‘Closing the Loop – A Workshop for the Newspaper and Content Industry,’ a one-day event organized by IppStar at the Park Plaza Hotel in Noida opened up interesting opportunities for news publishers looking to monetize their content on the web. Attended by major news publishers such as Dinamalar, Amar Ujala, The Tribune and Delhi Press among others, the event did chart out the digital roadmap for the print media although it didn’t unlock the door to instant revenue-generating solutions. It made no bones about the fact that dealing with the online reality is perhaps the biggest challenge for publications that have dominated their respective niches till now. The bottom line – integrate your publication to analytics if you haven’t done so and use the analytics smartly to be able to automate your marketing operations and stay in healthy competition.
Analytics – this is where it all begins
One of the key objectives of the IppStar one-day workshop was to explain how leading media companies are currently using big data technologies and tools, such as analytics and Data Management Platforms (DMP) to track user data and produce actionable information for editors and advertisers. The workshop also simplified optimum positioning of advertising content by use of analytics as well as discussed native advertising, editorial and advertising campaign analytics that boost advertising sales.
Today, mobile devices like smartphones and digital channels have literally taken over the market compelling publishers to produce and distribute their content across multiple channels faster and more efficiently than they have ever done before. It is therefore important for media outlets to measure the performance of their content and to regularly optimize it in order to reach a larger audience. Most media businesses use editorial analytics to evaluate the performance of their editorial content and the advertisements that run alongside.
Ad server is the key
An ad server is an automation software which, as the name suggests, is a server, storing advertising content that gets optimally distributed across different online advertising slots. Ad Server software help publishing websites manage their ads sales and distribution, quantify them, select the right ads for specific campaigns and oversee implementation of online advertising campaigns. There is actually a whole lot more that ad server software can do to optimize online advertising both from the publisher as well as the advertiser perspectives.
With online readership gradually taking over the larger share of readership in the print media there is a serious need for restructuring the advertising operations here in order to earn advertising revenue in proportion to the rise in online readership. For this to happen, the print media platforms would have to play by the new set of rules that apply to the online domain. Use of big data is indispensable in online advertising for both the publisher and the advertiser and to do that, both must set their websites to analytics as that’s the only way they can get statistics and other information and learn about the performance of their websites.
From the IppStar workshop for the newspaper and content industry, conducted by Tariq Hussain, CEO of Express KCS, owners of a leading ad server platform known as MediaFerry, the underlying message was – analytics and ad sale and service automation are not just indispensable for news websites but they actually compliment each other. More importantly, the local language media also knows that it can’t merely rest its development on the continued growth projections of the Indian print industry.
At the end of the day, a business has to earn its revenues from its target market which is moving online faster than what most observers imagine. And why won’t new audiences embrace interactive content on multiple devices rather than print which is a one-way street. The challenge is monetization and this kind of workshop with many participants from the advertising departments of news publishers is a way to demystify the realm of analytics and dynamic digital advertising. It is they who will have to align their sales pitch to the new multi-channel campaigns that brand owners and their agencies are increasingly asking for.
