USAToday.com will relaunch its travel section today with a range of new or revamped features offering marketers increased advertising opportunities. The redesigned site will place greater emphasis on consumer input, travel tools, and blogs. A centerpiece will be the new Flight Center, which will include a flight tracker, departure delays map, Wi-Fi locator, and information on fares and airline mileage programs. Touted under the tagline "Explore. Go. Share.," the refurbished travel site also encompasses a batch of new blogs. They include The Golfer's World; Just Back From, which will include memorable stories and tips from USAToday travel writers recently back from trips; Amazing Race, which will provide travel tips and information based on the far-flung journeys of contestants in the CBS reality show; and a cruise-related blog to be introduced by month's end. Embracing the user-created content trend, blogs and other sections on the site will more prominently feature comments and feedback from readers. "We're taking the inclusion of consumer comments and really bringing that to the fore so there's a lot more user interaction," said Jeff Webber, publisher of USAToday.com. The goal is to provide a more balanced mix of expert advice from its staff writers with the opinions and insights of travel consumers, he said. USAToday.com's travel site drew 677,000 unique visitors in August, according to comScore MediaMetrix. While citing a higher traffic figure, Webber said he believes the changes will nevertheless result in "considerably more" traffic to the site. Around the new travel site features, USAToday.com is counting on a set of new sponsorships and ad placements to boost revenue. That effort includes offering exclusive sponsorships for its Flight Center and redesigned Travelers Toolbox feature as well as on its Today in the Sky airport blog. Within the interactive maps that accompany the travel site's 28 city guides, travel marketers will also have the chance to direct readers to their locations. Marriott International, for instance, could sponsor a map indicating the locations of all its hotels in Chicago. Webber said it is still being determined whether the map sponsorships will be offered on a national basis as well as by city. In a new twist, USAToday.com will also allow advertisers to sponsor RSS feeds within the travel page of a reader's personalized MyUSAToday site. The feed can provide more information on a marketer's products or services or on special travel offers. In a more traditional vein, the travel section's front page will also feature a new expandable billboard unit for advertisers seeking to make a splash.
Traffic to most news sites slowed the first week in September, which included the Labor Day holiday, compared to the previous five-day work week. But traffic at a handful of news sites--those owned by companies that made news as well as reporting it--surged, according to new data by Nielsen//NetRatings. CBS News saw traffic grow 83 percent to 2.4 million unique visitors for the week ending Sept. 10--which was the same week new anchor Katie Couric debuted. But most top news sites fared worse for the week ending Sept. 10 than the week before, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. AOL News drew about 8.9 million visitors the first full week in September--down from around 12.3 million the week before--while CNN saw its traffic drop to 10.5 million visitors from 11.6 million the week ending Sept. 3. NYTimes. com traffic fell to 4.9 million the week ending Sept. 10, from 5.1 million the week before. Among the top 10 news sites, only Yahoo grew its traffic for the first full week in September--drawing 16.9 million unique visitors that week, compared to 15.8 million the week before. In addition, pictures of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' daughter, Suri Cruise, sent visitors to CondeNet. Traffic at that site surged to 3.5 million for the week ending Sept. 10--up more than double from 1.6 million visitors the week ending Sept. 3.
The serialized Web drama "LonelyGirl15" is moving from YouTube to the ad-supported site Revver, where the creators of the saga--now known to be fictional--stand to gain a cut of ad revenue from the clips. Lonelygirl15, which focused on the life of home-schooled 15-year-old Bree, became a cult hit on YouTube, drawing hundreds of thousands of fans. While the clips purported to be real, their high quality and the seemingly made-for-TV plot lines spurred fans and the media to investigate whether Bree was actually a creation of scriptwriters. Last week, the show's creators solved most of the mystery when they issued a post characterizing the clips as a "new art form." "Thank you so much for enjoying our show so far," they posted on an online forum devoted to LonelyGirl 15. "With your help we believe we are witnessing the birth of a new art form. Our intention from the outset has been to tell a story--A story that could only be told using the medium of video blogs and the distribution power of the internet." Several days later, three amateur detectives revealed that Bree was actually being portrayed by 19-year-old actress Jessica Rose. The creators then stepped forward to identify themselves as Californian twenty-somethings--Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders and Greg Goodfried. By Friday, they said that LonelyGirl's goings-on will now be chronicled on Revver, the video-sharing site that splits ad revenue 50-50 with the content owners.
Hoping to build its brand as a free video site, AOL is offering to distribute its video search engine to other Web publishers for free. "It's a play based on the belief that by helping the entire industry grow, we'll help ourselves grow," said Tim Tuttle, vice president of AOL Video. AOL is making available open video search application programming interfaces that Web publishers can place on their own sites for free, but with a limit of 10,000 searches per day. If volume goes beyond that, AOL would then seek branding on the site and/or revenue, said Tuttle, who previously served as CEO and founder of the video search engine Truveo, which AOL purchased last year for around $50 million. AOL also is allowing video content owners to distribute their videos throughout the Web by submitting feeds to the AOL video search engine. AOL will then review the sites of content owners that submit feeds to make sure their videos don't infringe on copyright, Tuttle said. If approved, those sites' videos will then be available at any site that powers its video search with AOL. Separately, AOL today is also launching its AOL Video service for computers with Intel Viiv; the new service will enable consumers with Viiv technology in their computers to more easily view AOL Video on large-screen TVs.
When the U.K. daily The Independent allowed Bono to guest-edit an issue in May, it sold an extra 70,000 copies. Was it because The Independent donated half of all revenues from the issue to Product Red (a Bono-initiated program where companies including Gap, American Express, Motorola and Nike donate revenues from special products to a fund that helps fight poverty and AIDS in Africa) or because Bono edited? Whatever--they'll do it again when Giorgio Armani designs the Sept. 21 issue, which will feature celebrity-written articles by the likes of George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Beyoncé. There is nothing new in celebrity editors; any number of U.S. magazines have invited in the unschooled as publicity stunts to pump up newsstand sales. But newspapers? With the exception of tabloids that nobody reads for serious journalism anyway, reputable newspapers have generally shied away from such shallow promotional tactics. But who is to say that The Independent isn't on to something? Think of the possibilities: The New York Times could invite President Bush to edit an issue in which suddenly the Iraq war won't seem like such a lost cause and the White House won't be the usual confederacy of dunces. Weepy stories on the environment and downtrodden New Yorkers will be replaced by upbeat profiles of kids who were not left behind, or praise for Chevron helping to lessen our dependence on imported oil by discovering homemade crude on a rig with a gigantic hurricane target painted on its side. USA Today simply must put Ralph Lauren in charge--if only to get rid of that green, red, purple and blue schema in favor of muted earth tones, navy, or maybe classic black-and-white. Moreover, the man on the street will become the woman on the runway--a vast improvement--and stories might run long enough to engage someone who doesn't have ADD. The Washington Post might invite in Lewis Black, who won't be able to fill the paper with stories leaked from senior-level administration officials trying to advance their own agendas, but it will be considerably funnier to read. The Los Angeles Times could put Tom Cruise at the controls for an issue that questions the mental clarity of an aging Viacom CEO, who can only be saved by a few doses of Scientology and by avoiding post-partum depression (since it can't be helped by modern medicine, anyway). Six pages of baby pictures can replace the sports section. The business section can be turned over to an analysis of box office returns for certain action films featuring secret agents, fighter pilots or race car drivers. The Wall Street Journal should give Michael Lewis the reins, so that on the same day we can find out why the Tigers are taking a dive, why your broker makes more money that you do--even though it is his job to make you more money; and how teenagers will use the Internet to bring civilization to its knees. The Financial Times can invite in anybody they want (as long as they trade out the pink for something a little more butch), since nobody really reads it, but only carries it to impress the other commuters who are playing Donkey Kong on their $3,000 laptops.
Mass marketing in the digital age means marketing to many segments of the entire mass. In fact, we all know the very idea of "mass marketing" is road kill. Technology allows us as marketers to understand the individual segments of our audience and deliver messages contextually relevant to each segment. In fact, segmentation is the strategic cornerstone of relevance and thus optimization. Leveraging the power of data and technology for optimization will have a huge impact for your campaigns. Careful data analysis and test design also provides long-term value in the form of business intelligence, facilitating a window on the latent needs of the market. Over the past year, agencies and businesses alike have begun to use optimization and analytics for marketing in ways they never have and never could before, with outstanding results. Nowhere is the strategy becoming more prevalent than with the landing page. Since about half of all online ad dollars go into paid search, landing page optimization can reap tremendous rewards. The very nature of search marketing affords us the opportunity to deliver contextual relevance in ways that were unimaginable to marketers just a decade ago. Also, these search-focused strategies transfer to other forms of user-controlled media or pull marketing, which should be gaining more attention in your marketing plans. So that I may deliver contextual relevance myself, here are a few basic landing page optimization examples (in the guise of a clothing retailer) of delivering contextual relevance based on high-impact segmentation: Keyword -- If the visitor's search query included color specificity, the product landing page will display the color match product image and have supporting copy for the color that matches the user query. Geo -- It's the middle of January. As a clothing retailer, I show down jackets and snow boots on my home page to users from Maine; however, I show polo shirts and loafers to my users from Florida. Referrer -- Visitors from the comparative shopping engines will land on product pages optimized with additional product options matching their category interest, since these visitors are likely still in the consideration phase. Stage -- Customers that purchased shoes will be shown socks and belts should they return to the home page within 30 days of their purchase. Should they return after the season changes (if they live in a seasonal climate), they'll be shown the season's newest shoes. An often-overlooked one... Language - Visitors who used a Spanish language search query or came from a Spanish language site will find that their landing page will be in Spanish. Once you've discovered the high impact segment you want to optimize, that's when the fun begins. As a digital marketer, you will be able to wrestle control of content delivery away from the IT department and bring it where it belongs--your marketing department and your agency. Now that's some very relevant segmentation indeed.