How To Win In The Local Media Market

As we move deeper into what promises to be a hotly contested election season, we're hearing ever greater rhetoric harking back to the American Revolution.

Whichever side of the political aisle you fall on, the revolutionary fighting spirit -- typically fomented at the local level -- remains an acutely American phenomenon.

The fighting spirit pervades the local media business as well, and that can be healthy of course. But sometimes it's misdirected.

We've all grown up in a landscape of local media companies fighting each other for share of the local marketing budget. Yellow Pages skirmished with direct mail and outdoor, the newspaper took on both -- and television stations have always religiously monitored and reported share.    

Old habits die hard and, as these local media companies build Web businesses, it feels natural for them to position their Web product against historical local competitors. 

The only problem: None of these companies delivers audience share online like it does -- or did -- offline. This makes the "share" battle artificial.

Ten years ago a newspaper in a mid-size market may have reached 80% of the adult residents with its weekly circulation. The network affiliate TV stations reached over 90%. And when something at home broke and it was time to call a plumber, electrician or the air conditioning guy, Yellow Pages was the go-to reference for nearly 100% of consumers. 

Today, of course, Google's done a number on the Yellow Pages. And unless the Yellow Pages develops a new search utility that entices consumers, it's hard to imagine they'll ever approximate the kind of reach online that they used to enjoy with their printed books. 

The newspapers have seen oligopolies -- in many cities, monopolies -- for in-depth local, text-based news turn into an all-out scrum. Now audiences are fed a continuous stream of news updates -- from numerous and potentially limitless sources -- reporting everything from the most hyper-local topics on up to international news. And not always too well.

The local broadcasters are part of that news scrum, meaning some markets have more than half a dozen local news organizations, each battling for 10% reach into the market and none with a large-scale audience like in the good old days.

Now, let's look at it from the vantage point of the marketer. The local marketer now grapples with dozens of local Web entities each claiming to be the biggest by their own preferred metric -- comScore, Nielsen, internal logs, time spent on site, audience interaction, blah, blah, blah...

None of the local Web publishers brings scale to the table online as it might have offline. Meanwhile, the marketer is presented with dozens of localized national offerings from Google to ad networks, with more targeting flavors than Baskin Robbins. 

The marketer's end goal hasn't changed: Grow the business. But it's become immeasurably more time consuming and difficult to do the necessary marketing work online.

So, the local guys fight with each other over 10% table scraps while the national players localize their product and deliver the kind of reach and frequency the marketer is accustomed to buying offline -- and still needs to buy online in order to grow his or her business. The trouble with those national players is that their technology is bewildering, the ad placement is data-driven and making a connection between targeting a cookie profile on a group of hard drives and real events happening in the marketer's community is difficult at best. 

If local media companies continue to spend more time fighting each other for share than they do providing local marketing expertise, the national players will slowly but surely suck the oxygen out of the room as they make their data-driven marketing models ever more intuitive and easy for small businesses to use.

Local marketing will follow its national cousin and become: a) more science, less art; b) more commodity, less creative; and c) more dominated by large national media providers at the expense of the local ad sales departments.

So what are you, as a local Web publisher, to do? 

I don't have all the answers, but here are some things local players need to be thinking about:

Arm the sales department with art AND science. Basic sales training is always good, but more than ever local sellers need to be marketing experts, bringing smart business solutions to their clients daily. Our sellers need to embody the "art" aspect of marketing -- by developing creative ideas that leverage all the media platforms they represent.

Art alone is not enough, our sellers also need to have access to and be masters of strong technology-based marketing tools. For instance, using the ad server to track beyond clicks in order to optimize based on metrics like view-through, the impact display advertising has on search referrals and ensuring reach is maximized and creative is refreshed after the frequency zenith has been attained. Selling a site based on size relative to other local publishers -- or CPM, or other generic metrics -- is as relevant to our clients as Duran Duran is to my 15-year-old daughter (and of even less interest).