”Many young people don’t have newspapers at home, so they cannot read them even if they want. That’s why we deliver our newspaper for free to schools and universities,” explained Mr. Barbot working for the largest regional daily newspaper in France.

Ouest-France has a circulation of nearly 800,000 copies – twice as much as the best selling nation-wide title Le Monde.

”After two years of delivering free copies of newspapers to school, we see that there is no copies left. So they take it, they read it,” continued Mr. Barbot.

But does he really believe that after having Ouest-France for free will these young readers start to buy the newspaper?

”It’s another thing. Young people are used to free information. But we had some tests with subscription for young people and had good results,” answered Mr. Barbot.

Ouest-France offered readers aged 18-24 to subscribe one issue per week for free for a year and after that period they could continue their subscription, but they had to pay.

”We had very good 15-per cent transformation rate. It is a good result for a direct marketing campaign,” answered Mr. Barbot.

Watch full interview with Herbe Barbot, made at the INMA Outlook 2009: European conference in Vienna, October 1-3, 2008.

Video brought to you by Artur Karda and Agnieszka Mazus, multimedia reporters at Media Regionalne, Polish part of Mecom Group. Read more about Mecom here.

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