Although Google seems to be the last place the newspaper industry should be looking for inspiration—it just recently shut down its print advertising service—the fact remains that the Internet advertising giant has nailed successfully an entirely new source of advertisers at the same time print is losing theirs. The continued growth of online advertising, even in the face of the recent slump, has drawn away traditional, big-media advertisers from newspapers, but there hasn’t been a concomitant cross-migration of “long-tail” AdWords-style advertisers to print. That is a problem for print, given the measurable performance of online advertising and continued, increasing time spent online; this is looking like a zero-sum game that the newspapers are losing.

But does it have to be? Jeff Jarvis, in a great article at Seeking Alpha, argues that newspapers are still well-equipped to survive the changing times; they simply need to adapt. In addition to looking at commerce (some have managed to be successful at this) and leveraging their unique information and readership into building new services (like real estate agency), there are a couple other intriguing ideas that print should consider, spearheaded by the Big G and other online advertising outfits:

• Form an ad network: Instead of relying on their own ad sales division, newspapers and newspaper networks should outsource ad sales to ad networks that can fill their inventory across all available newspaper inventory.  (Of course, the ad network typically shaves off a comfortable margin for itself, something the newspapers would probably not like to lose. They can form the ad network themselves, like the airline industry did with Orbitz.) This will allow them to sell inventory on metrics meaningful to advertisers—not just geo, but on demographic, vertical/topical bases as well. And it reduces advertiser friction and builds campaign scale.
• Create a new sales force: Maybe Google isn’t the place a small, local advertiser would think of turning to to start a campaign. Jarvis suggests a “citizens sales force,” the sales side of citizen journalism. He might have a point, since a lot of the print long-tail are not going to understand AdWords any better than those online long-tail advertisers that need services like ReachLocal, Yodle and OrangeSoda. He also suggests that local media can probably retool to sell inventory beyond their reach, if there were such a network in place that could serve them.

The Los Angeles Times announced recently that revenue from advertising on its online division covered the paychecks of its entire editorial division—online and offline. This is certainly heralding the value of online traffic, which newspapers have long thought cannibalized their print traffic with dubious financial return. The hidden story is that they’ve made a new advertising model work. Maybe it’s time they apply what they’ve learned online to revive their flagging print division.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.