15,000 pay in 2018 was the biggest among influencers; CJRW considers P. Allen Smith a “media vendor partner,” not a paid influencer.
Sign up for Daily E-news
