Mapping out the crossover point for digital vs. print
24 January 2012 · By Adam Burnham
Happy New Year to all, and I hope you have as high aspirations for 2012 as I do — both personally and professionally.
I want to start by letting everyone know my wife and I are expecting baby No. 4. Lillian Sue Burnham should be here on or before February 14, but if you ask my wife, any day now is good with her. We are very excited to welcome the last addition to our family. That is my advertising innovation at the home front.
Now for an entertainment update: Two movies I watched for the second time over the holidays, which I thoroughly enjoyed and have important messages that correlate to our changing industry: “Moneyball” and “The Social Network.” Both are great examples of challenging contemporary philosophy to create new dynamics and new business models; buck legacy thoughts and expense; invest in your future; create products the audience wants in ways never seen; and rethink your plans regularly. All key takeaways. If you have not seen them both, you should.
OK, on to business and the topic I want everyone to plan for: The Crossover Point.
My friend and colleague, Kirk MacDonald, blogged last month about the need for all our peer companies to set their digital growth goals at 50% for 2012, and honestly, this has to be the minimum expectation.
I took this a step further recently while in California meeting with our sales teams at our Los Angeles properties. During those meetings, I posed this question to them:
What do you need to do to double digital revenue in 2012?
...[more]Forget (almost) about Google
10 January 2012 · By Harold Grönke
Common sense dictates that newspaper circulation that costs more to deliver than it pays in return is useless.
But most newspapers abandoned their common sense when it came to creating their online versions and courting Internet readers. Like frightened birds pecking for crumbs, we were just grateful to see our online community growing in any direction.
Because most of us had a background in print media, we weren’t sure how to generate those online relationships. So we became totally dependent on search engine optimization (SEO) and long tail and other such tools to handle it.
But have we done the right thing to over-emphasise the importance of these tools?
I think we haven’t.
A couple of weeks ago, I got the first market research results for newspaper cross-media reach in Germany. They blew me away because they were very different from all polling we had done ourselves about our online users. According to our new analytics research, fewer than 15% of our newspaper readers used our Web site on a regular basis, (compared to the 50% shown from our polling).
Furthermore, the analytics showed most of our users came from outside our market.
I couldn’t believe this.
So we took a closer look at those Google and Yahoo! analytic tools and discovered one remarkable result: Those tools told us that we had more users in a city within our market than in the whole market.
...[more]Benchmark for 2012 should be 50% increase in digital revenue
03 January 2012 · By Kirk MacDonald
Here is the one professional New Year’s resolution you need to make in order to make it a great year:
Grow digital revenue 50% year over year.
Before you click the close button, think about what this looks like:
First and foremost, digital growth of 50% or more is attitude — a belief that it can be accomplished and the will to pursue a big goal with energy and confidence. It is serious “culture change,” on which Earl Wilkinson spends the first three chapters of his recently released, must-read Newsmedia Outlook 2012.
Single-digit digital growth is a non-starter. Double-digit growth in the range of 20% won’t get you there. But 30% digital growth rates put you in the game. And 50% growth rates start to cover up print revenue losses and create a bright future for newspapers in their local markets.
Every time I have this discussion, people say, “Don’t forget about print.” Don’t. I have written and spoken at length about the effectiveness of the total-audience, integrated sales model that combines digital with print.
...[more]Local is our future: treat it well and let it lead the way
06 December 2011 · By Adam Burnham
When evaluating our revenue trends at Digital First Media, we look at more than 60 revenue categories in digital. These range from simple banner ads to more complex re-targeting products — all tracked down to the individual sales person level with performance analysis versus goals.
We spend a considerable amount of time at this level of detail so we can monitor what is working and what is not. Where do we need to put more focus, and in the same vane, where do we need to back off? This follows our “try fast, fail fast” mentality.
However, the real focus here is on predicting where the future digital revenue will come from. Aside from obvious product lines like mobile, video, and email, we know our future is in local digital sales. And all our digital pure play competitors know this as well. Google and Facebook are already looking at building local sales teams, but can they really compete with us?
While the brands are cool and exciting, we already have a large, local sales infrastructure in place and building a new one is very expensive.
Let’s take a look at Patch for a second. This latest attempt by AOL to build a local platform is not working. Content is adequate at best, and sales are very low. Even with the power of AOL and Huffington Post traffic, they are challenged. Why? How can one editor and one sales person compete in a market where we have five to 10 times those resources? Answer? They can’t!
In the meantime, we offer the best local relationships with businesses, strong brands, strong digital products, and, in most cases, the largest local audience. Through partnerships, we can expand that audience to reach virtually everyone in the market. Some use Yahoo, MSN, or third-party exchanges, but all offer the same audience extension model.
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Viewing digital as a start-up business brings success
14 November 2011 · By Adam Burnham
Let’s be honest, shall we? Newspaper companies have dabbled in digital on different scales for the past 10 years. While we dabbled we have seen print revenues decline at a pace nobody expected. Some will tell you print will recover and will continue to be the backbone of their revenue model. That may be the case, but I am not willing to bet the future on it.
Today, we are all rushing to commit to a digital strategy in one form or another. Some through allocation models still tied to print sales, while others focus on building new digital revenue on new digital platforms. But have you truly committed?
At Journal Register Company, we view our digital first strategy as a start-up business. This means we expect to see a heavy investment with aggressive revenue growth.
As we approached the end of 2010, eight months into our digital first sales model, we had a series of annual budget meetings for our 2011 plan. During those meetings I listened to all of our sales leaders present a plan to me that collectively rolled up to digital increases of 42% year-over-year. On the surface, that sounded aggressive, but nowhere in line with a start-up mentality.
...[more]So what does Digital First really mean?
18 October 2011 · By Adam Burnham
I get this question all of the time. So Journal Register Company is dumping its print way of life and only focusing on digital? Hardly, but in some respects, yes.
Change is something that too many in our industry fear. We have spent the last 10 years watching our classified business erode into virtually nothing. Monster.com, autotrader.com and realtor.com have taken what was the bread and butter of newspapers and moved the medium of choice to the Web…and we let it happen. We can no longer afford to look the other way. We can’t simply wait for an economic rebound and assume all of those print dollars will come streaming back in. Mark my words, it will not happen. It is time to invest in a new model, the digital first model.
Since launching our Digital First strategy in May of 2010, Journal Register Company has been producing year-over-year results in digital revenue that are 7 times the industry average. This is something we are very proud of and also something we are very transparent about. No smoke and mirrors here. This is a dedicated approach to selling true digital products and solutions to our customers, with the large majority of this revenue coming from local selling efforts.
If I told you two years ago that you could replace every dollar of print loss with digital gains and build a plan in which digital could sustain your organisation for years to come…hell, if I told you that today, what would your response be? Probably something like, sign me up!
That is exactly what JRC is doing.
...[more]Creativity transforms advertising executives into true media marketing consultants
02 August 2011 · By Tyler Mack
Special sections and banner ads alone are not going to see news advertising organisations grow beyond where many of them currently stand.
For us to make true progress and not only see larger revenue gains but also become a vital cog in our local marketing wheels, we’re going to have to prove how invaluable we can be to local business. This takes creativity and strategic positioning, and in some cases a retraining of the sales organisation. We’ve got to go beyond the servicing of accounts through standard print and online ad options to become real media marketing consultants.
At the Las Vegas Review-Journal, we’re approaching our advertisers with this expanded consultant mentality on the digital side. We’re presenting them with programmes that include traditional print and fairly standard online ad placements, but also consulting with them on their mobile and social strategies as well as their Web site purpose and goals. We’re assessing our clients’ needs on analysis calls, returning to the office to share them with a fulfillment team, determining difficulty and internal costs of the tasks requested, then pricing and proposing back to the client.
...[more]Digital sales strategies thrive on confidence, not caution
07 June 2011 · By Tyler Mack
The digital experimentation permeating newspaper operations is both reassuring and scary. The one constant we keep hearing from vendors and other newspaper groups is that no one is doing everything right, and everyone continues to experiment and try to find the next big revenue driver.
The key thing to remember here — and to constantly remind sales reps who are treading into these new digital waters with caution — is that the only way to get to the next level is to jump in with both feet.
Many of our sales reps want to wait until these new models and programmes show undeniable proof of success before they have full faith and pitch the new programmes with vigor. That cautious approach to embracing new ventures is what has contributed to the newspaper industry lagging so far behind the myriad of Web service businesses that are ever-expanding into our local marketplaces.
Here at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, of course, we’re launching new products and services all the time in the digital realm. While we’ve had some growing pains with respect to the processes of fulfillment for some of these services (e.g. search, Web site design, mobile) we’ve been pushing our reps to not bog themselves down with concern over all the ins and outs of how the end product will be finished, but rather to have faith in our support staff and vendors.
...[more]In the age of “co-opetition,” competitors sometimes become partners
26 May 2011 · By Paul Farrell
We recently ran a workshop with one of our advertisers to get a clear understanding of their commercial objectives for the year ahead.
This is something we do regularly with all of our main advertisers and prospects to ensure we are best placed to deliver solutions based on a clear understanding of their needs. It has allowed us to get further upstream than we have ever been before and develop a close relationship with both the advertiser and the agency.
At this meeting the client outlined a challenge they had in terms of generating sign-ups to a specific service they had launched. Armed with the brief, and a clear understanding of the challenge, we set about looking at how best we might address the problem.
It became clear to us that in order to present a credible solution for the client we would have to look at filling in some gaps within our own media arsenal. In a world where we are preaching integration and solutions, it has become increasingly important to look beyond our core assets and think of our role as adding value. Irishtimes.com is the largest news site in the Irish market, and The Irish Times has a high value urban readership unrivalled in the market. However, to address this brief we needed to deliver more.
...[more]Creative advertisements with premium placement outperform all others
12 May 2011 · By Kirk MacDonald
Past blogs in this space have focused on the technical aspects of the integrated sales model.
This one is dedicated to the C in the ABCD sales model (Audience, Bundle, Creative and Deal) — reinforcing the importance of creative concepts and execution in generating sustainable revenue growth and leveraging our combined print and digital audience.
Think about it: Not so long ago, newspapers were limited to selling print ads in similar ad sizes. An advertiser could buy black and white ads, spot colour ads or process colour ads. Desirable ad positions (such as front page ads, island ads or waterfall ads) were limited.
Today, newspapers allow a broad range of creative ad positions, and in many cases inventory is limited by demand. And on digital platforms, creative execution is virtually unlimited.
Think about this as well:
In the mid- to late-1990s newspapers were launching first-generation Web sites that were governed by IAB standard ad sizes. There were three, and in many cases those ad sizes still comprise the majority of digital ads.
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