Talking Ads Click at Florida Paper

By: Miki Johnson It's a common dilemma: You're shopping online and have a question about an item, or hours, or shipping, but the only way for you to contact the advertiser is through sometimes slow, often unanswered e-mail. Until now.

With the Palm Beach Post's "Talk-to-Seller" button, almost every item advertised online through the paper (about 24,000 at any given time) is accompanied by a clickable icon that prompts the user to enter their phone number and choose to be connected to the advertiser in one, three, or five minutes.

"What we like about it is not only the ability to instantly connect buyers and sellers," says PalmBeachPost.com General Manager Dan Shorter. "It's that the buyer clearly hears that we sent them the lead." When a call from the Talk-to-Seller service rings on the advertiser's phone, it is preceded by a recording, "Stand by for a lead from the Palm Beach Post," in either English or Spanish.

Since the project was launched last August, it has generated about 400 calls per week: 51% for job recruitment and 39% for real estate. The remaining 12% includes auto and other classifieds as well as customer care calls to the Florida daily, often about its extensive online ad capabilities. In fact, the technology was developed with click-to-call provider eStara to allow users placing Post ads to connect more easily with the paper.

Seeing that the service could also give advertisers without a Web presence (such as someone placing a one-time classified ad) a way to promote sales to online shoppers, the Post ad staff decided to offer the Talk-to-Seller option free to all advertisers. "We felt like it was time to give one back," says Shorter.

The click-to-call technology is only part of the paper's extensive defense against such dollar-stealing online classified services as eBay and Craigslist. The Post offers a suite of online advertising options that have undoubtedly contributed to Shorter's report that this year the paper's revenue grew 69% and profits overshot estimates by $4 million. The newspaper also won a Digital Edge Award from the National Newspaper Association last year for "Best Advertising Program" in its circ category (the Post has a weekday circ of 154,800, 190,931 Sunday).

The ad staff also has digitized all content that appears in the Post's ads. This means every word and every item advertised by the newspaper can be searched as well as distributed easily to multiple advertising platforms.

The most important of these alternate advertising venues is the paper's kiosks, which can be found in a six-county area in malls and libraries. The brightly colored, ATM-sized machines, with touch-screen displays, carry the Post's logo on their plastic facades and can display auto, real estate, or job listings for the paper. Through this onscreen interface, users can set up a job interview or a test drive, print out listings, and even purchase the paper.

The kiosk program was introduced in late 2002 with job listings, and was so successful that the paper added the auto category in 2004 and real estate later that year. The kiosks, which now play 30-second videos created by the paper's ad staff for advertisers, are accessible to approximately 5 million people a month, with 280,000 users and 2.15 million page views in 2005.

"We're doing a lot of things to show people we can reach a larger audience and non-readers," Shorter adds.

Imperative to this multi-platform approach was the Post's advertising ID numbers, which allow users to search online using a number associated with each item in every ad. The paper also offers popular packages that allow advertisers to upload up to eight photos for each ad (many of which play on kiosks) and add 700 words of text and a video or audio file. "If you give people value," Shorter insists, "they'll not only buy you, they'll buy you again and they'll tell their neighbors."