The Ad Headache That Year-Round School Is Creating

As if the nation’s retailers don’t have enough problems, they are suddenly facing the prospect of seeing their second-largest sales period virtually vanish. Los Angeles’ new multitrack school-year schedule has thrown them for a loop.

The city has inadvertently become a huge test market for most retailers--effectively sending the retail world back to marketing school.

Next to the Christmas season, the biggest sales period for many retailers is the back-to-school period from late July to mid-September. But the Los Angeles Unified School District’s new schedule means that there is no longer a standard back-to-school date for all 650,000-plus students. Many will return in early July. Others will start in mid-August.

Big retailers are watching Los Angeles with keen interest.

“The notion that school is out for the summer is a thing of the past,” said Diana Munatones, assistant to Los Angeles Schools Supt. William R. Anton.

If Los Angeles is a harbinger of things to come--and most marketers say it is--year-round school is the wave of the future. The year-round schedule is in place to some degree in such cities as San Diego, Long Beach and Salt Lake City. Dozens of smaller cities have begun to test it too.

When students don’t return to school at the same time, what happens to back-to-school marketing? Some say it will have to be segmented over the entire school year. Others say it can be targeted to those families affected. And some analysts say the effect could be so profound that no amount of marketing will help.

“I wish all the retailers a lot of luck,” said Peter Simon, director of retail relations at NPD Group Inc., a Port Washington, N.Y., research firm. “I think this is really going to hurt them.”

Of course, few retailers will admit that. Officials at Sears and Mervyn’s would say only that they’re studying the situation. A J. C. Penney executive said the signs aren’t good. “Any intelligent retailer would guess that sales will be off because of the flattening of the season,” said Bill Miller, Penney’s special events manager for the Greater Los Angeles area.

“This is a brand-new dimension,” said George Hite, vice president of public affairs for Target, which has 27 stores in the Los Angeles market. “It will require real adjustments to how we handle back-to-school advertising.”

Like everyone else, Target has traditionally created a single back-to-school campaign that ran from late July to mid-September. Now it must suddenly reach families whose children will return to school in July, August, September and January.

“We’re going to learn a lot,” Hite said. “Clearly we can’t do four back-to-school campaigns nationwide, but we can do micro-marketing in Los Angeles.” That is, the company may directly advertise only to those families whose children are returning to school. It could do this through targeted newspaper advertising or through the mail.

Indeed, some experts say this could represent a grand opportunity. “Instead of wringing their hands, retailers should work out a marketing strategy to deal with it,” said Ben Enis, marketing professor at USC. He suggests that retailers target families in each area of the city as their children return to school. The families could then be mailed information about sales that are designed just for them. “If their kids are going back to school in July,” Enis said, “the trick is to make them feel special because they’re different.”

Coors Pulls Eveready Parody

Coors Brewing Co. wants to bang the Eveready Energizer Bunny’s drum. But Eveready is trying to stop Coors from running a parody of the Eveready spots. The Coors ad, which has been pulled temporarily, features funny man Leslie Nielsen performing a parody of the rabbit. An Eveready spokesman said his firm disapproves of the Coors ad, which closely resembles the spots created by its Venice-based agency, Chiat/Day/Mojo.

Cruz/Kravetz Lands Big Client

One month after opening, the Latino ad agency Cruz/Kravetz: IDEAS was awarded the combined $1-million-plus Spanish-language ad business for American Express Integrated Payment Systems and Banamex USA Bancorp, said Carl Kravetz, president of the Los Angeles agency.

American Express and Banamex operate a money transfer service between Mexico and the United States.