A fantastic success story in local TV, newspaper and web: aggregating audiences and linking to transactions

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Next week I am giving the opening keynote at the Regional TV Marketing Association conference in Byron Bay, which brings together the top executives across regional television, media buyers, and corporate marketing roles.

I’ll share more on what I cover when I get a chance (not for a few weeks probably), but I thought it was worth sharing one of the standout case studies of success in local media, including TV and newspapers.

This has been driven by Clark Gilbert, who has famously come from being a professor at Harvard Business School to running a media company in Utah, the heart of Mormon country. The results so far have been exceptional, including 20% growth in the Deseret News newspaper in 2009, the highest in the US. This interview with Gilbert brings out some deep insights, making it well worth watching.

Editor and Publisher brought out exactly the right quotes from the interview on how local media companies need to think:

The wrong way: “If you frame yourself purely as a content player, you’re going to be in big trouble.” The right way: Use news to aggregate audience and then wrap it with other business models such as transactions.

“Newspapers have been doing this for 50 years,” Gilbert says. “The classified section had nothing to do with news content.”

Gilbert was talking largely in the context of mobile, which he sees as fundamental to local media strategies. As such they are moving into “deal-of-the-day” and “last-chance deal” offers, which are the heart of what has fueled the “ridiculously fast” growth of companies such as Groupon.

Newsonomics has some insightful perspectives on the Deseret phenomenon, describing their recipe as:

* Start with several cups full of daily newspaper and broadcast types.

* Take a teaspoon of the Christian Science Monitor.

* Add in a dash of HuffPo spice.

* Ladle a tablespoon of Demand Media into the mix.

* Borrow ingredients from two Washington D.C. news companies, the 143-year-old Washington Post and the one-month-old TBD.com.

* Shred, dice, slice, puree, whir and, finally, blend.

A powerful melange that shows that media companies that truly reinvent themselves are creating ample opportunities there for the taking.