Hearst-Argyle to Resell Google AdWords for Local Advertisers

Hearst-Argyle announced earlier this week that they will resell Google AdWords across their 26 local TV station sites to local advertisers. Here is Hearst-Argyle’s press release:

(Full disclosure: Hearst-Argyle is a customer and equity investor in Internet Broadcasting)

Hearst-Argyle First Television Reseller of Google AdWords

NEW YORK, Nov. 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — In an effort to target the growing local search advertising market, Hearst-Argyle Television, Inc. (NYSE: HTV) today announced a new strategic agreement with Google in which Hearst-Argyle will become the first television industry reseller of the Google AdWords(TM) advertising program.

Under the agreement, Hearst-Argyle, operator of 29 TV stations and more than 30 Websites, will become an official reseller and will use its Web sales force to provide marketers in its 26 local markets access to Google AdWords. AdWords is an online advertising platform designed to help small and medium- sized businesses use the Web to find new customers by delivering relevant ads when users search for specific products and services.

“This is a terrific partnership to expand the digital suite of solutions we provide our advertisers,” said Terry Mackin, Executive Vice President of Hearst-Argyle Television. “This entry point to the local search market complements our existing digital media efforts which include local content, social networking, and being a primary destination in all our markets on ‘all three screens’.”

“Our new collaboration will build on the trusted relationships that Hearst-Argyle has already established by selling local television and Web advertising,” said Eric Stein, director of local markets at Google. “Now, local marketers will also have access to an additionally efficient and cost- effective way to reach customers on the Internet and help drive their continued success online.”

Boston, MA-based research firm Yankee Group recently projected that local search and Internet ad spending will grow from $1.9 billion this year to $9.3 billion in 2010. According to research by New York-based Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc., more than 50% of U.S. small businesses believe they can use the Internet for sales, marketing and customer support.

Today’s announcement represents an expansion of Hearst-Argyle’s relationship with Google. In June 2007, Hearst-Argyle became the first independent TV station group owner to establish a content- and revenue-sharing arrangement with YouTube(TM). To date, Hearst-Argyle has launched 26 YouTube Channels populated with news, weather, sports and entertainment videos as well as with original, local television programming and content from its recently launched social-networking site High School Playbook (www.HighSchoolPlaybook.com).

Hearst-Argyle’s digital multimedia efforts encompass the Web and the digital broadcast spectrum. A majority of the Websites operated by Hearst- Argyle stations are consistently ranked No. 1 within their respective markets. Generating in excess of 1.5 billion page views each year across the network, the sites are at the leading edge in providing wireless application protocol (WAP) content, podcasts, web-based newscasts, web video, and blogs in a broad cross-section of markets. Several Hearst-Argyle stations have used digital spectrum to launch weather and/or traffic information channels.

AdWords is a cost effective, efficient way for businesses of all sizes to advertise their products and services at exactly the time their customers are looking for them. Businesses can select and bid on keywords related to what they are selling and pay only when an interested user clicks on their ad. Advanced targeting options, customizable ads, and detailed reporting enable advertisers to evaluate the benefits and performance of their cost-per-click advertising efforts. More information is available at www.adwords.google.com.

A Very Simple Question…

Do you consider yourself knowledgeable about the online community in your area?

Then answer this question.

Name three prominent local blogs and/or bloggers.

If you can’t do that, then you aren’t nearly knowledgable enough about your local online scene. If you don’t want to use these blogs as any part of your news coverage, that’s your call. Don’t want to ever link to local blogs from your site? I think that’s a bad call, but it’s your choice.

But if you don’t have a clear sense of who is blogging locally and why, then you have no baseline for deciding what your news organization should be doing online.

Have You Hugged A Banner Ad Today?

Many local advertisers are mesmerized by the glamor of search advertising – and for good reason. Search offers a direct response vehicle that matches clicks to results, it’s essentially self-service – any business can get an ad on Google or Yahoo within minutes, and it’s hyper-targeted meaning advertisers can reach consumers at the right place at the right time. Of the $20+ billion expected to be spent on online advertising in 2007, approximately 40% of that will go to paid search, according to eMarketer.

But as paid search becomes more time consuming with advertisers having to managing hundreds, if not thousands of keywords, and costs increasing with its popularity, some local advertisers are looking elsewhere for new customers online, as The Kelsey Group found. When looking to best allocate their budgets, local advertisers must not forget their old friend — the display ad.

Still a force online with approximately 30% of all online ad dollars (eMarketer), display ads can have a huge impact on campaigns, as Robin Neifield points out in her ClickZ article. Display ads differ from search ads in their ability to catch consumers’ attention, reinforce a brand, create memorable messages, and raise top-of-mind awareness through compelling graphics and rich media.

Because of the Web’s inherent ability to track, direct response marketing and measurement have proliferated in online advertising. But as Neifield says:

“Online remains largely a direct marketing realm that rewards the last point of consumer contact prior to a sale or conversion. This last touch point has the perception of ultimate value when, in fact, many contributing factors should share credit. An exceptional marketer understands these fine points.”

The smart local advertiser and media buyer will understand how display ads fit in with their online mix. While search can provide instant gratification, the smart plan is to use search together with display ads to build brands, create awareness, and ultimately drive new customers.

Don’t Think Branding, Think ‘Being Part Of The Social Fabric’

Whether you’re a television station, newspaper or radio station, you are probably obsessed with “branding.” Which makes sense, if you’re dealing with traditional media.

If your TV station is branded “News 13,” well, then you want everything you’re associated with to be branded the same way. You want your website to be News13.com and you are going to focus all of your station resources towards that co-branded site.

But that “branding is everything” philosophy doesn’t necessarily translate to the Web. Online users are less impressed with a brand, and more likely to be drawn to sites that are useful to them, no matter who they are affiliated with. It’s all about the connection to users, and to the social fabric of the web.

That point is illustrated by this Washington Post piece on AOL’s current trend of launching websites which often have no direct connection to AOL.com itself.

AOL executives say their new products attempt to capitalize on an Internet that is rapidly becoming a mix of feeds, blogs, widgets, profile pages, user-created content and other elements that are collectively regarded as Web 2.0.

“It’s really about getting a piece of the usage,” said [Kevin] Conroy, who is leading the new strategy from his office in Dulles. “You don’t just steal someone from that environment and say, ‘Come here.’ You want to be part of the social fabric.”

To a traditional local news executive, not branding something seems insane and counterintuitive to your core business. But there are a number of advantages to the idea, not the least of which is creating an extended local ad network, similar to the one AOL is creating nationally.

Beyond that mainstay, much of the new strategy involves services and products that don’t prominently feature the AOL brand. A joint venture with Telepictures Productions, TMZ is the top gossip site on the Web, according to ComScore, with more than 10 million unique visitors in October. Yesterday’s headlines included “Ballroom Battle of the Sexes” and “Britney, Please, Leave Chris Crocker Alone!” The only clue to its parent is a small “AOL News” logo at the top of the page and a few tiny links to AOL sites. Another popular site is Black Voices, the top destination for African American content, which has almost no mention of AOL. AOL has bought Userplane, a Los Angeles start-up that focuses on providing chat software to other sites, and it has a plug-in for Facebook that lets friends know when a user is online. Redskins fans can get free e-mails with the address @Ultimateredskinsfan.com through AOL. There are similar opportunities for local news organizations. If you’re in a state capitol, then launching a state politics site with integrated discussions is a natural. If you’re in a big, sprawling city, launching a site that focuses on the suburbs is a good fit.  A radio station group would be a good match for a site highlighting the local music scene, etc. There are lots of possibilities, and by not branding them with your core news organization brand, you have the chance to have a product that is lively and engaged without worrying about interfering with the mission of your newsroom.Engaging in your community’s social fabric is more than just sponsoring a Health Fair or running a Toys For Tots campaign. It’s also about connecting with people indirectly and  seeing the conversation not as a branding opportunity, but a chance to build a relationship.

User-generated only gets you so far

Who knew? Good local news coverage that people want to read depends on good journalism.

 

Steve Outing, proponent of citizen journalism and columnist for Editor and Publisher, shares an excellent cautionary tale about his experience relying on user-generated content to create a business.

 

The idea seemed solid: Create a site centered on an expert contributor (say, a climbing enthusiast who knows what she’s talking about and can write informatively) but count on energetic climbers out there to jump in and provide lots of great content. Read Steve’s post because I’m glossing over details, but fundamentally, the user-generated stuff as a whole just wasn’t good enough or consistent enough to attract a big enough audience to make a business. Too much crap, not enough real information that readers found worthwhile.

 

It will be a while before the primordial ooze of user-generated content evolves into a living, breathing reliable news provider without a strong framework of  people who are paid to find stuff out and tell the world about it.

 

The number of people systematically gathering news in an organized fashion matters. Having thousands of user/gatherers out there sending comments, photos, videos, documents and more is a tremendous opportunity. But that mass needs help. As the economic model crumbles for old-fashioned newspapers and TV stations, the old-fashioned gatherers, writers, choosers and filterers continue to have value.

Online News Consumers Are Not Depletable Resources

An article on LostRemote got me thinking. Are traditional news sites not learning from the successes of other online businesses?

iMedia Connection had an extremely interesting article about Brian Shuster a few months back. Shuster is known as the Prince of Pop-ups and he made his start on the Internet in the adult industry. The lesson that Shuster learned can be summarized in this one quote.

“The Internet works in a very counterintuitive way,” Shuster explains. “Adult webmasters like myself figured out pretty early on that they could often make more money advertising their competitors than they could selling their own product.”

Shuster believes that you can make more money steering traffic away from your site than you can by trying to keep consumers on your page. Shuster believes the Internet is a medium that rewards depth. It allows consumers to follow narrow and niche passions in-depth, and Shuster believes mainstream websites treat Internet users like a depletable resource. It does appear that some mainstream sites are learning from news aggregators like Digg.com, but the adoption is certainly not a whole hearted effort that rewards the consumer 100%.

Shuster believes that sites can only create so much original content. No news site can possibly contain enough original information to satisfy a user interested in a breaking news story or a topical news article. This is where Shuster believes sending these consumers elsewhere can actually be more profitable for a site.

The internet is not like a paid newspaper or time-slotted TV show. I can read every local news website and find every angle possible on a story or subject that peaks my interest. So in the case of filling my niche or narrow passion online, I am definitely not a depletable resource. As a consumer of news, my biggest pet peeve is when both local newspapers in Minneapolis take the same exact angle or cover the exact same Gopher sports story on the same day. Since it is easy for me to read both papers online with no added cost but time, I want as much original content on the my local sports team as possible. Right now, the best way for me to follow The Gophers is an online forum. The community members post what stories they find and everyone discusses them. That is the type of passion and depth online news sites have to tap into and provide to come out on top.

How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook

In some ways, Facebook is the ultimate enabler of “local” connections. The site allows you to connect (or reconnect) with all sorts of communities, and as this column in Information Week notes, the problem with that is you’re often connected with people you would just as soon forget.

By the time you’ve reached your forties, chances are you’re out-of-touch with more friends than you’re in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans… Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some.

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.

This problem is something to consider as you work on ways for local users to connect with each other. People don’t always want to be found, or contacted or sold to by advertisers.

As a local news operation, one of the biggest advantages you have is trust and comfort. Keeping that bond with your users doesn’t limit your sales opportunities, but it does offer up some special challenges. The advantage for you is that you’re building a relationship with your local users that will last longer than their current infatuation with whatever hot social network is currently grabbing headlines.

So What Does ‘Local’ Really Mean?

This may sound like a question with a very obvious answer. But what does “local” really mean online?

The temptation is to see local as simply geography. If I’m a news organization, then focusing on “local” usually just means aggregating local news and information and offering it unfiltered to my web site’s visitors.

The problem with that approach is that when you talk to your readers, they tend to see local as more of a mental location than a dot on the map. Yes, they do care about what’s happening in their town. But local is so much more for them.

To consumers , “local” means the things that are important to their lives. It might be local weather, the sports scores and traffic conditions. But they also may belong to a international soccer fan club and manage their daughter’s baseball team.  All of those things have equal importance in their eyes, and the challenge for news organizations is to aggregate and present all those mental “neighborhoods” in a way that works both for the users and for your advertisers.

One of the reasons that sites such as MySpace and Facebook have succeeded so spectacularly is that they enable their users to connect with their “local” interests. Sometimes its geographical (this is who I work with), and sometimes the proximity is less important (this is who I went to school with).

One of the things I want to explore in future posts is that real meaning on “local,” and how we can help redefine what that means for local media outlets.

Cyber Monday

Techcrunch posted an article about the high hopes for a large Cyber Monday. Experts are expecting $700 million in online sales today.

According to wikipedia, the origins of Cyber Monday date back to 2005. The term was first coined by Shop.org when research showed that 77% of online retailers reported a significant increase in sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2004. I personally have not heard of Cyber Monday until this month, but evidently the day is very popular for online shopping.

Cyber Monday represents the first chance for consumers to shop at work after the Thanksgiving holiday, and it presents a huge opportunity for retailers to use advertising to drive local media consumers to their online store fronts. Seventy two million Americans are expected to being shopping (purchasing or browsing) today. If that number is accurate, it would mean nearly 1 in 4 Americans will be online looking for Holiday presents on Cyber Monday.

Facebook Presents an Opportunity for Local News

Facebook and ABC News have teamed to power a politics section on Facebook. This marks the first formal partnership between the burgeoning social network and a news organization. Like other companies, local media needs to find ways to tap into social media sites to extend their brands and reach out to new potential users. Now that Facebook has dipped its toe into the news business, local media sites should take a harder look at how they can participate.

One opportunity is for local news brands to create their own Facebook page. Much like “people pages,” a local news brand can create a page for themselves and add applications, send out messages, gather “fans,” get comments, post questions and more. Additionally, these pages allow news sites to post links/feeds with the latest news headlines and promotions — all linking back to their Web site — while providing community members with relevant local content.

(Via Lost Remote )