Do You Really Believe That Printed Annual Reports Are Dead Or Dying? Analyze This:

In a move that was mighty hard for followers of the current credit market mess to miss - but one that warrants additional notice, we think - Regions Financial Corp. took four full pages of the March 18th Wall Street Journal - the first page in impossible-to-ignore chartreuse, which added even more big money to the big media ‘buy’ - to reprint the first four pages of its Annual Report.

Frankly we think the Chairman and his penmen could have done a much better job of highlighting Regions’ performance and future prospects than they did: The payoff punch, for example, “I believe the markets are missing an opportunity”, was embedded midway through, as was the highly reassuring news of their 37th annual dividend increase.

And normally, we’d also cavil at the cost of reprinting about 2000 names of the “Regions’ 33,000 Associates” who, the FIRST QUARTER, 2008 The Shareholder Service Optimizer PAGE 3 chairman said “Join Me In This Message” on almost a page and a half of the WSJ’s expensive real estate (as we guess we are doing).

But the fact is, that if the letter prevented the stock from dropping a buck or two, or better yet, made the stock go up even a dime a share, which clearly was the intent behind the big spend, the four pages paid for themselves many times over…like in the multi-millions of dollars.

So if you are one of those corporate people who say “printed Annual Reports are a big waste of time and money”, we say, “Do the math…including the potential impact on your stock price of only putting out “find it yourself information” in difficult times – which basically equates to no information - and analyze that.”