Neil Sanderson

From the breaking news battleground in New Zealand…

One of the country’s leading news websites, stuff.co.nz, drew a crowd in downtown Auckland last Thursday, causing pedestrians to look up, grab their mobile phone cameras and start clicking.

The publicity stunt (click the video above to watch) touts the site’s commitment to being first with breaking news, while looking very much like a breaking news story itself. And of course, it’s all captured on video, which stuff.co.nz is no doubt hoping becomes a viral hit. (That would be much more likely if the stuff people offered a video embed code.)

It reminds me of the days when radio stations battled for breaking news honours. Remember 20-20 News, 60-second updates and news hotlines with weekly payouts for the best tips? This stunt brings that sort of competitive tub-thumping to online news. All good fun, but will it change reader behaviour?

Stuff.co.nz is owned by Fairfax, which publishes several New Zealand newspapers and owns the trademe.co.nz auction website.

Joe Marchese at MediaPost explains why it’s so hard to get brand advertising onto websites at prices that will appeal to publishers.

…the issue with bringing branding online isn’t with the marketers and agencies, it is with the publisher side, maybe with some help from the marketers, of course ;-). Publishers can create “impressions” simply by adding ad units, but adding ad units don’t magically increase the amount of consumer attention in the world, or even on a given page. What publishers have that is of value to brand advertisers is consumer attention. In order to prove valuable to brand advertisers, publisher must find a way to share their audience’s limited attention with marketers in a FAIR exchange of value.

The question, of course, is how can online publishers increase advertising rates to make up for a reduction in impressions.

The marketer’s role in this is twofold: 1. Don’t force publishers’ hands by arguing both sides. Marketers can’t claim they value the opportunity to guarantee the delivery of a message to consumers, then when presented with such an opportunity, cite the lowest ad network CPM rate they have been quoted for negotiation purposes. 2. Build creative that is meant to be a contained brand experience/engagement. Engagements are not traffic generators. People don’t necessarily want to visit a brand’s website at the drop of a hat…

Marchese argues that publishers and ad networks need to do a better job of defining and delivering value for brand advertisers.

New research shows online advertising in the United States grew in the first quarter of 2009 by 8.2 per cent, apparently contradicting other research that shows online advertising declined by 3.4 per cent in the same period.

Writing at MediaPost, Joe Mandese suggests that different definitions and methodologies explain why the TNS MI results (in the table above) are more upbeat about online than those reported a day earlier by Nielsen.

Nielsen says its internet ad expenditure data accounts for, “CPM-based, image-based advertising,” and do not account for, “paid search advertising, text only, paid fee services, performance-based campaigns, sponsorships, barters, in-stream (”pre-rolls”) players, messenger applications, partnership advertising, promotions and email campaigns, or house advertising activity.”

That leaves out an awful lot, including some of the most rapidly growing areas of online advertising.

Mandese quotes TNS MI as saying online is the only major advertising segment to grow in Q1, while the overall media spend fell 14.2 per cent.

These charts, from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, really need no commentary and certainly won’t come as a surprise.

Of course “classifieds ads websites” is another way of saying Craigslist, which had 42.2 million unique visitors in March 2009, compared with 53.8 million total unique visitors to classified sites.

For an equally dramatic chart of US newspaper ad revenues (not just classifieds) over the past three years, visit Alan Mutter’s blog.

Further to my previous post about the NY Times considering selling memberships to help fund its journalism, Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher today posted some useful ideas on how to entice members with more than coffee mugs, t-shirts and tote bags.

Here are some of his most innovative and promising ideas, in my opinion:

* Every newspaper member gets exclusive discounts from a large group of participating newspaper advertisers. Rather than the anachronistic printed coupon books that have been around for decades and are sold for fund-raisers (in Colorado these are called Gold C Books and sell for $10), allow members to use their mobile phones to show retailers, restaurants, etc. their discount coupons after entering their password. This eliminates the problem of leaving the coupon or coupon book at home, since most of us carry our cell phones everywhere. A special app for smartphones could identify nearby discount deals based on your current location, or be browsed or searched.

* Advertisers should be persuaded to take part in the member discount program as part of their overall ad deal with the newspaper and its digital services, so there’s a wide variety of discounts and deals to be had.

* Consider deals with groups of restaurants, or ski areas. A paying newspaper member can get one free meal (when another is purchased) once per month at a selection of participating restaurants, or one free ski lift ticket per month. If our hypothetical newspaper membership is only $10 a month, it’s a no-brainer that you buy a membership if you like to eat out or ski.

As Outing points out, the key to making memberships work is in offering value. If people won’t pay for online journalism directly, perhaps they can be persuaded with discounts on other things they buy.

Mark Evans reports today that Globe & Mail marketing journalist-blogger Keith McArthur is to become Senior Director - Media Innovation at Veritas Communications, with responsiblity for social media.

Some harsh words for Canadian advertisers regarding their use — or non-use — of paid search:

Toronto seems to be the epicenter of the orifice that Canadian advertisers have lodged their collective heads in. The city doesn’t get it, the province doesn’t get it, the country doesn’t get it. When it comes to search, Canada (with a few exceptions) is clueless.

That’s from a Canadian, by the way. Gord Hotchkiss is president of search marketing firm Enquiro and he lives in the United States British Columbia. 

He’s been in Toronto this week for the Search Engine Strategies conference, but it sounds like he’ll be glad to get back across the border. He may be safer there too.

If you thought Facebook was just about staying in touch with friends, or finding long-lost schoolmates, then you’ll be blown away by Facebook Fanatic, a book whose authors say they will reveal:

• 75 Ways to Buzz Your Band
• Popularity Tips and Tricks to Make You Facebook Royalty
• Coolest Profile Names and URLs
• Get Celebrities and Famous Bands as Your Friend
• Poking and Prodding, Oh My
• Rock the Facebook Vote
• Be a Blog Hog
• Climbing the Wall
• Go Underground on Facebook with Little Used Privacy Settings
• Make Money Off Your Videos
• 55 Ways for Authors to Buzz Their Book
• 70 Ways to Get Films Recognized
• 40 Ways to Zoom a Political Campaign

As the promo on amazon.com says: “Read today and rule Facebook tomorrow!”

I haven’t read the book, but maybe I’m not dreaming big enough.

One of the highlights for me of last evening’s CaseCamp 5 in Toronto was the opportunity to hear and meet Tim Shore, founder of freshdaily.ca.

Tim’s company publishes three city-centric websites covering arts, music, film, fashion, food and a bit of local news. They are Toronto’s blogTO, Vancouver’s Beyond Robson and Montreal’s Midnight Poutine. Each site has two full-time editors and draws content from a host of local contributors, with advertisers paying the bills.

In his CaseCamp presentation, Tim talked about the challenge of drawing new readers to his company’s flagship site blogTO. The site has a self-inflicted marketing problem, Tim said, in that it has established itself as a blog brand, yet is moving away from traditional blog styling towards local information and directory services.

[As I wrote last month, the redesigned blogTO has similarities to conventional online news services. And a passing reference last evening to Torstar’s local sites toronto.com and ourfaves.com suggests where Tim sees opportunities to compete.]

Another problem for blogTO, Tim said, is that some potential readers who aren’t into blogs might see no reason to visit his site.

Reaching out to those non-blog Torontonians, blogTO recently launched a series of printed maps for Toronto neighbourhoods, and started providing restaurant reviews that appear in the National Post newspaper. The maps point users back to blogTO for further information, and the National Post deal has coincided with a nice lift in traffic to the blogTO restaurants section, Tim said.

So blogTO is really starting to behave like a media company, looking for opportunities to build its “brand” wherever it can, while staying focused on its core service.

Asked whether freshdaily.ca was considering sites elsewhere in North America, Tim was non-committal. But he said he saw many opportunities to further develop the three existing sites.

I’ll never forget the day several years ago when Google AdSense first appeared on nzherald.co.nz.

One of our news stories that day was about a near-fatal shark attack in Australia. As soon as we switched on AdSense, pages carrying the shark attack story sprouted ads for cage-diving operators offering “swim with the sharks” experiences. If memory serves, we asked Google to bar those ads for a few days, and hoped we hadn’t offended too many readers.

You’ve probably seen or heard about other examples of bizarre and inappropriate context-based advertising.

One recent case involves the British website GoneTooSoon.co.uk, where people post condolence messages. Everything was going fine, until the webmaster decided he needed to earn some money and installed AdSense.

The tribute page for someone killed in a motorcycle accident began carrying ads for motorcycles. Even more offensive was an ad spotted by a user of the site, who wrote:

“Can you really trust a site which posts an advert of [the murderer] Ian Huntley’s biography - not only on my beautiful friend Ian’s site, but on a website that also has a memorial for [Huntley’s victims] Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman?”

Outraged, visitors to the site began removing their tributes and vowing never to return.

Following the uproar, the ads were removed. The site is soliciting donations to keep it free to access.