Printcasting's Advertising Implications

Online media pioneer and chronicler Steve Outing has a post about Printcasting and Classifieds on his personal blog, as well as his new venture: Reinventing Classifieds.

I ran into Steve at the Individuated News conference in Denver, Colorado in June, after giving a presentation about Printcasting. He asked me how our tools could be used by businesses, and if there were any implications for classified advertising. I told him that while classifieds per se aren't a focus of Printcasting, self-serve advertising is, and I see a lot of parallels between the two. The posts above are the result of our conversation.

How does Printcasting dove-tail with Classifieds? They both help small businesses market their products and services. A large percentage of newspaper Classified ad revenue comes from commercial customers (basically auto dealers, real estate agents and employers). These businesses are accustomed to writing text ads that are formatted to look good in print. The better tools on the market eliminate most of the design work for the advertisers, and simply accept feeds which are then automatically formatted into nice-looking Classified ads.

At a high level, this is how Printcasting will work, with feeds of variable content flowing into pre-fab publication templates. We want advertising to work the same way. A small business will only have to type in a compelling message about a product or service, optionally upload an image, and choose which publications they want their ad to appear in. After that, we will automatically generate display ads with different dimensions and fonts. They'll be able to see what their ads will look like in different sizes, but they won't have to worry about finding a designer for every ad.

If our advertising approach is successful for small businesses, I can imagine it being applied to larger commercial customers, as well as consumers. Forget about how things work in newspapers now, and instead think about the fundamental need for everyone at one time or another to get the word out about something. That applies to everything from garage sales to white sales, and everything in between.

Newspapers have a lot of different tools and terminology for different types of ads, but in the end they all boil down to the same thing: "Will you buy my apples?"

printcasting, steve outing, classifieds, advertising, small business marketing

Classifieds: where commerce and community intersect

A little over a month ago, my team -- which usually focuses on things like hyper-local blogging and social networking -- did something that I think more newspapers should be thinking about. We launched a new self-serve classified ad placement tool that's focused on the future.

We call these enhanced online ads because they have nothing to do with print, and they leverage the online medium to the fullest extent. But what they really are is blogs reinterpreted as ads. We basically took our successful blogging engine, tied it to a secure payment gateway, tweaked some of the presentation and called the results classifieds.

This sounds simple, and it is -- but for newspaper classifieds it's a fundamental change. People on Bakersfield.com and our other local sites can now post an unlimited amount of rich text, pictures, and even audio and video (currently from YouTube) to tell stories about stuff they're selling. The result is something that's closer to eBay than traditional newspaper classifieds -- which I lovingly refer to as a "Haiku ads" because people forced to describe products in three lines using shorthand. By contrast, the new ads have lots of room to tell stories.

Enhanced online ads are fully integrated with our other community offerings, too. When you post an ad, you have the option to automatically link to your user profile so that people can see other things you're selling, in addition to your recent blog entries, comments, photos, articles and anything else you have contributed. We also include a link to post an ad right next to the button to submit a story, post a blog entry or post photos.

Another benefit of tying classifieds into our community platform is that we can provide fun new ways for people to shop by keywords in ads, just as people can browse for profiles by interest. We're having fun seeing which keywords are more popular -- something you can't do in traditional Classifieds which are organized by category. Well guess what? Portable keyboards is not a "classification" in our newspaper, but wow, there are already three ads with that keyword today. There are plenty of more utilitarian keywords too, like mowers and couches.

We like the tags because the let users tell each other what's hot in the marketplace right now, rather than having to always be locked into our rigid categories. And since the Classifieds are on all nine of our brands in Bakersfield, you can see how different products are of interest to different audiences. Bakotopia's keywords are naturally more eclectic than those on The Northwest Voice.

On the backend, we built a flexible tool that gives us granular control over pricing for each category. We can set the price to list (which is usually free for merchandise), the number of each upsell to include (such as photos and videos), and the cost for additional upsells. We can also set a package price that bundles upsells together for one fee. In this way, users have many choices over what to put in their ad and how much to pay, but if they don't want to get into the weeds they can just choose a package and proceed with composing their ads. It's not that different from buying a computer on the Dell or Apple Web site.

Yes, the ads are already making money. No, I can't tell you what the amount is (we don't release revenue information). But I can tell you that after just one month, the weekly revenue is already increasing at a fast clip and we're practically getting love letters from people thanking us for creating a better way to advertise locally.

I'm fully aware that many of the "content people" who follow me and the Bakomatic platform are probably yawning right about now because they think this has nothing to do with them. That's really unfortunate, because I would argue that this has more to do with user contributed content than a lot of other initiatives that fall into that category. Classified ads are the oldest form of user-contributed content in newspapers, right next to letters to the editor, and for a long time they were the only way that average people could get their messages out to the public without having to go through editorial gatekeepers. I'll never forget the award-winning journalist who once told me she got some of her best stories by looking for bizarre classified ads and calling the advertisers.

And that's just it: classifieds are stories that just happen to cost something to tell. Heavy users of eBay will tell you that the products with the most interesting stories get the most response and sell for more, and that can only happen because they have the space and tools to express themselves. It's gratifying to be able to say that in Bakersfield, people are already comparing enhanced ads to eBay, and thanking us for providing them when they get a call about their products in hours rather than days.

I can't wait to see what stories come out of our new enhanced online ads. In addition to making lots of money, I hope this results in our own local version of Antiques Roadshow.

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