IFRA

Selling must become more “scientific” in order to convince advertisers and adapt simply to the methods of the Internet pure players. The U.S. supplier DTI is testing a solution that involves all the business processes of a newspaper groups.

“Search engines, such as Google, deliver a lot more ads that newspapers – because they can target them", argues Richard Hall, international marketing director of Digital Technology International . "Advertisers don’t pay until the ad is delivered to a relevant individual, and/or clicked on by the reader."

Newspapers therefore provide Google with ads to deliver, but they have to pay a large percentage of the revenue to Google for the privilege. Publishers cannot afford this added cost of doing business – online prices are now too low. We have developed a tool (DTI AudienceReach) that helps newspapers solve this problem. Typically a newspaper does not know very much about its audiences (in print, web, or mobile, etc.). By collecting, and merging subscriber information from the Circulation database; website behaviour (including time spent on each story), reader offers, third-party demographics, mobile number, etc we are able to build a profile of rich audience data, and use this data to serve accurately targeted ads – without paying a search company to do it for them. We are not suggesting that networks, such as Google’s AdSense have no value – but that there are more profitable alternatives».
 

Below are illustration of what can be done using AudienceReach with explanations from Richard Hall, international marketing director of Digital Technology International :

 

Picture 1 shows the “order form” :

This is where the customer indicates the bid amount they want to pay for a cost per thousand, clicks, leads or actions. And the number desired. It also allows the order to be limited by user session to “x” number of displays for the same advertisement or “x” number per reader regardless of the number of sessions involved. Translation: 3 views per session; 20 views total per reader. The order form also caps the amount of exposure per day (Maximum Daily Spend), indicates specific days of the week to run (if left blank the order can appear every day of the week) as well as limit by hour(s) of the day (peak exposure times).

Picture 2 shows a single ad version associated with an order.

Orders can have multiple ad versions associated with them as well. The customer can indicate URL links for click thrus, leads and action; what websites and areas they want to purchase (multiples supported per ad) and the media to be used. Also, if they check the “exclusive” box then no other customer can buy that same website/area for the same time period this order has it scheduled, thus making them the exclusive advertisement for that position. If multiple ad versions apply, you can also link different versions together as “companions” which means both must be presented online together, always. And you can weight each version. For example: I schedule 4 different ad versions; 1 is weighted to be used 50 percent of the time the other two versions 25 percent of the time, each.

Picture 3 shows the targeting tab options.

The example displayed defined questions and answers that are accepted for targeting based on the “area” (website/area) in which the ad is published online. This lets advertisers target specific gender, marital status, age brackets, include ranges and educational levels. This is also site-defined and controlled (the questions for targeting and the answers allowed). As they enter this information the code will look into the Audience database to determine the number of matches “known” with those attributes.

Picture 4: Included is the ability to target by geo-location (country, state/province, city, zip/postal code) or by area code or by region (which is site- defined as a group of areas making up a single “region”). Notice you can schedule into multiple zips/postal codes or cities or states, etc.

The system also looks at the online connection to determine if they have been connected previous and thus have a Genome profile. Stored in that profile is information such as ads clicked on previously; stories and ads keywords, searches they have run, etc. This is used to determine what ads have a higher interest for that customer “today” and ranks those ads for delivery ahead of ads just scheduled for a particular area on the page the reader is accessing, such as sports or business or lifestyle, etc. This is behavioural targeting based on data collected over time as to that user’s preferences. Also supported is channel targeting, such as email SMS and MMS alerts. The way this works is registered users can opt in to receive alerts via email, SMS or MMS or any combination therein, for specific types of advertisements. Example: I am interested in ads for LandRovers. Once an ad is scheduled that matches that criteria, the registered user is notified via the contact method they indicated and URL links to the ads provided, etc.