Q&A: Matt Jones, Gannett Director Of Mobile Strategy & Operations On Local Mobile Content & Advertising Approaches
I posted earlier today on the announcement by Gannett to launch local mobile sites. Matt Jones, who heads mobile at Gannett, kindly agreed to a quick Q&A to discuss his current focus and future plans. Here are the highlights:
• What’s the fit between mobile search and advertising?
Mobile search and advertising are a fit – but only in general terms. We want to utilize our existing core properties, our television stations or newspapers with short codes; we want to put short codes on those properties to engender mobile activity. On the other hand, we are also promoting the fact that Indystar [the Indianapolis Star], for example, has a mobile website and there is a WAP push component available to that as well.
Third Screen Media is doing the ad serving for us. They are also doing some sales. And our local markets obviously can sell their inventory – and then again, we can sell it nationally or regionally as well. Locally, [our local media properties] have the option to sell inventory to marketers. So if you are a real estate firm or a pizza shop or a car dealership, then you have the ability to use these local sites to reach a local audience.
• Is it about banners? Or do you plan to make use of 4Info’s capabilities to deliver video ads as well?
I think the banner is sort of the tip of the iceberg. The banner is the thing that allows a user to see an offer, if you will, from an advertiser. After the user clicks on the banner we support all of the mobile ad feature sets. We have employed click-to-call, we have employed geo-lookups for properties, and we have employed video. There are some very creative things that users can do. But we see that click-to-call is one of the most powerful [features] for media.
• Can you share any of the numbers?
We sell everything on a CPM basis. It is not uncommon to see CPMs in the $30 to $50 range and the conversion rates are very strong. I think that there is an element of this being a new medium and there is a lot of experimenting; there is a lot of customer and consumer interest in finding out what happens when they click on the advertisements. Google recently commented that mobile ads work twice as well as Web ads – and we’re seeing similar behavior.
• What’s next for Gannett in mobile?
We have got a lot of work in front of us to tunnel deeper into local. One of the things that we are focused on is delving deeper with 4Info in our local markets.
We have reporters and staff on the ground in Indianapolis reporting the news. Nobody is going to be able to cover a market as well as a local staff. Google and Yahoo are trying to aggregate local content but it is very difficult. It is certainly a competitive advantage of ours.
[Note: Readers in the U.S. can check out the content alerts by keying in m.indystar.com or texting the keyword indy to 59523.]
