The Young Broke Box Office Records For Spider-Man 3 And That’s Really Bad News For Newspapers As Sony Pictures Concentrated On Digital Marketing Rather Than Newspaper Ads, Toyota Relaunches The Scion xB Without Newspaper Ads, And Macy’s Warns Publishers They Will Continue To Lose Out Unless They Change Their Ways.

Sony Pictures pulled out all the online stops – it had ads all over MySpace, it sponsored a multitude of blogs, it offered free Spider-Man games, there were downloadable movie trailers and as Jeff Blake, Sony’s head of global marketing and distribution explained, “The Web is a pretty economical way to reach moviegoers.”

While television and billboards got big spends, Sony intentionally reduced the newspaper spend.”The Internet as a marketing vehicle has grown in leaps and bounds,” Blake said. Without giving away numbers, he said a “substantial part” of the budget had been migrated from newspapers to the web.

Sony had pretty much bet the studio on Spider-Man 3 being a huge success. It cost around $400 million to make and by the time everyone gets their cut it needs about $800 million to show a profit. The marketing had to be just right to fill theaters, and Sony’s decision to divert huge amounts to Internet activities and away from newspapers can only be sorry news for print.

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Other studios will no doubt pay close attention to how Sony achieved its marketing success. After all, most movies are aimed at getting the young to put their bums on seats at movie theaters and Sony has perfected the way forward.

Pickup a Friday Los Angeles Times or New York Times or other major metropolitan newspaper and one finds full page ads upon full page ads for movies opening that weekend. But those ads have been getting less and less over the past year and there’s good reason. They don’t come cheaply – maybe up to $100,000 each in the bigger newspapers -- but if the young aren’t reading those newspapers, then what’s the point of the ads? When it comes to the young – and we’re talking from the youngest teenagers on up – “Where thou goest, movie marketing goest, too.”

Around four percent of studio marketing budgets were spent on online ad campaigns last year, but that doesn’t include promotional activities like setting up web sites and the like. Look for the web spend to grow by leaps and bounds.

And it’s not just movie ads that are migrating away from print. Who could have imagined a national car relaunch without newspaper advertising, and yet Toyota, the world’s largest car maker, is doing just that. For its redesigned Scion xB that went on sale this week there are no TV ads, and no ads in mainstream print publications. The car is aimed at male urban drivers aged 18 to 35 and Toyota believes there are better ways to reach that demographic – the Internet and Outdoors.

Toyota’s campaign is aimed at a demographic that spends more time surfing the Web than surfing TV channels. It has set up Want2BSquare.com filled with video and games. It is choosy where it will place its Internet ads – none on MySpace, for instance, because that is too mainstream. Outdoor billboards are being used to poke fun at the shape of the boxy looking car.

No one has really tried to launch a car without newspapers of TV since Volvo tried it in 2000, putting its entire ad budget for the S60 into an America Online campaign. Sales were not great, but if Toyota pulls this one off then other car launches will surely take notice..

Department stores have long been the anchor for newspaper display advertising, but that has taken a hard downhill turn in past years because of store consolidation. Where there may have been several different department stores in town now many have consolidated under one brand, like Macy’s for instance, and so the overall advertising volume is down.

But even the department stores have been looking ever more at digital campaigns and Anne MacDonald, Macy’s chief marketing officer, gave newspaper publishers meeting in New York this week a real tough “shape up or ship out” message. “In order for your newspapers to be winning our advertising dollars, you need to be winning in the marketplace, and that's not currently the case," she warned the annual meeting of the Newspaper Association of America.

She laid it on the line. She and her colleagues are not happy with newspapers these days – declining circulation and the loss of the young means department stories have to look to national fashion magazines, the Internet, and TV far more than in the past, to reach those readers.

“The daily newspaper remains a very good tool for Macy's, that’s the good news. The problem is our customer is not picking up the newspaper as much as we would like … We need to make sure we are not spending more to get less. Macy’s is taking steps to increase [customer reach] and the efficiency of our spend. In this environment, newspapers will get left behind.”

She reminded publishers that Macy’s core audience are women aged 25 – 64. While she is not about to tell newspapers what news they should be printing she made clear that newspapers must appeal to that demographic or she is throwing her money away. And she pointed out that 30% of business today comes from various minority groups such as African American, Hispanic or Asian. Whatever newspapers do to make their product attractive to that audience makes her advertising spend more meaningful.

Her own feeling is that people want to read local news in local newspapers and that newspapers should move that local news to the forefront. Local news, she said,“is your differentiation but that is not what someone sees.”

And she brought up the point that national advertisers have complained about for as long as there have been national advertisers – the difficulty in placing national ads. She believes the industry needs to coordinate national ad placement so a Macy’s doesn’t have to deal independently with each newspaper.

Given the Sony, Toyota and Macy’s examples, it’s not difficult to understand why print advertising revenues are taking such hard hits these days.