Newspaper & Mailroom

NewspaperDirect Brings Transparency and Precision to Print Advertising Placement

Friday 17. October 2008 - New Ad Value Map Feature Helps Renew Confidence in Newspaper Advertising by Showing Advertisers Where and When to Place Ads in Printed Media in Order to Maximize Exposure and ROI

NewspaperDirect Inc., the world leader in multi-channel newspaper and magazine content distribution and monetization, has added a new feature designed for professional subscribers of PressDisplay.com. Called Ad Value Map, it aims to help advertisers maximize the response to their ads in printed media.
When advertisers place ads in newspapers today, they are concerned with two things beyond the quality of the ad itself:
1. How many people will see the ad on the page
(goal: maximize the audience)
2. How much time will people spend reading that page
(goal: maximize exposure of the ad to the audience)
NewspaperDirect measures both of these statistics daily for every issue of its 750 publications on PressDisplay.com, and for the hundreds of privately labelled digital editions it hosts for publishers. It calculates the number of people who looked at a page in a newspaper and combines this number with the aggregated amount of time spent on that page by all readers. Detailed data is collected and presented for every issue of every newspaper, which enables advertisers to make informed decisions on a daily basis.
Statistics are gathered from millions of readers around the world, including over 1,000 libraries and hundreds of thousands of PressDisplay.com e-paper readers. To display the results in a way that is easy to understand, NewspaperDirect uses the front page as a benchmark and assigns a value to each page within the publication as a percentage of the value of the front page. Advertisers see a visual representation of each page’s value in a newspaper by viewing the color-coded thumbnails of each page, which represent its value relative to the front page.
Ad Value Map has already identified some interesting, if not surprising, data. For example, in many newspapers, the sections that typically capture the attention of readers the most are the editorial pages, cartoons and crossword and Sudoku pages. The potential for advertising is high on these pages, but traditionally very few ads are presented. Also, in tabloids, internal pages often garner a value higher than the front page, due to the high ratio of photos to text on the front cover of the newspaper.
“The $3 billion decline in newspaper ad revenues in the last six months is indicative of an industry where advertisers are frustrated by not knowing which half of their advertising dollars are being wasted,” said Alex Kroogman, CEO of NewspaperDirect. “With Ad Value Map, Wanamaker’s mystery is solved — we can now show advertisers where and when to place their ads in printed media to maximize the return on their advertising investments.”
Ad Value Map expands on NewspaperDirect’s unique Reading Map technology, which uses sophisticated tracking techniques to monitor the exact amount of time readers spend reading a particular location of a digital newspaper, right down to an area roughly the size of a postage stamp. With this technology, NewspaperDirect is able to identify the most-read pages, most popular articles, highest-viewed pictures and advertisements — all vital pieces of information for understanding readership and ultimately the value of specific sections and pages to advertisers.
Availability
Ad Value Map is available for professional subscribers for all 750+ publications on PressDisplay.com.