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Circulation Audit Methods Continue to Evolve

Posted April 30, 2013 by Mark Hanzlik, ACGMedia    

From Poynter this week, Daily newspaper circulation totals 'do not capture the full story' anymore, a thorough reporting and discussion of the move to change reporting metrics by The Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations).   AAM has been slowly overhauling its' ancient methods of counting print circulation for newspapers and magazines, the organization name no longer contains the word "circulation" anymore.  This latest change was motivated by Advance Publications (publisher of many 3x week "dailies") and likely others who no longer see value in the five-day average reports.  

AAM is trying to change with the times, keeping up with newer advertising buying models and publishing patterns that are emerging.  They've already incorporated digital metrics into their product menu and will no doubt follow this path despite some immediate criticism and the fact that the reports may become less uniform and require additional training to understand.  

Wanderful Debuts Find & Save Digital Inserts

Posted April 16, 2013 by ACGMedia   

From NAA mediaXchange 2013
By Michael Depp, NetNewsCheck

The new product, dubbed Find & Save (over the earlier Find N Save iteration), was positioned as a complete overhaul of the digital FSI experience, one that Wanderful's leaders boasted had Silicon Valley thinking baked into it and a high quality user experience at its center.

"We're trying to reimagine and reinvent the circular," Ben Smith IV, Wanderful's CEO, said at the Newspaper Association of America's mediaXchange conference.

The product, which went live at 380 papers in all of the top 50 DMAs this week, is launching with a number of national advertisers in place. Wanderful is targeting the inclusion of regional merchants by September and local clients by December, Smith said.

The new Find & Save was built with the goal of being comprehensive, portable and local, three core facets of print circulars that Smith said have long made them work for consumers. With the migration of the FSI to digital, however, Smith said personalization was a key expectation for users.

Other digital tools were also brought to bear, namely mobile's portability and consumers' desire for participation via social media. Consumers' existing expectations of strong visual merchandising needed to be translated to screens. The entertaining value of the experience also had to be elevated, Smith said.

So what does that all of that look like?

Dave Thomsen, Wanderful's executive VP of product design, showed a video that toured some of the platform’s main features. The home screen hosts a vertical crawl of frames not unlike many online shopping sites or deals malls. Each frame includes a different merchant with a featured item (retailers pay for prominence according to the frames' order).

Every frame also opens into its own page of a retailer's circular items, which users can add to personal lists as a favorite or share via social media.

Users will be reminded of sales that are expiring on their favorited items on their smartphones via email or text alerts, and once the platform rolls out more geofencing capabilities, it will even notify them when they are in the vicinity of a store featured in their personal list. Those lists are also easily retrievable via smartphone.

Consumers can also shop by item category, and similar items will be served up as they browse.

Thomsen said the company also wanted to capitalize on a key shopping dynamic — that people like to be inspired by others' tastes — and so Find & Save features a section on trending community picks that makes other local wish lists discoverable to users.

But will users ever discover Find & Save itself?

That may be the new product's biggest gamble, and so far consumers have sniffed at digital efforts to translate the FSI. Wanderful's backers, comprised of a dozen publishers including A.H. Belo Corp., The McClatchy Co., GateHouse Media Inc., Cox Media Group and Lee Enterprises Inc., will ultimately need to convince a wider array of small and large publishers to embrace and market the effort with their readers if it is to become the national platform to which Smith said it aspires.

Given that inserts are a $4-5 billion annual business for newspapers, the stakes of the bet are considerable.

So how will Wanderful — and its newspaper partners — know if it's paying off? "If a local retailer wants to get someone to walk in their store, they're going to have to deal with the newspaper business," Smith said, adding that Find & Save would play a key part of a larger strategy — including advertising — to drive those bodies in. "I hope to get to the point of dominance again."

He added that the product would be iterating continuously and that iPhone and iPad apps are currently in development.

Ad Buying Tech Myths Debunked

Posted April 2, 2013 by Mark Hanzlik, ACGMedia    

We've all been hearing about how ad technology was supposed to simplify the ad buying process and provide assurances for advertisers and vendors alike that there wasn't a lot of smoke-n-mirrors and other shenanigans going on behind the scenes.   Here's a Digiday post from Brian Morrissey on April Fool's Day summarizing the 5 Myths of Ad Tech.

One take-away from the discussion,  "There is a lot of crap that is being paid for"

Alarming Stats About Banner Ads

Posted March 22, 2013 by Mark Hanzlik, ACGMedia    

From last week, here's an interesting digital advertising post from Digiday about banner ads and the alarming facts about their many shortcomings. Take your pick, there's plenty of reasons for digital advertising leaders to change the nature of web advertising but there doesn't seem to be too much movement away from the stalwart banner.

1. Over 5.3 trillion display ads were served to U.S. users last year. (ComScore)
2. That’s 1 trillion more than 2009. (ComScore)
3. The typical Internet user is served 1,707 banner ads per month. (Comscore)
4. Click-through rates are .1 percent. (DoubleClick)
5. The 468 x 60 banner has a .04 percent click rate. (DoubleClick)
6. An estimated 31 percent of ad impressions can’t be viewed by users. (Comscore)
7. The display advertising Lumascape has 318 logos. (Luma Partners)
8. 8 percent of Internet users account for 85 percent of clicks. (ComScore)
9. Up to 50 percent of clicks on mobile banner ads are accidental. (GoldSpot Media)
10. Mobile CPMs are 75 cents. (Kleiner Perkins)
11. You’re more likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad. (Solve Media)
12. 15 percent of people trust banner ads completely or somewhat, compared to 29 percent for TV ads. (eMarketer)
13. 34 percent don’t trust banner ads at all or much, compared to 26 percent for magazine ads. (eMarketer)
14. 25-34-year olds see 2,094 banner ads per month. (ComScore)
15. 445 different advertisers delivered more than a billion banner ads in 2012. (ComScore)

Digital Divide Changing for Hispanics

Posted March 10, 2013 by Mark Hanzlik, ACGMedia    

Here's a short but important piece from NBCLatino last week that brought to light some interesting changes in the digital divide for Hispanics.   The author of the article cited a new Pew Hispanic Center report released on March 7 where the findings show that internet use of Latinos grew from 64% in 2009 to a current level of 78%.    

It was also noted that cellphone ownership also increased during the same time period, and that by mid-2012, Latinos led all other groups including whites at 47% living in cellphone-only households.   The Pew Hispanic Center report can be find here.