• by Jim Meskauskas , September 8, 2004

I was just reading the other day on Editor & Publisher that newspapers are hoping they will finally get their fair share of political advertising this season after decades of broadcast's dominance has rendered political advertising in newspapers obsolete.

It makes sense. Newspapers already serve as "earned media" outlets for political campaigns, with front-page election coverage and opinion pieces on editorial pages serving as de facto campaign advertising.

But the industry is more sanguine than usual about their prospects for cutting a fatter slice of the pie this time around because the terms of the McCain-Feingold act, as it stands now, put restrictions on "soft money" ad spending in broadcast 60 days prior to the presidential election. The implication is - and hopes are - that this bodes well for print and other non-traditional forms of advertising.

Online advertising, of course, is what most immediately comes to mind when one says, "non-traditional." In light of the inferences that can be made, given the dawn of the McCain-Feingold era, then what we are talking about is newspapers online look to gain the most from this political season.

And for the most part, they should. Of all the online media environments, online newspapers offer the best opportunity for political concerns and candidates. This is not because there aren't plenty of other places to go, but because, at this nascent stage of online political marketing, messaging of a political nature seems to be more acceptable in a news environment than in most others. I've run political advertising in a lifestyle media environment, few people are ready to get a political message while they are looking up recipes for Beef Stroganoff.

But online newspapers also have something else that is desirable to a political marketer: their regionalism.

Online newspapers have the best capabilities for geo-targeting advertising. They have this for two reasons: one, newspapers, be they online or terrestrial, are primarily a local medium (lets set aside USA Today or New York Times for now); and two, many of them require registration from their users, providing the newspapers with declarative data by which to target. These are two reasons why advertisers should be using them as ad vehicles.

There are two things that need to be taken care of first, however, if online newspapers are going to get business with regularity and in the volume they might deserve. One, the sales strategy will need to be different. And two, the traditional guys at the paper are going to have to either get up to speed with how online advertising works or get out of the way.

First, let me address sales strategy. Telling online media guys that online newspapers can offer the same audiences as any major portal just ain't gonna cut it. Yes, the kinds of people who are found on Yahoo! can be found at an online newspaper. But that doesn't mean that a buy there makes sense. People who drink Coke might be on the Underwaterbasketweaver.com site, but it doesn't mean Coke should be buying media there.

Online newspaper sales, specifically dealing with networks of papers, need to position themselves as being able to give an advertiser's message the halo of local flavor. This is certainly the draw for political marketers, because in politics, they know that it is always local. Most people's lives are typically informed by locality, which in turn becomes a part of their identity. Using that gives a marketer authenticity that might not otherwise be gained through other means. Think of it as a kind of "cultural spot fill." A program like "Seinfeld" may not play in Lubbock, Texas as it does in New York, so I gotta buy some programming that is popular in Lubbock to deliver the region. Same idea here.

Second, at the local level anyway, the people running the online portion of the business need to learn more about how to deal with the industry. You have a lot of guys in there who are still talking about "hits" and still don't know what third-party ad servers are and still don't have any idea what the IAB/AAAA Standard Terms & Conditions are. Look, if you are talking about "hits," you better be Casey Kasem or Sammy Sosa. It makes it very hard to deal with newspaper vendors at the local level when they don't play by the rules the industry has tried to establish, they don't use the language we speak, and they don't understand the industry.

The online newspaper is poised to be a very good buy, but they've got to get real with their positioning and modern with their personnel. They don't want to end up wrapping fish in the long run.