The problem with advertising in newspapers is not the medium but the commercial content itself. The Independent's Ian Burrell talks to a man on a mission to drive up its quality.

See the article as it appeared in The Independent

Earlier this year, advertising big cheese Tim Delaney spent many long hours wading through and evaluating the advertising of a month's worth of national newspapers, and at the end of the process he was deeply unimpressed. There were, he says, two or three ads - out of several towering piles of newsprint - that did what they were supposed to do.

"That's pretty amazing if you think about it," he says. "The ads are appalling.  When you look at them objectively and say, 'Is this an interesting ad?', you've got to say that 95 per cent of them don't seem to use the medium in a way that's likely to be interesting to the reader."

As a multi-award winning creative and head of the Leagas Delaney agency, which numbers BlackBerry, the UnitedNations' World Food Programme and Reebok among its clients, he knows what he's talking about. Delaney, who worked his way up from mail boy to become a creative director at the BBDO London agency aged 27, also held The Guardian's advertising account for five years in the Nineties. 

His task as the chairman of the Awards for National Newspaper Advertising (Annas) for 2006 is to help inspire a resurgence of interest in commercial content within a medium that is increasingly seen as being on the way out. That is not a view that Delaney shares.

He refers to a comment made last year by Andrew Gowers, the departing editor of the Financial Times, who said that newspaper publishing was sustained on "dead trees". That is damaging talk, says Delaney. "You only need enough people to start thinking that way in competitive media and we go from having a very healthy press in this country to where things are in America -with the exception of The New YorkTimes and The Washington Post, they are incidental to most people's lives."

Such a scenario, he believes, would represent a significant shift in the way the British public consumes information. "This country has always been peculiar about its newspapers," he says. "Go to Germany - they've not got national newspapers. We've got all these national newspapers and they're all really important to the national landscape. We've got to resolve how we make the most of this incredibly important medium."

Delaney says one of the key misconceptions in the advertising world is that newspapers are merely purveyors of facts and data, and are somehow incapable of relating in any more personal way with the consumer. That is nonsense, he believes. "We've got to get beyond the point where people say newspaper advertising is about rationality," he says. "Newspaper advertising and print advertising in general can and should create an emotional response. If there's a received wisdom [in advertising] that says you need music, lights and movement, and that's the only way to create emotion, then you are starting with a prejudice. My response to that is, 'So there are no emotional books, then?' If you read Anna Karenina, you don't feel anything?"

The Independent's single front pages, he argues, generate a strong emotional response from readers.  Delaney says that big selling newspapers, such as The Sun, which has an eight-figure readership, offer advertisers the kind of mass market they used to look for in television.

"Newspapers represent the old ITV,with big blocks of people with a point of view," he says. "If you want to talk to Middle England, talk to the Daily Mail. You have got these people in blocks and you are not going to get that on 500 TV channels where there is this incredible fragmentation."

But the quality of the newspaper ads has got to improve. One of the problems, he claims, is that media companies increasingly drawup campaigns without properly consulting the advertising agencies they use. As a result, the creatives, who design the ads, often feel "neutered" and deliver work of "passionless intent".

One of Delaney's great bug bears is the strip newspaper ad, which often runs at the bottom of a page and, he says, offers little room for creativity. "If you've got a strip ad, that is not going to bath the baby," he says.

"You've got to set out to create an emotional response, and impact is part of that.  The Sun's readership is around 12million.  What a medium.  What a thing to have.  And the best people can do when they want to advertise razors is say, 'Let's put a strip underneath the England match report'. That's not what it's about."

Delaney is a keen reader of the sportspages as a former director of Fulham, a football club he helped Mohamed Al Fayed to transform, helping to bring in coaches of the calibre of Kevin Keegan and JeanTigana, partly through contacts he had established with Adidas.  Thesedays he prefers the aesthetics of Spanish and Italian football to the cruder English version.

But when he talks about impact in advertising, he repeatedly talks of scale, noting that The Daily Telegraph still offers something special to advertisers in its broadsheet format. "When you go big in the Telegraph, you go really big - I think the Financial Times should use that aswell."

As an example, he cites the recent advertising for the Emirates A380 Airbus (Emirates is a Leagas Delaney client),which ran in several newspapers but over four broadsheet pages in the Telegraph. "It was a corporate ad rather than a brilliant ad and it was stating the obvious - this is one of aviation's great landmarks. [But] on that day, anyone reading a newspaperwould have said, 'Yes, Emirates is a powerful airline'. It was a use of power and status and scale to make a point."

Flick through the ads, in context from The Times 

Delaney's advice to those creating and placing press ads is to be more selective and not afraid to take a chance. "Less is more," he says. "I would surprise people more.  I'd do less insertions and have bigger spaces."

The Annas will try to get advertising agencies to up their game with their press work.  The lure will be cash prizes. "It sounds mercenary but you will get people to say 'I want that money',"  he says. "They can get bigger and better gongs from other awards schemes."

Delaney illustrates his arguments in favour of the future of press advertising by way of a sketched pie chart. He argues that the sizes of the slices of the ad pie enjoyed by different media have changed over time but there should be "room for everybody" in building a relationship between consumers and a brand. "People have got to say, 'We can use this medium of newspapers'.  We've got millions of people every day reading it and absorbing it - why on earth would we believe it's just a dustbin for factual information?  People need to be re-educated about the medium."