Commentary
Newspaper Publishers Launch Nucleus, National Ad Network
- by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, April 18, 2016
Last week, four of the country’s biggest newspaper publishers announced the formation of a new national advertising network, in hopes of wooing advertisers with greater reach and new audience targeting capabilities.
Gannett, Tribune Publishing, McClatchy and Hearst announced that launch of Nucleus Marketing Solutions, led by Seth Rogin, formerly chief revenue officer at Mashable.
Nucleus will offer ad products spanning established and emerging digital channels and will facilitate programmatic sales for national ad campaigns. Nucleus will also offer coordinated print campaigns.
Together, the partners claim to reach a combined audience of 168 million U.S. unique visitors per month, including 70% of consumers in the country’s top 30 media markets. The publishers are also working on signing up 11 affiliate partners to further boost reach and distribution.
This is just the latest in a series of attempts to create a digital ad network for national newspaper publishers, not all of which have been successful. Back in 2008, Tribune joined forces with The New York Times Co., Hearst, and Gannett to launch a new network, QuadrantOne, to pool online ad inventory.
The joint venture eventually rolled out programmatic ad sales, but was later shut down in 2013.
Last year, Tribune Publishing took another stab at the network idea with the launch of the MediaWorks Publisher Consortium, with a number of other newspaper publishers, enabling advertisers to create print and digital ad campaigns spanning newspapers in the country’s top media markets.
The Newspaper National Network brings together 25 newspaper companies in America under the aegis of the Newspaper Association of America, offering advertisers access to over 9,000 newspapers nationwide. There is also the Local Media Consortium, which includes over 1,600 newspapers and local broadcasters.
Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily. You can reach Erik at eriksass@gmail.com.
The key will be selling this as a true national network---no cherry picking---like allowing buyers to select which papers' websites they want. Also, audience delivery should be guaranteed on a national basis, not site by site. And, most important, a major effort should be made to sell these choice youngish and upscale audiences to TV advertisers who can use TV commercials, not static display ads, to reach viewers with their standard branding messages. The alternative is to go the digital selling route and offer a myriad of ad units, all sorts of attribution and other direct response mechanisms, and, the aforementioned cherry picking, but the results will probably be disappointing ad revenue-wise.
One final comment. If a miracle happens and the consortium decides to sell this like a TV network, it will need a specially trained, highly qualified sales unit to approach advertiser media directors and agency network TV buyers, not just the planners. Also, the network must be sold using TV metrics, with the usual digital refinements as add-ons, not the other way around.
Good luck guys and gals.