inluminent

San Diego is a beautiful town to fly into. Wow! And it’s gorgeous to walk through the touristy area close to the harbor too!

I spent the first day at NAA’s Connections today. It was fun… but it was also a long day (nothing like boarding a plane early in the morning, then losing two hours of the day before sitting in conference rooms for presentations).

I attended the Smarter Selling presentation first. The first thing announced was that they’re blogging the conference… and the cool thing is that pretty much all the notes from the presentation are online already. What you won’t read in those notes is that Rusty Coats presented some great stuff very well, that Bruce Kyse is doing some cool stuff in small markets, and that you could definitely tell that Joseph Jaffe isn’t a newspaper guy. Sandhi Kozsuch from WorldNow presented some interesting stuff about what’s happening in the TV-website space too… Overall it was a good session, but honestly, the information presented wasn’t all that actionable… The panel just didn’t have enough time to present and answer questions. In fact, I don’t think there were any questions at the end of the presentation… I wonder why that is?

One thing I found in that presentation that was useful was a link to AdConnections.org. Haven’t heard of that before, and I’m checking it out now… Good collection of Case Studies, and advertising contacts, but egads, the website sort of sucks now that I play with it a bit…

After that, we checked in at registration and then headed to the Opening General Session. Lots of “feel good” talk, and a presentation by Linda Kaplan Thaler, author of BANG! Got a free copy of that book at the end.

Then back to my hotel to check-in. Then back to the Marriot to attend a reception… lots of meet and greet… It’s painfully obvious to me that I don’t know that many people in this industry. I feel very much like an outsider still.

An observation: There is a lot of money floating around this industry… You can tell by how good the bags at the conference are.

Tomorrow brings some great sessions and a few client meetings.

And to finish out this post… does anyone know why I can’t send email using a wireless connection in the Embassy Suites on Harbor provided by Passym?

The following are the notes on the Smarter Selling panel’s presentation, just because I’m not sure how long SignOnSanDiego will provide their weblog, and I don’t want to lose the notes:

Smarter Selling

Okay, first the bad news. According to Rusty Coats of MORI Research, the 2004 version of NAA’s “Power Users” study reveals that — in just the two years since the association’s first survey of general Internet and online newspaper users — Google went from a market share for local news of zero to a market share of 39 percent. When it comes to what sites users employ to research purchases, Internet users interviewed by phone put Google at the top of their list (at a rate of 36 percent), while newspaper site users cited store Web sites most often at 47 percent and Google at a rate of 40 percent. As Coats put it, “That put newspaper Web sites into a heroic race for seventh place” at 17 percent for the attention of online shoppers. Statistics like these have publishers worried about losing retail advertisers, but also eyeing the search engine for possibly ways to maximize traffic to their own destination sites through this popular portal.

But newspapers can still sell to many of the strengths revealed in the first “Power Users” study. Said Coats: “Our users aren’t loosers.”
-84 percent recently shopped online
-82 percent recently bought online
-88 percent are employed
-69 percent are online daily @ work
-63 percent check news daily
-58 percent frequently bank online
-57 percent have home broadband
-54 percent have college degrees
-The mean age is 38 (while the mean age of the printed newspaper is 54)
-Average income is $71,000 and they spend an average of 19 hours online a week.

“Our francises are already reaching a much younger audience,” Coats said, but, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t welcome their connection to or celebrate their heritage from the print edition. Some 75 percent of users contacted by phone read the print newspaper in the past week, while only 25 percent of them said they had used the newspaper online. When asked their primary source for local advertising, 51 percent cited the local printed newspaper, while only 2 percent mentioned the local newspaper Web site. And, and the news franchise remains a key to online newspapers success, despite challenges from sites appearing to offer greater entertainment value. More than half (58 percent) of phone respondents cited breaking news as a reason why they turn to online rather than print.

The lesson here: “embrace your print roots,” Coats said. In its favor, the Internet remains the medium that “owns the at work audience” and “the net is “where America shops,” he added. Full results are posted on the Digital Edge, but maybe some of you have drawn your own conclusions of what these data mean. Weigh in.

Small market goals are similar to those in larger markets, said Bruce Kyse, vice president of News and New Media for The New York Times Regional Newspaper Group. His refreshingly upbeat tale of success for the smaller newspapers in this group seemed to hinge on using reasonable CPMs to expand newspapers’ market share of ad dollars by selling against radio and cable. The group’s newspaper Web sites set revenue goals for each Internet page and make banners, “top ads” and waht Kyse called “PIP ads” work for buyers.

PIP ads — or, “Peak Internet Performance Ads — are disruptive ads placed in key locations, one per page. They deliver a strong offer and call to action, which the newspaper insists the advertiser change weekly, and are sold in annual contracts at a monthly rate for a minimum number of impressions. “We’re selling impressions, not a CPM,” something that’s more understandable to the advertiser unfamiliar to the medium, Kyse said. Creating scarcity — there’s a limited inventory and a sales blitz creates some urgency for the advertiser to buy — has made this a very successful product in selling to automotive, Real Estate, home furnishing, hospital and Lasik surgery clients.

Joe Jaffe, a self-styled “New Marketing Consultant” and former Madison Avenue media director, endorsed the concept of scarcity for online newspapers and other sites (i.e. Marketwatch.com only offers one “intermercial a day), but said it had gone to “stupid” extremes in the Super Bowl where 30-second spots this year sold for an average of $2.3 million. He encouraged newspapers to “celebrate what makes you unique,” primarily being local to an audience with whom the online newspaper enjoys a certain intimacy.

He coined the term “Glocalization” — a new twist on thinking global and acting local — as a way of describing online newspapers’ value proposition, saying, “there’s something to be said about approaching a user when he’s in a local mindset.” That could also be described as “contextual relevancy,” which with “integration” and “intimacy” make up online newspapers’ strong suit in Jaffe’s opinion.

Jaffe recently compiled a “Best Practices” project for the NAA that will share some of the smarter online advertising campaigns online newspapers have fielded with the industry and potential advertisers. This, too, will appear shortly on the Edge, but, in the meantime, he invited other online newspapers to send in their winning ad campaigns via the front page of adconnections.org (where there’s a button on the home page to allow newspapers to submit their sales stories.) These stories will be shared as part of an “Innovators’ Roundable” series NAA is planning in conjunction with the Internet Advertising Bureau, and hopefully in smaller markets as well.

In taking the “smarter buying” message to these markets, it’s worth noting that the competition is getting smarter about what they have to offer local advertisers. Sandhi Kozsuch, senior vice president for marketing and audience development for New York-based WorldNow, made no secret of the fact that his broadcast clients are “going after direct marketing and newspaper dollars; those are teh dollars that are in play right now.”

He said, “broadband is allowing TV to catch the wave on the Web” with streaming video and other features, but more useful tools could catch the eye of more local advertisers. Downloadable weather and news desktop utilities are gaining penetration of up to 12 percent in many markets and staying open on users’ computers as long as 6 hours a day, Kozsuch said.

Also a concern for newspaper publishers: auto ads. TV station Web sites have latched onto the “60-second test drive” as an online feature for dealers as a way to retain automotive dollars in local markets, Kozsuch said.

Tell us what you heard — but more importantly — what difference you think it will make in how you “sell smarter.”