A few weeks ago, I posted an article that focused on the ways traditional print advertisers were investing and using new media, some would say, better than most classified and news publishers. Since that time, I have seen a plethora of releases and updates speaking specifically about the auto industry and their great adoption to reaching all generation streams, through much targeted marketing and brand awareness campaigns. In the vein of changing advertiser habits, I now share with you that Volkswagen is in talks with Apple about creating the iCar.

We have all seen the reports that show the emerging buying power of generation Y and I am sure we have all thought about how we can tap into that market for our own product awareness initiatives. In worrying about self-promotion however, we sometimes forget about our advertiser campaigns. Bad move. The lack of full market penetration attention for our classified customers, forces advertisers, as seen here with VW, to look outside of our customer reach source (newspaper and magazine sites) to fulfill their business imperatives. If you haven’t already, you need to find ways that planning these two very important items occur concurrently.

The list of activity, especially with Automotive OEM’s, does not start and end with VW and its potential iCar. Just over the past week in the news, we have heard of Google and BMW collaborating on map sharing, Toyota in Second Life, Ford hosting events for specific area bloggers to take advantage of the blogosphere hype and the list continues.

At this rate of high valued traditional print advertisers adopting new media elsewhere, would it not make sense to incorporate some new media solutions and campaigns in your classified site?

written by Beverly Crandon

IQZone, a creative mobile applications company, has officially launched its mobile classifieds site today.

The site allows you to upload a classified ad, with a photo, video or plain text for free and of course all done through your cell phone. Those without a mobile phone are still welcome to IQZone as the site provides alternative ad placement options, such as placing an ad directly online or email. Even with other ad placement options under their belt, IQZone holds their mobile application as their flagship product and it is marketed as such to be their differentiator in the classified game.

The sites classifications still need some fine tuning - searching for cars, but getting an ad for a home was somewhat frustrating. However, the site creators have been smart in finding ways to maximize exposure for their advertisers making it a not so bad option for sellers. Through placing an ad with IQZone, you not only get listed on their site, but your ad will also have placement on Oodle, Google Base and Google Search (formerly Froogle).

Classifieds are evidently only one facet of IQZone’s capabilities. Here, users can share photos, connect with friends and use the application to promote events. Sounds like other social networking sites, but this one places its mobile classified application at the start of the line.

written by Beverly Crandon

Recent research from the Online Publishers Association, shows that web users are spending more time sourcing content online, versus communication.

With search allowing browsers to access information more readily and easily, many have turned to the web for speed in information gathering.

The findings listed here illustrate some of the online market positives for newspapers and content magazines, with well designed websites. This shows that the online audience looking to source news and pointed information has grown and will continue along that trend.

Finally some statistics that can easily be monetized for news sources!

written by Beverly Crandon

In our travels to find what’s new in classifieds, we came across another video classified site, ‘Real People Real Stuff’.

The site itself, launched at the beginning of May this year and today it houses hundreds of interesting video ads. On Real People Real Stuff you can sell practically anything - ads posted on the site cover divorcees selling their wedding tuxedos, through to nifty videos advertising car pooling services. What I found most interesting about the site is the energy and effort private advertisers are putting into their video ads. Showing that not only is the site serving a utilitarian need (sell something), but people are having a lot of fun in the process.

In terms of functionality, a seller can be assured that the site supports all of the standard video hardware formats (digital camera, cell phone, camcorder and web-cam). Placing an ad is free and you are allowed 30 words, as descriptive text. As a buyer, you will find standard classified options that allow you to search by category, most recently added and by geography.

This Virginia based start up has plans to invest more of their dollars behind the marketing of the video ad site, as they understand that the classified space is a content game. Yet still, for being only three months old, the site has gone international and has not done too bad with amassing content in the US.

written by Beverly Crandon

When the buzz acronym CRM comes up in conversation, people tend to think of applications and software build, to aid commercial sales representatives manage their professional accounts. Common vendors such as salesforce.com or even mySAP CRM often come to mind. But thinking of CRM in such a one dimensional way has caused some managers to scoff at the idea of customer data management, when asked. Stating costs as a factor (“CRM is not in the budget this year”). Others say they have asked to get CRM software for the organization, but are waiting for committee approvals. What ever the hold up on formal CRM, it is my belief that you have no excuse to not mine the data your private customers provide on a daily basis. We too often forget about the valuable customer data contact centres gather, through their end call dispositions.

Finding ways to better serve our larger spending clients, always seems to take precedence over truly analyzing what our private sellers and buyers (volume) are interested in. When you dissect the silly reality, the laws of consultative advertising and selling tell you that putting your private audience last is indeed backwards. Without your private audience (volume), you would have no large commercial advertisers (revenue).

Gathering data to better understand the minds of your private reader is easy, once you have a contact centre that is capturing end call disposition information. Using the excuse that waiting for a CRM tool is the hold up, doesn’t hold water. Both organizations using automated scripting tools and or manual data capture, can perform a level of private audience CRM. Most centres make it mandatory for agents to disposition the results of every call they take and if you are not in your centre, you really should start to. I know in a manual environment, there may be concern that this may take away from productivity, but I encourage you to block times where you enforce this or segment the agent groups so there is at least some type of data coming in on a regular basis. By not collecting the data for action, you are muting the voice of your customer.

End call dispositions, if formatted right, can give you better insight into:

• Conversion numbers
• First call resolution factors
• Customer objections
• Error loads
• And a sense of customer retention levels

Gathering the data is only step one in understanding the private audience CRM. From there:

• Review the data on a regular basis - what your customers are telling you is key.
• Circulate to senior leadership and in-house marketing departments, what the top 5 customer comments are per month – you want exposure into your centres to allow others to see the types of calls that are handled. I would also encourage you to include a quick snapshot of centre performance on the ‘top 5’, so it looks like a dashboard of some sort.
• If you are in the situation where CRM does exist in your organization, explore the possibility of exporting feeds from your scripting database to your CRM application. This will automate the analytics of end call data collected from the contact centre.
• Share data with your commercial clients. This will show them that you as a newspaper or magazine care about their marketplace relationship, with your product and its readers.
  

Not to take away from the effectiveness of a well defined CRM tool, but contact centres communicate with the largest customer pool your company has and holds a lot of your company’s public value in their interactions. If there is anyway to speed up private customer data analytics in your organization, I would explore it.

written by Beverly Crandon

I remember it like it was only yesterday – the year 2002. Publishers rushing to re-fit the ‘homes’ sections of the newspaper and web site. Some were even running out and creating vertical magazines for new and re-sale homes. We were determined to catch the rush of the housing boom, no matter what.

At the point of the boom, newspaper and classified real estate ad sales increased by 18.6%. Instead of making up an average of only 21% of a publisher’s multi-vertical content, Real Estate, at that point, represented 23%. It also seemed to publishers that banks and lending companies were cooperating. The high number of subprime lenders offering ‘B’ loans, as a second chance to some, turned many renters into first time home buyers. This arena made matching Realtor to buyer, an easy sport for advertisers.

Today’s story, however, is somewhat different. Mortgage rates and the prices of new and resale homes have risen. The cost proliferation of the market has led to a slowed home buying pace and of course a lower number of new housing starts. Worse yet, those that took advantage of ‘B’ loans and low mortgage rates, are now finding it difficult to keep up, with the current interest rates.

The dismal air surrounding some subprime home owners and others feeling the pinch, has caused a rise in the number of foreclosures and an increase in resale homes on the market. But many are coming to find out that placing your home for sale, these days, seems a loose loose situation. In the first quarter of this year, 2.8% of homes for sale remained unoccupied – this is the highest level seen, since 1956. There is no doubt that home sales have slowed at an alarming rate.

Home owners looking to sell are now exploring renting their home as an option. They are hoping that they might be able to make a small profit on the home, as opposed to find themselves in a negative state of foreclosure.

Rentals and Classifieds Today

In past, vacancy rates have been used to tell the tale of the rental market and its viability, as a profitable sector for publishers. In Canada, vacancy rates increased by 0.2% and if you look at the detail by province, you will see that western Canada’s vacancy rates pale in comparison to Eastern Canada. Eastern Canada averages somewhere within the 3.8%, with Windsor leading the pack at 11%+. In the United States, vacancy rates are at 10.1%, an all time high. With such a healthy number of rental units available, the classified listing potential has now also increased.

Many publishers have spent very little time working on their rental entities, both online and in print. Stating that it is smaller yielding in revenue, due to the high number of private classified listings. It has also been described as a volatile market, leading to over competitive requests from advertisers. Our docile approach to the rental market, however, has allowed a slew of rental e-classified sites to appear and they have been able to capture a considerable audience.

Getting back in the rental game will be difficult for newspapers and magazines, but numbers show that the attempt to dabble in rentals again, is a necessary one. The market possibilities for classified bottom lines are prime. Moreover, given Q2 and Q3 newspaper performance results, other avenues of revenue generation are necessary.

If you are looking at getting back into the rental classified game, a quick review of what is already out there is necessary. These online only sites have had a lot of time to test interfaces, navigation strategies and peripheral rental services on their site. Just recently, I reviewed 17 sites and in my opinion, Yahoo’s Real Estate/Apartments for Rent shows the best.

The criteria I used to determine site status was based on a few things:

Site Aesthetics – clean appearance on home page with minimal commercial advertising. All commercial ads were formatted to match the pages scheme.

Navigation – it was very easy to navigate through the site and find all of the sections pertinent to me. Yahoo also provided information that went above and beyond my expectation.

Information – as a renter, there are things I want to know about the area I am looking to move to. Most sites did a poor job of that and forced me to go elsewhere to finish my research. Yahoo on the other hand, provided nearby school information, as well as neighborhood guides. Maps also allowed you to select restaurants and other neat attractions in the neighborhood.

It is important to note that much of Yahoo’s Rental Listings come from Apartments.com, but advertisers are able to place ads directly onto the Yahoo site. The other interesting note was that a quick review of the Apartments .com site did not leave me as impressed. Information was served in ways that were not compelling or engaging.

written by Beverly Crandon

So much has been said about MySpace and Facebook that much of the spotlight has been taken away from some of the other social media gentle giants. Bebo, now seems to be all the craze in Europe. Data shows that it is the most visited social networking site, in all of the UK .

For those of you interested in social network partnerships, ensure your compete clauses leave room for regional differentiation. Different strokes…..

written by Beverly Crandon

Nissan is said to be heavily promoting their Sentra and Altima cars, via Xbox. The approach was derived, with the late Generation X male as the target.

Both the Sentra and Altima featured models will have a dominate presence in the game ‘Forza Motorsport 2’ and its marketing. Nissan and Xbox will also be hosting a series of events through to the fall, further spreading the hype on both the game and the featured vehicles.

So far, results for the game show that:

• More than a million copies of the game have been sold
• The average user is spending 100 hours on the game
• The primary demographic of game owners are male, in their mid-20’s and have an average house hold income of $58,000

This type of creative brand advertising shows that large, traditional, newspaper advertisers are, either themselves or through a hired agency, thinking out of the box when it comes to spending their dollars.

A sure fire way to get your publishing media source to stay top of mind, with dealer principals and or at the OEM level, is to tailor your advertising spots and packages, to better fit their needs. Don’t run to the banner, skyscraper solution as your ‘drive thru’ approach. Advertisers with a greater vested brand and product are willing to pay for ideas that are different and challenge the norm, while still showing benefit on how to reach the desired consumer.

If I can leave you with more food for thought, I will leave you with this excerpt from a Kubas report entitled ‘How the Big Money Sees Newspaper Advertising’. This graph tells a very compelling, yet encouraging story. It shows that our form of media (print, magazines and their affinity sites) is in need of a consultative selling shake-up (challenge the norm) and we need it fast, while advertisers are still spending with us.

Challenge your sales teams: have them segment their automotive client lists by historical propensity to buy. Tailor a multi-media advertising package that suits their needs. Do not be afraid to introduce micro-campaigns that target the different models on their lot. Because you are suggesting a group of campaigns for a single client, you will have greater price flexibility and have no issue in attaining the incremental revenue, through your new collective, multi-media advertising solution.

written by Beverly Crandon

I would like to take a minute today on my blog, to comment on a report that I have seen being heavily circulated to publishers, and print media senior managers. The report is called ‘The 2007 NNN Integrated Newspaper Footprint Study’ and it was commissioned by the Newspaper National Network (NNN). The NNN is an organization, owned by newspapers and newspaper associations. Their core mandate is to help advertisers find the right newspaper buy, for their advertising media mix. In essence then, they do great things for print media, primarily because they are print media, by ensuring advertisers understand the benefits. But, having said that, I do believe the report they released, showed their industry segment bias, in obvious ways.

The report relishes in the fact that 81% of newspaper website users, still read the print version of the newspaper. Don’t get me wrong. I see how this can be an adorning fact for print media. It encourages those who have not spent the time and effort on their websites to do so, because the risk seems minimum. It puts to rest, any internal questions about self-erosion, and so on. Where the report failed its audience, in my opinion, was in not taking a look at the total picture.

Clear, good I get it – 81% still read the print version of the newspaper, but how do we address the flat earnings, the decline in overall readers, the increase in online news source competitors and new sources for commercial advertisers that actually work. My fear is, the report puts print media in a sense of comfort that it has no business being in.

Trends show that less people are subscribing to newspapers daily and are reverting to purchasing it only once weekly, if at all. These now, sporadic purchases are included in readership stats, which sometimes skew results and perhaps this was the fact here with the NNN report. Nonetheless, the more infrequent print media purchases and overall lessened readership have, as we all know, led to the erosion of newspaper revenues. Even though some say print losses are being quieted, with online readership, it is important to note that publishers struggle to monetize online advertising to make up for their print losses. So, what does the erosion in ‘print-everything’ mean: its time to re-think business imperatives? Below are a few of many ideas:

Covering the Cost of Traditional Journalist

Contract community freelance journalists to write compelling pieces for the newspaper. With all of the blogs and micro news sites created by independents, the choices are abundant, making it easy pickings for a print publisher to do so. Employing a community freelance writer or blogger on contract, can be done at a fraction of the cost demanded by a full time, on staff journalist. If this suggestion scares you because of quality, relax. Have you taken a look at news stories online, on newspaper sites? Their quality has eroded, not to a detrimental level, but the race is on to get cutting edge news released to the public. This leaves less time for copy editing.

Creative Commercial Advertising Online

Let’s face it, the biggest monetary gain for newspapers online will have to come from their commercial advertisers – and I think we all get that. Where I think newspapers often drop the ball, is with the positioning of advertisements online. Reports show that less and less people click on banners and that many readers find pop ups or oddly placed tile ads intrusive. Newspapers need to take notice that social networking sites, such as Facebook (100,000 new users per day), have opened up their online real estate to commercial advertisers (and classified listings). To compete, Newspapers will need to find clever ways of integrating their client ads into their content searches, to increase click throughs.

Community Supplements (Geographically and Group segmented)

I say it all the time – although results seem grim for major daily newspapers, the smaller community papers are doing well. Local or community publications are expected to grow over the next two years by over 4%. Adding more supplemented, newsprint, community publications to a newspapers suite of products, would be a great longevity asset.

Reports such as the NNN’s could be both beneficial and detrimental to its audience. Complete understanding of the market overview is required by a reports reader, to ensure decisions are not made in silo, but are made given the state of the complete market.

The street consistently posts declines in earnings for the newspaper industry and I expect this will continue to some extent. But declines can be managed through increased site traffic leading to better monetized commercial advertising. Declines can also be quieted if newspapers can gain market share from those who do not frequent their sites today.

Publishers and senior leadership need to be concerned about stats pertaining to, growth of online only publishers, regional market share, social media growth and applications, and total market adoption of online news and classified sources. Keeping the above imperatives in mind, will allow publishers to keep an active pulse on their business and the markets they play in.

written by Beverly Crandon