SmartSource isn’t dead – yet. To those who’ve been wondering whether we had witnessed the coupon insert’s swan song more than a month ago, it appears it will show up again later this month – just as soon as it’s rounded up enough coupons to make publishing a new edition worth the trouble.
It’s been anything but business as usual for one of the two coupon inserts that, for decades, have regularly appeared in Sunday newspapers across the country. Vericast’s Save insert has been publishing roughly every other week for most of the year. Neptune Retail Solutions’ SmartSource was following a similar schedule, at least for the first half of this year.
Then the second half of the year began in July, and there hasn’t been a SmartSource since. The vanishing act is due to end soon, as, according to Sunday Coupon Inserts, a new edition is now expected on August 18th – a full seven weeks after its last edition, an unprecedented break for an insert that had previously never taken more than three weeks off, and that’s only over the winter holidays.
Take a look at the Save inserts, in the meantime, and you’ll see some additional brands now offering coupons in its pages – brands that once offered coupons in the SmartSource inserts, but no longer.
This weekend’s Save insert includes coupons for Astepro and Claritin, while the last Save from a couple of weeks ago includes coupons for Aleve and Bayer aspirin. All are owned by Bayer, which had previously been SmartSource’s largest advertiser. In the first half of this year, Bayer offered a total of 62 coupons in SmartSource inserts. Sanofi, owner of brands like Allegra, Gold Bond and Nasacort, offered 47 coupons. And no one else even came close – third place was Reckitt, with just 14 coupons for its products in SmartSource’s pages, while the amount of most other manufacturers’ offers could be counted on one hand.
So with a combined 56% of all the coupons SmartSource printed this year, Bayer and Sanofi had essentially been keeping the publication afloat. And now at least one of those manufacturers has jumped ship.
“We moved to Vericast’s ‘Save’ publication from Neptune’s ‘SmartSource’ so we can better plan our programs,” a Bayer spokesperson told Coupons in the News. Going forward, now in the pages of the Save inserts, “Bayer will continue to deliver print coupons via Sunday newspapers to provide savings to shoppers.”
When asked its future coupon plans, a customer service representative for Sanofi said, reassuringly if not misleadingly, that “our coupons can still be found in SmartSource,” even though there haven’t been any SmartSources to be found. After repeated inquiries, a Sanofi company spokesperson did not clarify or elaborate on that comment. The last insert coupons Sanofi brands offered were in the June 30th SmartSource, which have long since expired.
So with its top client having moved to the competition, and its second-largest client sitting on the sidelines with no current insert coupons at all, where does that leave SmartSource?
Neptune Retail Solutions, characteristically, did not respond to requests for comment about the future of its coupon inserts, even though doing so could easily have resolved concerns that it had no future at all.
But whether it turns out that SmartSource continues on a reduced and sporadic schedule, or ends up eventually being discontinued altogether, neither would come as a big surprise to those who’ve seen the SmartSource inserts lately. Its last edition at the end of June included only six coupons. A couple of weeks before that, there were just four. And a couple of weeks before that, SmartSource offered a grand total of three coupons.
In all, SmartSource published 195 coupons in the first half of this year. As of this weekend, Save has offered 605. And its insert this weekend is one of the largest it’s offered all year.
If Save survives and SmartSource fades away, it would be fitting somehow if the first coupon insert of its kind turns out to be the last. Several owners and name changes ago, Save began life as the Valassis insert back in 1972. While coupons had been offered in Sunday newspapers before, Valassis was the first to publish regularly-scheduled, multi-brand coupon booklets that are familiar to us today.
What eventually became SmartSource didn’t come onto the scene until much later. In 1988, Valassis was the largest of three coupon insert publishers at the time, until Neptune predecessor News America Marketing vaulted into the lead by buying the second- and third-largest inserts and merging them into one, which it rebranded as SmartSource a decade later.
The two publishers have competed ever since, even as the format has declined, with the increasing popularity of digital coupons and the downturn in newspaper subscriptions. Even before selling the company that would later be rebranded as Neptune Retail Solutions, the former owner of News America Marketing had long complained about the declining demand and profitability of its newspaper insert business.
As the new owners of Neptune focused on a more digital future, with the acquisitions of companies like RevTrax and Quotient, and investments in new digital promotional formats, perhaps the only surprise is that it has continued publishing the legacy SmartSource inserts for as long as it has.
In the meantime, the Save insert itself is now under new ownership as well. Early last week, R.R. Donnelley said it had completed the acquisition of Vericast’s “digital and print marketing businesses,” a transaction that was first announced back in March. RRD has not revealed what its long-term plans might be for its newly-acquired newspaper coupon insert business.
For now, at least, with or without a SmartSource, there will be plenty of coupons to clip from your Sunday newspaper this weekend. Considering so many SmartSource editions have been so thin lately, couponers may not even miss it if it someday doesn’t ever return. As for Save, its every-other-week publication schedule is not what it once was. And its ownership change adds a new measure of uncertainty to the mix. But for those who still look forward to having paper coupons delivered to their door – one coupon insert every other week is still better than none.
