- April 8, 2026
Hi. You might recognize me from the Opinion page, where I sometimes write a column called “100 words (give or take) every day (or so).” On that page, I’m the Observer’s publisher. Here, I’m the Observer’s owner, the guy who has to monitor the bank account and make payroll, by selling marketing services.
So, here, I thought I would talk to all the fellow business owners out there.
You know what it’s like: You have a great product or service, and you want to grow, and you think, “If only everyone knew what it’s really like to do business with us — they would see that it’s worth our price.”
“But,” you might be thinking, “how do I tell my story? How do I convince people that I’m good at what I do and they should trust me?”
Here’s my suggestion: Write an advertorial, like this one.
To prove to you that I believe in advertorials, I’m writing one myself right now. I could be doing lots of other things to grow the business, but I believe this is the most effective way to spend my time.
You might be thinking, “Easy for you to say. You publish the newspaper, so you can use the space for free.” I’m not going to pretend that it costs me as much to publish this as it might for you to buy this space, but that doesn’t mean it’s free to me, either.
Using ad space in print, along with several other Observer ads, depending on the week, increases our printing costs as well as our mail delivery costs.
I’ll try to explain why I’m doing it, and why it could be a good fit for your business, too.
In marketing, expectations guide experiences. When we go to a basketball game in person, we know the game is going to take a couple of hours. We are expecting to watch the game unfold, from start to finish, with all the shoe squeaks, the fouls and free throws, the subtle adjustments in strategy. If a player misses a shot, we don’t get up and leave.
Think about that in relation to marketing. In a lot of formats, you might get just a few seconds of someone’s attention, such as on a billboard or on a Facebook post. The expectation of a social media user is that the reels will come and go so fast that you have no chance at remembering anything you just watched. It’s supposed to be entertaining, maybe a little enlightening, and certainly not make you work for it.
Advertising in the newspaper is different. When people open the pages of the Observer, they are prepared to spend 20-30 minutes reading. Their brains are in “patient” mode. They came for the stories, and they’re even going to stay for the crossword puzzle.
That’s why sponsored content is such a powerful marketing tool.
Here’s how it works: You write an article about your business, and we publish it in advertising space, just like this one. Think of the article as your salesman.
As readers turn the pages, or scroll through our website looking for news, your headline is very likely to be read. That’s what readers are looking for: interesting headlines.
Once you have succeeded with your headline, you have just secured their attention for a few minutes.
That kind of attention is not easy to get! Imagine what you might have to pay to set up an event and get even 50 people in the room to listen to you. You might have tried posting on social media only to see it get one like, and that was from your personal account.
Meanwhile, thousands upon thousands of people are turning every page in the Observer every week. You have their attention. Now, you can tell your story.
(By the way, note that it says “Sponsored content” on this web post, so that no one mistakes it for a news article. Readers maintain their trust in the newspaper that way. But it didn’t stop you from reading, right? It won’t stop your customers, either.)
Of course, not every kind of marketing is great for every kind of business. Luxury watches are usually advertised with large photos of the watches, or large photos of beautiful people wearing the watches, so that you can imagine yourself feeling just as successful and happy as they are. (We can provide that, too, by the way. You don’t get much larger than a full page in this newspaper.)
Unlike luxury watches, some businesses have products that are a bit harder to explain. For example, what sets apart one chiropractor from another? Or one estate planning lawyer from another? Or a financial planner, or a hearing aid doctor, or a commercial real estate agent? (All of those industries have been represented, or are currently writing, advertorials in the Observer, by the way.)
To win a customer, professionals in those businesses might need to spend a few minutes talking to a potential customer, to share something personal, to gain their trust, to tell a success story, to share some market research. That is a perfect goal for an advertorial, a story about 500 words or so, that can leave a future customer feeling like they now know you and your business.
Does that mean they’ll call you right away? Maybe. If not, though, they will certainly be more likely to say hello to you when they see you at the next networking event. If they see you standing at a table at a health fair, they will be more comfortable approaching you. Or if they see other advertising, or they see your business name in a Google search, they will be more likely to see you in a favorable light.
The goal of an advertorial, like any kind of advertising, therefore, is to elevate your brand in the eyes of the community. If people think, “I need an estate lawyer,” will they be able to remember your name?
If you write advertorials every week in the Observer, the answer is probably going to be yes, they will remember you.
So who’s going to write it? You can, if you’d like. But if you don’t have time, or you’re not all that into writing, we can also help you with it, for an extra charge. We are here to make marketing easy for you.
Then of course is the question everyone has been asking all along: How much does it cost? Well, the short answer is, in print, it costs the same as any other kind of ad in the Observer. In the Ormond Beach-Daytona Beach market, which reaches over 6,000 households, the cost of doing six ads that are 1/4 page in size is $300 each. Those could run six weeks in a row, or they could be spread out over six months. If you're looking for Palm Coast and The Hammock, you would reach over 10,000 households, and the 1/4 page ads cost $400 each.
Ask me about frequency discounts.
Want to buy space on our website ? We can post your advertorial to observerlocalnews.com for $400. That gets you exposure for about a week on our homepage, and it lives online forever after that, providing a link back to your site, which helps with all of your future Google searches.
In other words, once you create the content, it can continue to speak to your future customers.
Want to learn more? Email me more, at [email protected]
