The Future of Local Reporting?

If your business thrives on local customers, you need to find ways to talk to them as directly as possible. In some cases, that means finding the radio stations that they listen to, or the television stations that they watch or even the billboards that they pass on their way to and from their homes. One of the most reliable ways to connect with local consumers had been to go through local newspapers. Notice the past tense in that sentence.

As newspapers continue to lose subscribers, that once reliable outlet for connecting with your local customers becomes less reliable. Smaller audiences mean smaller ad prices and smaller returns on ad spends. Newspapers know this and are looking for ways to regain the value of their local relationships. One way is to refocus their energies towards extremely local news.

The Washington Post is doing this with a new online local news site called LoudounExtra.Com. The website hopes that by bringing together "hyperlocal" reporting with online distribution, they'll be able to build a targeted and condensed audience. That audience would then be sold to advertisers looking to build their own customer base.

It's another example of publishers trying anything to grow their business while their audiences shrink. As an advertiser, these new 'hyperlocal' sites may be worthwhile. The best way to know is to use AdSymetrix.

Simply Tag Your Ad and watch as AdSymetrix tracks and monitors the responses. You'll know whether the hyperlocal news site is an experiment worth your advertising dollar.

How The World's Largest Advertiser Does It

Proctor and Gamble is the world's largest advertiser. It knows a few things about the way that traditional advertising has worked for the last century or so. It also knows that as the audience becomes harder to find and the message more difficult to spread that experiments in new media are going to become more and more important.

That's why, when one of their marketers talks about how P&G utilizes Tech Marketing, it's worth your while to listen.

The crux of the interview is that audiences are more diverse, separated and split up than ever before and that the new opportunities offered by non-traditional media is cheap enough to allow for experimentation.

But with all that experimentation, you need to have a way to know what works and what doesn't. That's where AdSymetrix comes in. Simply Tag Your Ad before you place it with AdSymetrix tracking tools and let AdSymetrix track and monitor your responses. You'll know where your new business is coming from and how you can attract more of it.

With the world of advertising changing, you'll need some help making smart advertising decisions. AdSymetrix is here to help.

Watching You Watching Them

NBC wants to know what you feel about their programming. Really feel. On a deep, involuntary level. That's why they've set up a panel of people to watch fast forwarded commercials while hooked up to all manners of scientific apparatus.

The hope is that by learning the body's reaction to ads, NBC can find ways to cram more advertising into your world. It's another attempt by television to make up new ways to combat the shrinking viewer audience.

They're not so concerned about the message, as they are the medium. If they can raise the value of an audience, or at least double the viewable inventory of ads, they can maintain their profit levels.

If only they had an easier way to know whether an ad was working.

AdSymetrix is that easier way. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor the responses. It's a lot easier than wrapping someone up in sensors and hoping.

The End of Advertising As We Know It!

OK, so maybe things aren't quite as dreary as the headline says, but as more and more people splinter away from mass-market entertainment advertisers are looking at new ways to get prospective customers' attention.

The Washington Post front's today with a story about how the 30-Second Commercial may not be long for this world. With the advent of TiVo's and other time-shifting devices, not only do audiences no longer need to keep their ears open during bathroom/snack breaks while the commercials are on, but they can pause and fast-forward and miss the messages entirely. Now, advertisers are finding that the highly targeted advertising markets opened by online advertising are showing more potential for generating new business than the shotgun approach that mass-market marketing ever offered.

So without a need for a two and two break and with tighter targeting of audience desires, marketers may soon see the day when viral video surpasses television commercials.

Of course, the best way for you to know when you need to pull the plug on any of your advertising is with the help of AdSymetrix. Simply Tag Your Ad and let AdSymetrix track and monitor your responses, giving you the information you need to make advertising decisions that not only save you money, but generate new business.

AdSymetrix, sign up now, it's free.

Movement in the Online Advertising World

Two interesting things happened over the last few days in the world of Online Advertising. Yahoo announced that it was buying Right Media, an online advertising marketplace and a Norwegian company launched their FASTMedia product that intends to give newspaper publishers the ability to target online advertisements to user intentions without having to go through a Google-like search engine.

Both of these announcements play in the background of most advertisers' business. They won't mean much to the small business person who wants to buy a placement on a local newspaper website or in a similar publication. But they do signify the bigger issue in the publishing world: how will publishers adapt to the new advertising marketplace.

Creating new ways to sell ads is one way, but properly understanding the value of their ads is another. AdSymetrix has been developed to solve that problem. Using our easy-to-use tools publishers and advertisers can track and monitor any ad, anywhere. They can compare return on ad spend against any medium, and any message.

AdSymetrix gives advertisers and publisher the tools they need to thrive as the advertising world evolves. Why not give it a try? Sign up is free.

Advertising of Tomorrow

It may read a bit dry, but this bit of theoretical musing about the current and future state of advertising by Paul McEnany nicely explains the reason why we created AdSymetrix.

Essentially, it says that advertising as we have always known it is done. Finished. Consumers are more sophisticated, demographic groups are more splintered and audiences are smaller and more wide spread. It means that the future of advertising is going to be specifically targeting smaller groups of people with messages that are more likely to grab their attention and place them in a wider array of positions.

And that's where AdSymetrix comes in. As you start to work within this new world of advertising, our tools will help your business qualify the locations, placements, media and messages your using to refine them to their most effective. AdSymetrix lets you know how well any of your ads are performing against any other ad you've placed in any medium anywhere. All within a simple to use dashboard. Give us a try, Signup is free