Iliffe Media Group is an independent and innovative multimedia business with an extensive portfolio of newspapers, websites, magazines, radio, and television. With a history spanning over three centuries, Iliffe Media Group’s news brands continue to be trusted and influential within their communities. The group boasts a combined 1.5 million social media followers and an online audience of millions, serving more than 650,000 newspaper readers and attracting 6,000,000 website visitors across 37 titles.
The Challenge
Iliffe Media Group realized that while their key account sales teams successfully converted the top 20% of customers into digital campaigns, 80% of their loyal smaller print customers were still engaging in little to no digital advertising. This represented a significant potential for additional advertising revenue that needed to be tapped into.
The primary challenge was that reaching out to the smaller 80% of advertisers to upsell them a digital ad in addition to their print ad was both costly and unpromising.
Strategy
For Andrew Harding, Head of Commercial at Iliffe Media, it was always clear that the “strategy for our business must be to not allow customers to only take a print ad on its own. They need to have some kind of a digital offering in it.”
To implement this strategy, they decided to leverage AI and Smartico’s “Smart Ads” product to simplify the process for sales reps and local advertisers to unlock hidden ad potential. Local advertisers faced challenges such as:
•Poor-quality banners
•Lack of proper landing pages
•Overly complicated rate cards based on industry jargon like CPC and CPM
The Solution
Iliffe introduced a “full regional audience” package for their smaller advertisers who had not yet engaged in any other digital activities with them. For a single price, these advertisers received both a banner and a landing page, costing either £79 or £99 depending on the size of their print ad.
Screenshot from the rate card of Iliffe with a simple and clear offer for their advertisers
To provide high-quality banners and landing pages efficiently, Iliffe and Smartico used the print ad as an initial brief, extracting all necessary information from it and enriching it with additional official information about the business from the web. This approach allowed them to create not only a carousel banner ad but also a corresponding landing page. This eliminated the need for any overhead or approval or feedback loops.
The Results
Andrew Harding summarized the benefits: “Smart Ads turned out to be efficient, simple, and really cost-effective. It fitted very nicely with what we wanted to do from a business point of view and strategy. The value for money for us as a publisher but also the advertiser is just fantastic.”
After successfully implementing “Smart Ads” in New Milton, Newbury, and Stratford at the end of 2023, Iliffe Media Group decided to roll out its partnership with Smartico to introduce “Smart Ads” to 20 more titles.
“Smart Ads banderole” on an Iliffe news site named “Marketplace & Latest Offers”
Their Expansion
Ricky Allan, Chief Revenue Officer at Iliffe Media Group, stated: “Smart Ads worked exceptionally well for our titles in Newbury, New Milton, and Stratford, which is why we are now rolling it out to 20 more titles including Kent Online, Lincs Online, Suffolk News, and Cambridge Independent. We see that Smart Ads brings significant new advertising opportunities to local SMBs. The market adoption by sales teams, users, and advertisers is great, and we reached 100+ new ads per week within 20 days of launching the first title.”
With hundreds of local print ads per week across all titles and an upselling price of £79-99, this represents a six- to seven-digit pound revenue opportunity for Iliffe. Additionally, Smart Ads can serve as a foundation for offering more digital solutions to these customers, who appreciate the ease and effectiveness of their first digital product and subsequently desire “more,” such as additional formats, more ad impressions, personalized landing pages, etc.
Conclusions
Smart Ads not only provides an immediate new monetization and profitable revenue stream through print-to-online bundles but also serves as an excellent gateway to digital-only revenue with long-tail advertisers.
About Smartico
Smartico empowers regional news publishers to seamlessly sell and deliver thousands of local display and video ads for their local SMB advertisers. To learn more about how Smartico can enhance your advertising revenue, contact the founder & owner Christian at cs@smartico.one for a free demo and personalized business case analysis.
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