The lasting existence of university publications proves readership is still strong amongst the college demographic.  On top of locally catered news, perhaps, one of the main reasons they’ve stayed relevant for so long is the inclusion of national ads.   Nation-wide brands do a great job of bringing novel ideas and a large budget to the table, which complement local businesses and event promotions nicely.  They consistently see win-win results for both the publication as well as the brand.

Imagine a black and white photograph of a meadow, with only a few patches of flowers fully colored in.  Obviously, our attention would immediately shift to those colored flowers because they stick out to us!  In a newspaper landscape of black and white classifieds and small budget advertisements, full page and full color campaigns seem to be where our attention lands.  We’re drawn to large colorful things, it’s human nature.   Further, the relatively short attention spans of the 18-24 year olds is really only conducive to skimming the papers.  When a unique campaign appears after they flip a page, college kids will likely spend more time digesting that then the debate over piece of school legislature that may not be applicable to him or her.

National brands have money and talent, plain and simple.  They wouldn’t have gotten the nation-wide recognition without attracting those things.  The brands who want to engage and maintain a loyal following in the college demographic would be foolish if they rule out their newspapers.  Brands can spend over one hundred thousand dollars to get a full page, four color advertisement in the Arts & Leisure section of the NY Times.  Or, they could spend a fraction of that and reach a narrowly targeted audience.  The average for the same full page, full color ad for Big 10 colleges is just under three thousand dollars.

If a brand wants to focus on college students, it is clearly the more affordable option than a national print publication. Additionally there is less waste, as the vast majority of the readers of a college newspaper are college students. Larger national publications have readers that are beyond the college audience. Therefore by using only a portion of a national campaign budget focused on college students will have a huge impact and benefits to the brand.