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.