Yahoo! advertising blitz hits Naples

The blitz is on.

As part of a new way of selling online advertising, sales agents for the Naples Daily News and its sister publications in Southwest Florida are pounding the pavement this week, trying to drum up new business through an alliance with Yahoo!.

The E.W. Scripps Co. — owner of the Naples Daily News — is one of the first companies to use Yahoo’s new targeted advertising program.

“It’s being developed now and being deployed,” said Rusty Coats, vice president for interactive at Scripps in Cincinnati.

Scripps has launched the program in three other newspaper markets: Ventura and Redding in California, and in Knoxville, Tenn. It’s all in an effort to boost revenues at a time when the newspaper industry is suffering from a bad economy, a drop in retail sales and declines in circulation.

Here’s how the new online program works: Local ads appear based on what users do online when they visit Yahoo! or the Naples Daily News Web sites, from researching stories to checking e-mail or stock prices. It’s called behavioral targeting, or “BT.”

Users of the two Web sites would see different ads from local companies based on their unique interests. Their habits aren’t tracked on other Web sites.

“This platform is an audience-based platform,” Coats said. “When you buy an ad and you are looking to reach someone wanting to buy a truck, they are the only one that will see that ad.”

Before if you were a dealership and you wanted to sell F-150s you might buy an ad in the sports section of the newspaper figuring that men buy trucks and men read that section, he explained. But you would miss part of your market, while advertising to others who aren’t interested, Coats said.

Corporate trainers and other leaders with Scripps are in Naples this week to help sell the program.

“Our audience, when you combine print and online, is larger than ever. And when you add in Yahoo!, no one else comes close. And when you add in behavioral targeting, you get to pay only for reaching your targeted audience,” said Chris Doyle, Naples Daily News publisher, in an e-mail.

E.W. Scripps is just one of dozens of media companies in a partnership with Yahoo! for online advertising and job recruitment.

Other newspapers in the consortium will be launching the new targeted advertising program too.

“The partnership is a long-term deal. There are 38 newspaper groups involved, representing 796 newspapers around the country,” said Lem Lloyd, vice president of U.S. partnerships at Yahoo!

The partnership has the potential to drive a lot more revenue to newspapers. It has evolved over time.

Since joining Scripps in August, Coats has made the advertising partnership with Yahoo! a priority.

Since then the effort has brought in more than $2 million in revenue for Scripps. Up until August, the partnership had only raised $100,000, Coats said.

“My bias is that everyone can sell this,” he said. “When we did this in Knoxville, the top seller was a woman that has been with the company for 34 years. She had never sold online advertising. She sold almost $200,000 in online advertising.”

Doyle called it a “great marriage” with Yahoo!

“It’s a great experience for advertisers and readers, because you are matching people who want to be matched, when they want to be matched,” he said.