IFRA

IFRA: One of the reasons you said for launching a search engine a bit more than a year ago was to enable Singapore Press Holdings to increase the productivity of its content and expose it to more people as well as boost earnings from it. Has this goal already been achieved, and if so, how?

Paul Jansen: We have had a good measure of success here. Rednano.sg, our local search and directory engine, indexes all the text and image content of SPH’s English-language newspapers and aggregates these with the non-SPH material it selects from the Internet.

This benefits SPH in two ways: it introduces web surfers to the SPH brand if they did not know about the Group previously, and it helps drive more people to the SPH newspaper reports via the links in the ww.rednano.sg results pages.

Also, on top of offering the links via computers, we have made a big push to offer Rednano on mobile. We do this three ways. First, via an SMS service where users can get directory results by sending a query to the number 33333. Then via web browsers through our WAP address m.rednano.sg. And lastly, through Rednano Locate, a geo-location service which gives results based on your physical location. Rednano Locate is a client-based service. We have tie-ups with handset manufacturers to re-load the client into phones at the factories, with distributors to do it at their points of sales, and with some telcos to make it easy for their customers to access our service on their handsets.

We have also launched a marketing campaign to encourage people to download the client themselves as it is as simple as typing in the word “locate” and sending this via SMS to 33333. And these mobile offerings have another effect: they extend the SPH brand further into the mobile space.

IFRA: You have mentioned the directory service. With this type of service, a person who looks for an Italian restaurant would not only get names and addresses of Italian restaurants in Singapore, but also news, reviews and other type of content regarding this search. How has this contextual search service been received by readers and mainly by local advertisers?

Jansen: Right from the start we knew that pure directory listings would not satisfy people. Furthermore, restricting results to addresses and contact details would be failing to take advantage of the richness of the Internet. So we enriched our directory with reports on the businesses listed, including news, reviews, and other content from SPH journalists as well as from other sources on the web.

Anyone can see the richer results by typing a query in www.rednano.sg and clicking on the FIND button. For instance, if you try “chicken rice”, a favourite dish of Singaporeans, you will see the richness of our results compared to the Yellow Pages and search engines.

The traffic has been rising steadily and we have been getting more than 800,000 unique visitors per month.

We have also been attracting advertisers and our supporters currently include big companies like Courts as well as small enterprises which do not even have their own web pages. For the latter, we create and host pages for them in our Directory.

IFRA: Your hope when this search engine was launched was to transfer the brand recognition of Singapore Press Holdings in print to the search engine, in order to convince advertisers to trust you also in this new platform. How has this been achieved?

Jansen: Creating our service required a delicate balance between tapping advertisers’ trust in the SPH brand and, to boost traffic, persuading people that we offered more than SPH content.

To do this, we created a new name – rednano.sg – and launched an extensive marketing campaign to drive home the message that non-readers of SPH publications would also benefit from using our search and directory service.

At the same time, we are proud of our parent company and solidified our association with it in the minds of readers and advertisers by powering the search features of the group’s online newspapers.

I believe we’ve reached the point that people – users and advertisers – know that we are part of SPH and also that we are more than just SPH.

IFRA: The business model for the search engine is based on advertising, plus some premium content and subscription services. Can you describe these ways of making money work and just how successful they have been? How does advertising in search behave?

Jansen: We have two core offerings and we deploy these across two platforms, online and mobile.

The first core is our Directory. Advertisers pay to enhance their listings and for premium positions when results are served. Because our Directory is far advanced compared to normal directories, we can offer the advertisers much more – for instance, links to newspaper reports about their companies, and pictures published in newspapers.

On the mobile platform, we have geo-location capabilities and combine these with our Directory listings so that advertisers can highlight their nearby stores or ATMs when users search for these.

The second core is our advertising network for online search ads. We call this the Rednano adSMART network. Advertisers can buy search ads in this network and reach not only the users of the Rednano search and directory engine but also the millions of users of a host of other sites. These sites include SPH-owned sites as well as others. By the end of 2009, we expect to be able to place search ads on more than 145 million pages a month.

Search ads are ads which are text-based and are “contextual” as well as content-driven. We offer advertisers two opportunities. We have search boxes on our site as well as in other sites with high-quality audiences. When someone uses any of those search boxes, the results appear together with ads related to the query: hotel or airline ads for searches on holidays, for instance. The second opportunity is when someone does not use the search box but goes directly to a particular section in a website; for instance, a health site or pages about health in a news site. In such a case, we deliver related ads from the medical or healthcare industry or fitness sector.

The best thing about either of these core offerings for advertisers is their high return on investment. As the ads are closely related to what people want, they are more likely to look at them and interact with them by clicking on the link. This is why search ads consistently score much higher ROI than online display ads, which are non-contextual.

IFRA: At the beginning, there were about 40 people working in the company on this project. Has that changed? Have you closed any deals with major search companies such as Yahoo, as Sesam did in Scandinavia?

Jansen: We have maintained a lean team. The forty or so people directly involved in the launch of the service included a mix of full-timers, contract workers and temps. We now have 48 staff, mainly full-timers with a significant portion involved in sales. We will scale up as the business grows.

We partnered with Yahoo when we launched. This involved both use of content and sharing of advertising opportunities. We are open to working with anyone who can help us grow our traffic and gain greater share of the advertising pie.

IFRA: What technology do you work with for advertising and web analytics?

Jansen: We are currently using a Microsoft/FAST product called AdMomentum for delivery of the ads and are looking to Omniture for analytics.

IFRA: You were hoping at the time of the launch that pay-for-click advertising will take off in Singapore as you intended to move towards this model. How does that stand?

Jansen: Our internal analysis indicates that both online directory ads and paid search ads are increasing in Singapore. However, the growth in ad dollar value is nowhere near the growth in use of the online media here. We see this gap as a good opportunity, but one which will require further investment and persistent effort to close.

IFRA: Mobile search is getting more and more relevant mainly with the new smartphones that, among other things, make the best use of GPS localisation. What is SPH’s search strategy towards mobile search and mobile advertising related to localised content?

Jansen: We see a great future in local search on mobile. It is not technology which will win this war, but local relevancy in the results served. Technology is merely an enabler. Having said that, we obviously should make good use of this. Our strategy is to pick the right services and technology partners to deliver these.

Again, one of our key mobile services is a Directory which is location-based. So a user is immediately directed to the nearest place or person providing what he is looking for, whether it is a restaurant, clothing or electronics store, mechanic or plumber. We do this through Rednano Locate, which is a joint creation of SPH Search and its technology partners, Ascision and Seeeker Wireless.

It works through a combination of three technologies: the cellular network, WIFI and GPS. This makes Locate truly ubiquitous as it works perfectly indoors and outdoors. With Locate, users get our directory, maps, traffic and nearby promotions. Most importantly, the service is telco-agnostic, allowing all mobile users to enjoy the services, unlike the telcos’ location-based offerings which benefit only their own subscribers.

Advertisers welcome our ability to offer their products and services to the mass mobile market. In addition, our ability to track the types of queries and times of searches enhances our understanding of the needs of mobile users. This psychographic database allows for much more precision when we deploy our targeted mobile ads.

The effort of the team, led by our Mobile Business Development Director Shirley Tan, to create Rednano Locate was rewarded in June, with an international prize. It was given the ‘Best Consumer Service Innovation Award 2009’ following a summit meeting in London for the telco industry organised by Global Telecoms magazine which is read by CEOs and senior managers of telecommunications companies and their vendors and suppliers.