The football season was looking great for the Green Bay Packers. The 2011 Super Bowl champions finished the regular season with 15 wins and one loss, only to lose in the playoffs last month to this year’s Super Bowl champions the New York Giants.
Many tears were shed in Titletown, but likely not too many among Green Bay’s biggest digital media players. True they would have profited from a Super Bowl bout — Gannett-owned local newspaper Green Bay Press Gazette’s website, GreenBayPressGazette.com, and its micro site PackersNews.com, had 6 million more page views in January 2011 than in the year prior period. But the sheer presence of a major NFL franchise in Green Bay, Wis., has been a big win for digital advertising providers playing in a market of its size.
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In terms of population, the Green Bay-Appleton market is the 69th largest DMA in the country, according to Nielsen. But in terms of digital spending, it actually ranks at No. 58, fueled by a strong league of Packer-backers, digital ad-embracing recreational businesses, as well as a solid auto dealer market. For the Gannett-owned Press Gazette, digital advertising actually makes up nearly 20% of its overall ad revenue, said Advertising Manager James Maurer.
“Being in a small market with a national football franchise gives us a different flavor,” suggested Dana VanDen Heuvel, president of Green Bay-based digital marketing consultancy Marketing Savant. “We’re obviously smaller, but at the end of the day there’s a little innovation going on and opportunity to experiment.”
The digital advertising market as a whole is above the curve in Green Bay, but some areas are still behind. Most noticeably, spending share in Green Bay towards streaming video ads is 4.6% less compared to the national average (the fact that only two local TV news players dominate the online media market could be a factor, Larry Shaw, VP of research for Borrell Associates, suggested).
Yet Green Bay is excelling in terms of behavioral targeting, with a local share of spending 4.3% higher than the national average. At $9.2 million in 2011, spending is expected to reach $89.4 million in 2016, a significant 868.2% increase.
“The Green Bay market is more focused on local advertisers,” Shaw said. “The smaller business market can afford to do that targeted ad instead of the old method of advertising. A local restaurant doesn’t want to reach as many people as possible, it wants to reach as many people in the area that are likely to go to the restaurant.”
According to comScore, the Press Gazette is the area’s digital media champion, scoring a monthly average of 429,500 unique visitors for the year period ending December 2011.
Only two other media players in the market reach comScore’s minimum reporting threshold of 50,000 unique visitors a month, said comScore marketing manager Carmela Aquino.
Fox affiliate WLUK-TV, owned by LIN Television, is at No. 2 with 355,117 average unique visitors a month to its site Fox11Online.com for the year ending last December. Jay Zollar, WLUK’s VP and GM, gives some credit to the station’s “balanced news” brand, directly inspired by cable news leader Fox News.
Coming in third is WBAY-TV, a local ABC affiliate owned by Young Broadcasting.
WBAY.com received a monthly average of 223,500 unique visitors for the 10-month period ending last December. (Aquino explained that WBAY used a different reporting methodology for December 2010 and January 2011, so numbers for those months are not comparable. In that same 10-month period, the Press Gazette averaged 428,100 unique monthly visitors and WLUK averaged 353,800 unique monthly visitors.)
The Press Gazette’s site-defining Packers coverage welcomed some digital enhancements for the team’s Super Bowl-winning season. During the playoffs, the Packers’ site featured daily live chats with team reporters, and the entire newsroom contributed to blog about Packer-related happenings in town, such as a local elementary school where students and teachers wore green and gold for the day, said Online Editor Julie Riebe.
For the most recent season, the site posted several videos a week of news conferences and locker room interviews, generating several thousand views each. It also ramped up efforts on an ongoing historic photo gallery project; approximately 2,000 to 2,500 Press Gazette archived photos were preserved and showcased on the site last season, with one gallery alone generating 221,000 page views, Riebe said.
The Press Gazette’s mobile sites underwent a Gannett-designed overhaul in February 2011. “Before they weren’t really that attractive,” Riebe said of the old mobile sites. “Now they’re cleaner, and they’ve made it easier to find features like weather and sports scores, and we’re able to add photo galleries to the mobile sites.”
The sites are also customizable; as an example, the Press Gazette put together a University of Wisconsin sports tab exclusive to its mobile sites. Five months later, Gannett modified the Green Bay sites to resemble the Odyssey template it has rolled out for other properties. “It was an effort to make the sites look cleaner to the reader, to present stories in a better format and to give more presence to photo galleries,” Riebe said.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Packers help lead Green Bay into Digital
via netnewscheck.com
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