ECRM: Retail circular advertising trends, February 2014

ECRM compared retail circular advertising in February 2013 versus February 2014 and noted trends occurring across top retail chains. The home improvement retailers have continued to reverse trends from 2013. Home Depot doubled its page count and slightly decreased ads per page, leading to longer, slightly less dense circulars. Despite this, Home Depot still ran less than a quarter of the number of pages that Lowe’s ran, largely due to Lowe’s running three circulars to Home Depot’s one.



Within the grocery channel, both Kroger and Safeway saw a moderate increase in ads per page. Safeway decreased its page count year-over-year, although it still leads Kroger, which continued to increase its page counts. The number of pages per circular was similar for the two retailers as well, with Kroger circulars being six to eight pages long, while Safeway’s were four to seven pages long. Kroger released only four circulars for the month however, compared to Safeway’s seven.



Outside of these channels, the largest change came at Toys “R” Us, which saw a large year-over-year increase in page count, largely due to a mid-month “Deals of the Week” circular, which was not run last year.

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ECRM’s Ad Comparisons technology captures promotional data from the top U.S. and Canadian retailers in all major markets. Ad Comparisons captures more than 40 metrics for each ad block and provides hundreds of analytic reports to put the advertising data in context. Ad Comparisons takes an individual approach to ensure all data and reports fit the needs of each user.