I was among the local online media types at the Centro Local Media Publisher Summit last week (May 15-16, 2007). Shawn Riegsecker and his compadres asked us to write the five most important things we heard during the summit.
Socrates advised his students to “Know thyself.” That summarizes my most important take-aways. Specifically, to help advertisers (and their agencies) local media sites need to:
1. Know what makes our sites unique compared with our competition (and that competition includes local and national sites)
2. Know why users visit our sites and how they behave when they’re there.
3. Know our advertising capabilities — how many impressions are available, where and which impressions are the most valuable, both to us and to advertisers.
How do we learn these things? Spending more time with our analytics, using our inventory management software to its full capability, and, I think, simply asking our readers.
Part of all this is learning how to optimize our yield on impressions — figuring out the effective cost per thousand on all of our products. Another part of this is to label our impressions — national, local, remnant, house.
4. It’s time for behavioral targeting. Those of us who resisted because of expense now must make the investment.
5. Not every web site is right for every advertiser, but every web site is right for some advertisers.