Free seminars will help you host a great event

A GOOD idea never goes astray. And with many an editor saying they want to do more to meet the readers, the ability to hold quality, small-scale events can be valuable to the newspaper business.

The Australian Conference and Events Bureau is holding a series of seminar in about 10 days – not much use for our New Zealand colleagues (sorry about that). The ACEB puts on an excellent seminar and has previously offered valuable advice to members and non-members alike.

These particular seminars are free. The bureau promises to cover entertainment & speakers, audio visual, theming, transport, tours, merchandise, exhibition hire, event management & team building. If you need to add public or private events to your media schedule next year, then this seminar should be a great starting point for new ideas or a fresh approach.

Adelaide – 18th November 2008 (Mercure Grosvenor Hotel Adelaide)
Sydney – 18th November 2008 (Novotel Rockford Darling Harbour)
Brisbane – 20th November 2008 (Novotel Brisbane)
Darwin – 25th November 2008 (Novotel Darwin Atrium)
Melbourne – 25th November 2008 (Mercure Spring Street)

To register, click here. It’s free, but places are limited.

Seeing the silver light

For a close look at a developing technology that could change the way advertising appears online, check out this post on the Digital Business blog.

One wii step for a sales rep, one giant leap for Editor-kind

There’s a lot of talk about print and digital ad bundling these days. It all sounds good in theory but the reality can be quite different to what the traditional newspaper people think, writes Mark Hollands.

Take a look at this ad on YouTube (apologies to those who might have seen it before) and notice the creative powers of this online ad. It’s brilliant: a great example of how to combine the power of the product (a wii game called Wario Land) with the environment in which it is being sold. It demonstrates what can be done with awesome imagination, commercially-minded co-operation from management and a sense of humour.

Once you have seen the ad, ask yourself what would happen if you walked into the Editor’s office and said this: “Hi, you don’t know me I’m from the ad department… umm, I’ve got this great idea. I sell an ad to Nintendo for a game in which crazy characters crash through things and bash each other. When the ad plays, our home page starts to fall apart. First, only small bits of the page fall off, then the photo of the prime minister tumbles off the page and then splash headline crashes out of the browser… you’re gonna love it!”

This would be an extreme and ridiculous conversation if a similar pitch had not happened at YouTube. I am sure that if anything remotely similar happened on a newspaper website, there’d be screams about the quality and sanctity of journalism. And rightly so, but it is fun to see what is possible and begin to entertain the idea that online advertising is more than banner ads, click-throughs and UBs.

You can’t sell that!

It’s not just newspapers that are feeling pain at the moment – the advertising industry itself is in an enormous state of flux, writes Kylie Davis.

IBM Global Business Services claim the advertising industry will undergo more change in the next five years, than it has in the past 50, in a cheerily named report, “The end of advertising as we know it”.

So if the advertising industry is being turned upside down, how can newspapers be expected to react and chart a course through such turbulent waters?

Bundled sales – combining print and online space – is loudly proclaimed as the answer. It marries the brand awareness of display space in newspapers – a medium where readers are widely reported not to “mind” ads but where marketers are never sure how much of their ad is working – with the cut through and direct delivery of eyeballs and transactions from online – where the ads are often intrusive and annoying but you can see exactly how many people clicked you.

But is anyone doing combined sales really effectively yet?

And in asking that, I don’t mean just slapping together a fixed offer, but creating ad campaigns across online and in print that delivers yield and plays to the strengths of each medium’s strengths (not just column centimetres and banner ads).

A lot of people are trying to bring the two departments together, but in some places it’s a herculean task.

The lovely thing about newspapers is that the space is finite. You can easily see what it looks like and when it’s sold out, you put the price up before you offer the next round.

But online is infinite. And the performance of the space is affected by the creative delivery, the relevance of the content around it, its connection to the home page, and how many links you’ve got pointing to it. And with so many campaigns now being paid on click throughs, rather than space taken, there are a huge number of variables that determines how much – or how little – you’ll actually get.

How do newspapers create a love match?

Tell us how it works – or doesn’t – at your newspaper. Or even how it should and could work.

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