NEWSPAPERS CHANGE THEIR WAY OF WOOING LOCAL ADVERTISERS TO STAVE OFF WEB COMPANY ENCROACHMENT
December 18th 2007 09:15
Web companies now beginning to dominate the US market for local ads online, and newspaper publishers are scrambling to change the way they sell ads, hiring sales teams that specialise in the digital market and creating new editorial packages to sell to compete with web companies.
The Wall Street Journal reports that companies like McClatchy, which publishes 31 daily newspapers in the US, is revamping its commission and incentive plans to better reward staff for online sales.
Gannet operates 50 mom-centric social-networking sites around the US as part of a broader strategy to boost online revenue through hyper-localised, and other publishers are talking steps to improve the way they sell online ads.
In Australia, some of the major metro newspapers, such as the Melbourne Age have already adjusted their ad sales force to go after local retail, pointing out that the changing nature of revenue accretion is not just down to the simplistic notion of exclusively online bleed, but also a change in the nature of the marketplace itself with metro communities turning inward and becoming more local, or indeed even hyper local.
The Melbourne Age advertising director, David Hoath, who joined the paper from the UK in July 2005, embarked on a forward-to-the-past strategy, of pulling his advertising department personnel out of the plush boardrooms of national advertising agencies and having them return to the old-fashioned notion of pounding the pavement in search of new business, and wooing the bottom end of town instead of exclusively pursuing the top end.
- From MediaBlab
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