Helsingin Sanomat monetises digital ad spend with front page print + digital option
Ideas Blog | 06 June 2016
The front page of the Helsingin Sanomat print newspaper has always been an ad.
This print ad still has high value. While many people state that “print is dead,” Helsingin Sanomat’s front page is still “the place to be” in the Finnish advertising scene when you want your message to make a statement and reach a lot of people at once: 800,000 readers, 15% of all Finns, daily.
Helsingin Sanomat is the biggest Nordic daily newspaper, and our digital services reach nearly 2 million Finns every week.

While our desktop, mobile, and tablet services have grown, we’ve struggled to monetise the digital environment as efficiently as print. Advertisers are familiar with basic online advertising (i.e. CPM and CPC sales models) but would love to buy easy-to-understand products that are visible at the Web site for a certain period of time (time based).
So we combined these two things — print and digital — and invented the “Helsingin Sanomat Multi-Channel Front Page Ad.” The advertiser buys the front page in all of our channels — print, desktop, mobile, and tablet — on the same day with one purchase.
Combining print and digital channels into one ad product grew the reach to more than 1 million Finns daily, which means with this single, easy-to-buy solution, advertisers can reach 20% of all Finns in a day.

Advertisers have been really pleased with the results. This solution works brilliantly for both branding and selling purposes. We have several cases where advertisers have been able to build brand significantly. We’ve also been able to create sales records for many different brands. One case went so well, the advertiser had to stop accepting new orders because it couldn’t handle the volume.
This experience has taught us to stop thinking about our different channels as separate advertising opportunities, because neither consumers nor advertisers think that way anymore. Even though digital channels enable you to create diverse and complex solutions, that doesn’t mean that you have to make things complicated.