• by Gavin O'Malley , August 10, 2005

Gannett Co.-owned USAToday.com said Tuesday that its online advertisers now have access to PointRoll's rich media formats at no additional charge, provided they pay a minimum cost-per-thousand impression rate. The move comes just two months after Gannett acquired the online technology company for an estimated $100 million.

The newspaper hopes that the new program will give marketers an added incentive to advertise on USAToday.com, and to use PointRoll's ad-serving tools when they do, said Laryssa Kundanmal, director of marketing for USAToday.com.

"There's a push by all publishers to make it easier for advertisers to advertise on their sites," Kundanmal said. "So we're making popular rich media advertising--its superior sound, movement, and interactive ability--accessible to advertisers who might have been limited to conventional banner ads before this partnership." Advertisers who choose PointRoll also have full access to its analytics tools, which extend beyond direct response rates to include interaction and engagement rates, Kundanmal added.

The company plans to eventually extend the program to all of Gannett's 130-odd local Web sites in the United States, said Tara Connell, Gannett's vice president of public relations. "At the moment, the arrangement is exclusive to USA Today because our local sites don't have the appropriate billing procedures to differentiate between the different ad formats," Connell explained.

Neither Connell nor Kundanmal would discuss others ways in which Gannett plans to benefit from PointRoll in the future.

USAToday.com, which claims over 8.5 million unique monthly visitors, currently offers a variety of targeting capabilities--including dayparting, geotargeting, editorial adjacencies, and customer segmentation.