Friday, February 15, 2008

quadrantone.com This new online ad network, backed by four major newspaper chains, will sell ads on about 120 papers' sites.

I was intrigued today to learn about quadrantONE, a new online ad network spearheaded by and for newspapers. It was launched today by four major newspaper chains: Gannett, Hearst, New York Times Co., and Tribune.

The selling point: National brand advertisers will be able to reach audiences through about 120 established, trusted local news sites. The network covers 27 out of the top 30 U.S. advertising markets and claims a monthly reach of nearly 50 million unique visitors (according to Nielsen Online, Dec. 2007).

PaidContent notes: "Since the expressed purpose of the company is to help advertisers reach local audiences, some of the national/international papers NOT included are: USA Today, ...The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune."

Advertisers (especially big-name brands) generally prefer to publish in major, established, credible venues. QuadrantONE aims to simplify this process by providing direct one-stop shopping for big advertisers -- as opposed to working with a media buyer to negotiate separate deals with dozens of venues.

Also, ad placement on the news sites is guaranteed. The New York Times reports today that the four chains are "transferring a portion of [their] online ad space to quadrantONE." The Wall St. Journal casts this as a benefit over Yahoo's ad network (which many papers, including some quadrantONE affiliates, use) because "Yahoo's partnership doesn't have guaranteed access to the [online] ad inventory of its affiliate newspapers."

What's missing from this picture? Today in the Industry Standard Jeremy Kirk observed: "QuadrantONE is most notable for the online players that aren't participants, such as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. ...If newspapers develop better ways to sell their own online ads, they may not have to share revenue with their Web counterparts such as Yahoo and Google."

It's hard to tell precisely which kinds of advertising quadrantONE will be supporting, since its Web site is so far just one brochure-style page with a couple of pdf downloads (not a good sign if you want to appear Web-savvy, in my estimation). But the San Francisco Chronicle reports, "QuadrantONE has a primary focus on display advertising and will let marketers target their ads by geography, subject and other categories. It is teaming with a yet-to-be-named technology company to supply a system that can provide ads to all the newspaper sites and report results to advertisers."

That's an adequate initial strategy -- although I think so far quadrantONE's approach may have overlooked some obvious opportunities.

Specifically, I hope quadrantONE will eventually offer text-based contextual advertising, not just display ads, which tend to have poorer clickthrough rates. Also, I hope the network offers advertisers the option to customize ad content (not just placement) by locality and other criteria. It's never enough to reach relevant markets -- you must do so with highly relevant messages in order to get results. The more quadrantONE's back-end interface for advertisers borrows the best from Google and Yahoo ad systems (especially in terms of detailed results reporting for specific campaigns, keyword bidding, and allowing on-the-fly changes to ads), the more likely it is that both advertisers and newspapers will make more money.

Looking further ahead, I think both newspapers and advertisers would benefit substantially by expanding quadrantONE to offer strong support for local and regional advertisers, not just national brands. Yahoo Local has its problems, but is nonetheless a solid start in streamlining the local online advertising market. So far, newspaper sites generally haven't partnered effectively with Yahoo Local. Nor have they done a very good job of selling online ads to local advertisers. However, the local part of the "long tail" holds significant potential to increase the overall size of the online advertising market. (Read: More money for everyone.)

There's no reason why an online ad network created by and for traditional news orgs couldn't play a leading role in developing the local online ad market. But if not, I'm sure some other kind of company will happily seize that opportunity -- perhaps on terms less favorable to supporting news orgs and journalism.

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