How to Effectively Bundle and Sell Multimedia Platforms

For more than 2,000 years commercial advertising remained pretty much the same as it was at its beginning, when ancient Egyptians printed news of sales on papyrus to hang on walls around the city. As technology advanced, advertising became a staple of newspapers and magazines, but those ads were separate from advertising on, say, radio or television. Surely, you can remember when print advertising meant the advertiser bought a certain number of column inches and, maybe, had a coupon for the reader to clip. In the 1990s, all that changed.

Welcome to the Digital Age
Advertising is no longer an either-or proposition where the advertiser has to choose between print and electronic media. Today, it's all one, a multimedia, multiplatform world in which the biggest factor is found online, and advertising is bundled to encompass every platform.

Christine Hamann is marketing manager of AdPerfect, a Vancouver-based software company that develops platforms for clients to integrate their print, online, and mobile advertising.

"Good advertisers understand they need to be everywhere their consumer is looking - online, print, mobile, and social media," she said. "Good publishers understand they need to meet their advertisers' needs in order to maintain and grow ad revenue. In today's media landscape, newspapers need to offer advertising solutions that produce a strong value and ROI for their advertisers, and a multimedia strategy is key."

Mel Taylor Media, in the words of its owner and namesake, "specializes in helping local media - print, electronic, or independent websites - figure out sales and business models."

The basic, successful business model, Taylor said, is one that utilizes bundling so both print and online readers will be able to access content. He believes that many facets of online publishing that were at the beginning regarded as truths have proven to be false.

"Publishers thought they'd build their site, and the money would come," Taylor said. "The newspaper ownership, the GMs, and the financial backers gave up the responsibility of figuring out a business model to the newsrooms and the tech people. When they did that, they didn't think for a moment that those two very smart groups of people have bupkis in sales and business background."

Taylor said that making money online should be a top priority for any newspaper with a website.

"A website," he said, "should start making a profit on day one. When you run a newspaper, the size of the book depends on the number of ads sold. When it comes to the Internet we throw that concept out the window, and it's the exact opposite. It's not OK that a website's profits lie in the future. It's not."

Keys to Success
According to Taylor, part of moving profit from the future to the present is bringing the sales department into every decision.

"Profit has to come first. The New York Times started something two years ago they called The Local. They had the money and the technology, and they failed. Why? They failed because someone from sales wasn't invited into a meeting about the undertaking. Every department has to be on board," Taylor said.

Two factors are critical to the success of an online publication. "First," Taylor said, "know who your competitors are. They're in front of your clients selling with Google, Groupon, Patch, and other hyperlocal media.

"Second, know your USP - your unique selling proposition. What do you do as a newspaper that the other guys can't do or don't do as well as you? You have bodies on the street and a record as a trusted source. That's important."

Equally important is a team approach to building a website. "The original model was that the online presence was turned over to the newsroom," Taylor said. "But everyone has to be part of it. Salespeople have to sell an integrated campaign in which advertisers buy the newspaper and online."

Even as the website evolves and new initiatives are launched, the newspaper mustn't lose sight of its primary income.

"Holding onto the relationship with the local advertiser is the most important part of this process," Taylor said. "If the local newspaper loses control of the relationship, it will be very difficult to get that relationship going again."

A website is just one piece of an effective multimedia message. "With the right campaign and the use of contests and coupons, for example," he said, "you'll be able to capture their email, Facebook, and Twitter to build your database."

Building the Platform
Of course, publishers need the right platform to enable advertisers to get the maximum ROI. That's where the software segment of advertising comes in.

"When we started in 2004," said AdPerfect president and chief technology officer Steve Kump, "we assumed a one-size-fits-all solution would work for our clients. We learned very quickly that publisher clients all do business their own way - different workflows, different technology, demographics, geography, and even different strategies."

AdPerfect has had to adapt in much the same way newspapers have.

"So, today, our solutions are flexible, scalable, and customizable to meet clients' varying needs. For example, our classified self-serve order entry is used by major dailies, medium to small dailies, and weekly community newspapers of all sizes, each offering their own customized packages, pricing options, ad options, upsells, and creative layout."

A major benefit of these customized packages is that readers won't be seeing identical ad formats popping up all over the Internet.

"Rather than building in specific customization for each publisher," Kump said, "we develop our solutions to be highly configurable, with many possible configuration choices. AdPerfect solutions therefore look, feel, and behave significantly different from publisher to publisher."

Once the technology is in place, you'll still need someone to sell the ads. Derek Mah, vice president of product development and strategy at AdPerfect, said, "Before selling multi-platform advertising solutions, training and understanding the solutions are key, and that is true from the sales director to the feet on the street."

Where the Readers Are
The weekly Long Island Press uses AdPerfect software, and general manager Steven McKenna is very pleased with the results. "Today, newspapers need to reach people in a different way than they reached them the last generation. Reaching the younger demographic is all electronic and, soon, 60 percent of all Internet traffic will be from a portable device," he said.

"If advertisers are steadfast about doing print advertising, you have to show them that the demographic most of them want most to reach is more an electronic, functional demo," McKenna said. "Online we reach 929,000 unique site visitors each month. Our print edition is unpaid, and the circulation is 85,000 a week. Our return rate is 1.9 percent."

Raw numbers like that are difficult for advertisers to ignore.

"Our first venture with AdPerfect was in automotive," McKenna said. "That initiative is built around print, Web, mobile SMS and texting, and social media. It's jumped our auto section 20 percent in less than three months. We're very pleased."

Brian Greenspun is publisher of the daily Las Vegas Sun. He said that his paper "got into digital early," and sales approaches have changed. "We are no longer selling numbers; we're selling total audience; measuring who they are, what they like - who the audience is. This is a new opportunity for advertisers."

It's a new opportunity for newspapers as well.

"Newspaper readers are dwindling. People want to get information in different ways than reading a newspaper in the morning. Now, this doesn't mean," Greenspun said, "that newspapers are going away. It does mean they're going to change."

To keep up with the change, he said, "A newspaper needs a top-notch digital strategy. I don't know yet what's right, but we're trying to find out." He added, "We bundle everything now."

Ellen Sterling is an award-winning journalist whose natural curiosity has led her to write enthusiastically on a broad range of topics. A New Yorker, she's now living in Las Vegas, where she blogs on the Huffington Post, reviews shows and movies, and freelances. Reach her at creativeink@me.com.