While I crack the mystery of financing my next hyperlocal venture, allow me to enjoy the distraction of its potential selling point: contextual advertising.
In the parlance of mainstream media, contextual advertising means partnering an ad with a related piece of content, Kathy Best, managing editor with The Seattle Times, described last month during a NewsU.org webinar. For example, an ad for a cruise line might appear with content on travel, or a restaurant might advertise alongside foodie content.
The most exciting thing about contextual advertising is this: News consumers respond more strongly to advertisements that have a local spin to them, Best found in consumer surveys. For instance, a local travel agency’s ad may get more attention in the travel section than one for a big cruise line. In this case, context has more to do with location than content. Score one for hyperlocalists!
But to make local (and hyperlocal) ads successful for sponsors, context must be coupled with customer service, Best indicated. The ad must do more than just announce the sponsor’s presence in town — it’s got to connect the consumer directly with the sponsor’s services. An advertisement might encourage consumers to order goods immediately via phone or online. Or it could promote a weekly special, giving the ad context in time (double booyah).
Best’s recommendation supports something that CUNY J-school’s Jeff Jarvis suggested previously, that local businesses aren’t interested in advertising their presence to consumers who likely already know they exist. Instead, contextual and service-oriented ads allow local advertisers to build on existing customer relationships by offering more (or at least different) services.
It’s a strong sales argument for why the local dry cleaner (the one who’s been around for twenty years and whom everyone knows) should advertise with hyperlocal media. Even if the advertisement provides only the dry cleaner’s telephone number, it’s one more extension of customer service that can drive repeat business.
There are some dangers to contextual advertising, Best warned, mostly having to do with the placement of ads with hard news. A media outlet shouldn’t place a politician’s campaign ad alongside content about his or her rival, unless one’s goal is to draw that outlet’s objectivity into question. Instead, contextual ads fare better when paired with soft news — food, travel, sports, and news that won’t strike a nerve, Best suggested.
Shuffling ads with content may get cumbersome for small outlets, especially for online publishers who rely on fixed templates. However, there might be tools available to help with that. (I’ll explore that in a future post.) And if an advertiser’s location and the timing of special offers are emphasized, then perhaps the ad’s coupling with relevant content might not be so important.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user FadderUri.
There is nothing more contextual than neighborhood news/neighborhood advertiser. Period. Don’t overthink all this. And don’t assume everyone in your town knows about the businesses that are there, therefore invalidating the value of good ol’ display. We sell and run ads in a very simple way and we hear time and time again from ‘readers’ that the ads are content to them – they didn’t know those businesses existed. Perhaps because our neighborhood of 70,000+ is something of a “bedroom community” – not many major employers here, so people leave the peninsula to go to work, and then come home at day’s end, but have spent the whole day in an environment outside the neighborhood.
We headscratch sometimes that our success via doing what the “experts” insist “doesn’t work,” is because we stumbled into this and didn’t have the “benefit” of anyone telling us what “doesn’t work” before we Just Did It.
Thanks for your comment, Tracy, and congratulations on the success of your publication.
Every neighborhood is different, and display ads may not sustain every news site. My former beat had a population of about 20,000 residents, some of whom worked elsewhere and some of whom worked with two big employers in the neighborhood.
The majority of small businesses in the hood offered services (dry cleaning, grooming and dining), and most didn’t feel the need to advertise or were averse to the cost. Furthermore, many didn’t have faith in online advertising.
But I think if these sponsors were taught the benefit of context (and if I’d understood it better then), maybe there would have been less reluctance to advertise online.