• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 1, 2007

Recently liberated from the pay-walls of TimesSelect, NYTimes.com has launched a multichannel branding initiative to show non-readers what they're missing.

"Internal research showed us that people think the Web site has what's in the paper, and that's it," said Murray Gaylord, vice president of marketing for NYTimes.com. "We needed a campaign to show them what's online--like video, slide shows, interactive blogs, and reader comments. There's all this content they don't know about."

Adapting the Times' classic "All the News That's Fit to Print" slogan for the digital age, the campaign--which made its debut in Sunday's paper--hinges on the motto: "All the News That's Fit to Click."

With what Gaylord called "a significant media spend," the campaign will extend to some 30 highly trafficked Web sites, including Yahoo, Google, and CNN.com.

In print, the ads will only be found in between the Times' pages. For outdoor, the paper will employ "taxi tops" in New York City only, while a diminutive presence on TV and radio is also planned.

"We have very specific metric goals," confided Gaylord, but declined to disclose them. "We're expecting this campaign to drive traffic to the site significantly."

The campaign, he said, was planned long in advance of The New York Times Company's decision earlier this month to discontinue its TimesSelect program--which charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to columnists' work and the paper's archives.

Analysts, however, found it hard to believe that the Times' recently revamped business strategy didn't factor into the plan.

"They took the paid model very seriously, but now they've got some work to do to smooth over the bump in the road that they created for themselves," said Gordon Borrell, newspaper analyst and president of consultancy Borrell Associates.

Officially, the Times said the two-year-old TimesSelect project had met expectations--drawing 227,000 paying subscribers from 787,000 overall--and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

Still, "projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising," Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com, said upon the announcement earlier this month.

Another goal of the campaign is to increase public awareness of the site's key sections, such as business and technology, real estate, travel, luxury and entertainment, which NYTimes.com has expanded in recent months. These sections, as some people might be unaware, now allow visitors to book trips and download real estate listings, among other services.

On the topic of original online content, the Times continues to add blogs to its mix. The latest, launched late last week, is dedicated to the ways people are reinventing their careers as entrepreneurs and independent business owners. Named "Shifting Careers," the blog will be written by Marci Alboher, the NYTimes.com's Shifting Careers columnist.