Kansas City SEO and SEM

SDSU College of Extended Studies
SDSU – The Principle of Media Management

by: Anne Haynes

Tonight’s class was around Public Broadcasting/Radio and Magazines. While learning about how public broadcasting dollars have been going down regularly for 2 years was interesting, the more interesting segment of the class was Corinne Lynch, District Manager of MNI a division of A Time Inc. speaker.

Corinne comes from a strong print background and was able to shed volumes of light about how traditional print advertising is moving to the digital age. What I found interesting about MNI’s print model is they sell in groups of publications. For example, if I owned a high end car dealership and wanted to increase sales in the San Diego area, I could run a local print campaign in national magazines; Forbes, Time and Money. Not only could I run this local campaign nationally, but I could hit 3-10 publications at once; same ad, 5 magazines, same time-frame and only circulating in San Diego. While this model sounds expensive it is actually more affordable because there are limits in the areas of control; the advertiser is not able to request only placing ads in Forbes and Money and not in Time; the advertiser is not able to request the ad to be placed in the front of the publication and not in the back. Utilizing the cookie cutter approach to localized advertising in national publications streamlines the cost of operations and in-turn the advertiser gains.

I being the outspoken type of person, had to ask about online and how MNI is dealing with the huge white elephant sitting in the room. Corinne transitioned into the online offering and how MNI is offering banner advertising on multiple sites. Her captive audience listened as she explained the difficulties in moving traditional print advertising sales people into online advertising people. How do you take a person with 10+ years in print advertising to change their definition of a “publisher”? A publisher is not a large company that publishes volumes of novels and publications. A publisher, in the web world, is “A” web site, not tons of web sites. How do you reach the mass publishers in web advertising? Oh, but of course, pay-per-click, affiliate networks and BLOGS. Corrine did mention about working with DoubleClick for MNI’s online offering. What truly hit home was how different the vocabulary truly is and how moving from print to online produces a learning curve.

Soon, there will no longer be a curve; seasoned print advertising professionals will talk both languages and web advertising professionals will catch up with print. But the fact remains, with the web; advertisers know how many people clicked; how many people submitted their information; who returned and their NAME, EMAIL + PHONE