Verticals find ad dollars
ADOTAS EXLCUSIVE — As advertising dollars continue to shrink many media sites are looking for ways to enhance their current offerings and create additional ad opportunities.
Just as traditional ad buys began to erode in the early part of last year, interactive advertising has been hit particularly hard in the last quarter of 2008. It’s no longer enough to offer traditional banner ads on your website news pages. To survive in today’s turbulent waters it’s important to build out additional advertising opportunities. How do you do this? By creating channels specifically targeted to consumer interests.
Currently, the big three verticals are: automotive, travel, and real estate. By building out these main hubs and creating channels that highlight content specific to the big three, savvy media companies are finding additional pockets of advertising dollars. A channel can be anything from an area where consumers can build out their dream car and find a local dealer online to an RMLS listing search area that shows the homes for sale in your geographic region. Companies currently creating customized channels for the big three verticals above are finding they can package these with traditional advertising packages and sell them as “targeted buys” to advertisers. It makes sense that a real estate company would be more likely to buy ad space on a designated homebuyer page than a “run of site” contract.
To explain how this works, let’s take a closer look at the automotive vertical. Automotive dealers have traditionally spent the bulk of their advertising budgets on local TV commercials, newspaper classified ads and radio spots. With the majority of consumers now heading online to research and shop for vehicles first, many dealers have shifted some of their spending to national online vehicle search portals.
Now imagine taking the same concept as a national online vehicle search portal and creating a section on your media site, but tailoring it to your local dealerships and their customers. It’s a win-win. The dealership gets a less expensive and more targeted way to access local customers, while you create an additional advertising stream.
The caveat is that in order to entice advertisers to try your new channel, you need to offer consumers and advertisers the big-time tools found on national sites. Many local media sites are now investing in robust vehicle shopping and researching tools that facilitate the car buying process for consumers, and then push them to a local dealer for purchase.
These tools may include fun surveys to help buyers find exactly the car for them, informative articles decoding automotive jargon like MSRP, and even tools that mimic social networking sites so potential buyers can create shopping pages, upload the vehicles they are considering, and invite friends and family to chime in with their opinions. Media sites have a trusted voice in the community and built-in local readers, so by investing in new tools and features you can offer increased services to your readers, boost online traffic, and become more attractive to local dealer advertisers.
One exciting outcome is once you’ve created a new channel, advertising dollars often flow in from outside the primary industry. For example, local credit unions and insurance agencies would love to have exposure to local auto consumers, but how? When an auto consumer clicks ‘Financing’ on your site, you have the power to put the credit union down the street, or the small one-man insurance agency, in the face of a local consumer. This is ‘path inclusion,’ putting complimentary industries in the buying path of the consumer, and it can pay off big in terms of advertising dollars.
Most local media sites are right on the cusp of bigger profits. By building out new online verticals like automotive, real estate, and travel, you can realize a bevy of benefits: more traffic from already loyal viewers, the retention and growth of current advertisers, and new interactive advertising dollars from currently untapped markets.
– Express your opinion, comment below.
Reader Comments.
Hmmm a new verticle channel concept….The Auto Channel(R) has been on-line for over 13 years, and we are still trying to convince ad buyers and planners that inserting their clients advertising directly into and around 100% relevant content is not only a good idea, it is the right thing to do for their clients…unfortunately over the years we have found that most ad buyers and planners never seem to find the time or have an inclination to actually spend time more that a minute on-line to really see what a 1 million page deep site like The Auto Channel can offer their clients…
So until Google Adsense came along we were struggling…now thanks to Google and Vibrant Media and others ad networks we can chuckle (instead of grit our teeth and curse) at the stupidity and arrogance of most so called professional advertising buyers…oh yeah the same guys who helped GM, Ford and Chrysler get to where they are today…
By the way in 13 years we have NEVER picked up the phone and heard an ad agency type asking us to put a package together for their client a formerly big three auto maker…so much for your perfect world
Automotive and real estate aren’t exactly doing that well. Neither is finance in case anyone’s wondering…
Health care however is still running reasonably strong. Hopefully President Obama won’t destroy one of the last of the reasonably strong industries.
Right Street, wrong address. National advertisers and their agencies will need a few more years and a generational shift to move into channel targeted local inventory. Local web sites also need to make the effort to court national and agency media buys while weaning themselves off the easy cash of adsense. I don’t see either of these happening in the near term. Maybe in a decade, with a strong aggregator and niche representation for a critical mass of local publishers. I think some industry consolidation may be needed before that happens.
Brad
kitaramedia.com
Leave a Comment
Article Sponsor
More Features
-
Loading ...
Latest News
- Hulu’s Bringing Its “A” Game But… March 19th 2010 ADOTAS – Hulu’s sales team is actively subverting the ad [...] more »
- Yelp! A class-action suit? March 19th 2010 ADOTAS – One of three civil suits against Yelp filed [...] more »
- Viacom Accuses Google; Testing Digital Millennium Copyright Act March 19th 2010 Viacom has accused Google of turning a blind eye to [...] more »
- Google to Leave China April 10th? March 19th 2010 ADOTAS – According to the China Business News, Google Inc [...] more »
- [x+1] Creates The Smartest Tagging System Around March 18th 2010 ADOTAS – Today, if you happen to be at the [...] more »
- IAB’s Video Standards Tackled By ADTECH March 18th 2010 ADOTAS – ADTECH, a part of AOL Advertising and an [...] more »
- Google Search and Mobile and….TV? Oh My! March 18th 2010 ADOTAS – Google wants to dominate your screens…. Not just [...] more »
Features
- Growing Pains March 19th 2010
- For Better or For Worse? March 18th 2010
- Yahoo! Wants to Get More Personal March 17th 2010
- Creative Considerations for the iPad March 16th 2010
- Amazon Leaves Colorado Affiliates Out in the Cold March 12th 2010
Spotlight
AdBidCentral’s CEO, Vivek Veeraraghavan Talks Openly*What was the inspiration to start AdBidCentral? The conditions that inspired AdBidCentral came from a variety of factors in my personal [...] more...
Reader Favorites
Classifieds
- Sr Director, Marketing Services
- Senior Web Analyst
- Account Director
- Director of Analytics
- Manager, Business and Trade Media Relations
Recent Comments
- Jedd Gould: I think you miss the point. Publications have to charge because the content most are
- Gavin Dunaway: They're similar, but Ning is more a competitor to Facebook and MySpace while StumbleUpon considers
- Steve Feldman: Does StumbleUpon compete with and does essentially what Ning networks does?
- Bulent: I wonder how many of the clients would accept a media plan, that would -as
