How to Squeeze an Orange

By: Mark Fitzgerald Freedom Communications Inc. hopes Orange County's trend-chasing, club-hopping, trail-hiking 25- to 44-year-olds find its new SqueezeOC glossy weekly and Web site so useful they'll be checking them all the time, even for deciding which sunscreen to wear while surfing.

What Freedom doesn't want those active young Californians to think is that SqueezeOC has anything to do with its flagship daily, The Orange County (Calif.) Register. Certainly, SqueezeOC 's unusual and very un-newspaperlike "gnat-casting" promotional campaign gives no clue that it's a sibling of the Register.

"It's an absolutely completely separate product," says Lelani Bluner, director of marketing for Freedom Orange County Information. "It's not branded with the Register name. We didn't want the perception that it's the Register."

But SqueezeOC is the sort of edgy niche product that newspaper companies increasingly are turning to as they chase a young audience that's not hooked on the daily paper. SqueezeOC is a glossy, 52-page, tabloid-sized print product that's polybagged and thrown every week on the doorsteps of 60,000 targeted homes, with another 20,000 copies distributed at racks located at hip O.C. locations.

"Really, the main thrust of our product is the Web site," says Bluner. SqueezeOC. com is intended to be a one-stop shop for what to do in Orange County. Even the ads change, depending on the weather or surf conditions. For instance, if the surf is up, ads direct visitors to surfboard repair shops. If it's flat, the site advertises a bedding store.

To promote SqueezeOC, the ad agency DGWB created a colorful guerilla marketing campaign meant to lure readers with events, messages, and post-modern tchotchkes in their favorite watering holes and haunts. At a velvet-roped launch party featuring cast members from MTV's "Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County" and "MADtv," SqueezeOC flags flew from the stirrers in the co-branded Ketel One martini that will be featured in bar promotions in the county.

Instead of ? heaven forbid ? newspaper house ads, the new SqueezeOC ad messages appear printed on cocktail napkins and on walls in health club locker rooms, wrapped around trash cans on the beach, and hung on bus shelters. "Everything's a location-based message and based on the 'Squeeze my ...' concept," Bluner explains. "So the message outside a CompUSA would read, 'Squeeze My Hard Drive.'"

Unlike the "faux alternatives" that some dailies have created to capture an active and youthful audience, SqueezeOC appears not so much to be competing with the alternative that's already there, OC Weekly, but Time Out, the listing magazine that isn't yet in the market. "There's a slice of opportunity in that there's no place that showcases everything to do in Orange County," says Bluner.

With its emphasis on audience interaction and Web feedback, SqueezeOC is determined to squeeze in a lot of face time with its readers and users, Bluner adds: "We did a lot of focus groups with this audience and found that this audience is busy, but busy because they want to be. They look for the best things to do with their free time."