The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune is the very model of a modern major metro.
It’s already the city’s dominant mass medium through its printed product. But now it’s exploiting its online presence to give its readers and advertisers a more personal experience, said Jason Erdahl, the Star Tribune’s executive director of interactive media operations.
Case in point: The Home Page Experience ad program, launched in 2006. The program gives marketers an opportunity to reach Web visitors through a variety of ad formats based on the number of times a visitor accesses the paper’s home page.
“What’s worked for us is that the user sees the message in different ways as they come back to the front page,” Erdahl said. This minimizes the chance a consumer might ignore the ad because of repeated viewings of the same message, he said.
The paper (Monday-Friday, 335,443; Saturday, 372,657; Sunday, 570,443) listed the ad packages at $19,000 each and booked 50 last year.
Home Page Experience reflects the paper’s embrace of the Web, a commitment that netted the daily three NAA Digital Edge awards this year for most innovative storytelling, best local guide/entertainment site (see box, below) and best digital ad program.
That’s on top of the four regional Emmys the paper garnered from the local chapter of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, citing the Star Tribune’s animation, still photography and videography efforts.
Yet even as the paper built its award-winning programs, its staff had to contend with rebuilding its Web infrastructure from scratch following the 2006 sale of the Star Tribune from McClatchy Co. to private venture firm Avista Capital Partners.
“McClatchy had the Web operations set up so that everything was centralized through the parent company,” Erdahl said. “McClatchy did a fine job, but this gave us an opportunity to look at things again and we decided to go with the best-of-breed option.”
The answer was a mixture of shrink-wrapped and custom apps, Erdahl said.
To that end, the Star Tribune tapped Clickability Inc. for its content management software and Silverpop Systems Inc. for its e-mail and newsletter alert functionality. The newspaper also maintained and expanded relationships with vendors such as Planet Discover, which was selected to provide search engine and shopping portal support.
Finally, the paper renewed its contract with Omniture Inc. for Web analytics and installed an ad management app from Google Inc. unit DoubleClick.
“The site may not look entirely different but nearly everything has been dramatically changed,” Erdahl said about the new infrastructure.
The Star Tribune used its own resources, meantime, to create its popular story commenting feature.
“I would argue that we have the best story commenting system on the Web right now,” he said. “We do require registration, but that doesn’t stop (readers) from participating because our users are open to sharing information with us in exchange for posting on the Web.”
Users can rate comments similar to the way Amazon users rate reviews, Erdahl said.
No comments:
Post a Comment