The newsonomics of ads that go bump in the night

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
We live in two worlds.
In the afternoon, on our desktops or laptops, we read news like the new Pew study showing yet another way that newspapers are going to hell. This one was hardly news to anyone in the industry, but it put the issue plainly, if dryly:

A new study of advertising in news by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, currently, even the top news websites in the country have had little success getting advertisers from traditional platforms to move online. The digital advertising they do get appears to be standard ads that are available across many websites. And with only a handful of exceptions, the ads on news sites tend not to be targeted based on the interests of users, the strategy that many experts consider key to the future of digital revenue.

Pew’s report underscores the fact that many of us have written about: Digital advertising, once the little sister, is surpassing print (newspaper and magazines) in the U.S. and Europe, and will pass whatever we mean when we say “TV” by 2016 or so. So news companies’ failure to get a larger piece of the fastest-growing ad segment — perhaps the fastest-growing ever — is a big problem. And the problem is growing: Three years ago, the top five digital companies took 63 percent of U.S. digital ad revenue; this year, they’ll take 72 percent, eMarketer estimates. Those companies: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL. That 9 percent differential is worth about $3.5 billion a year. Yes, it’s getting worse, by so many standards, as we’ll continue to see over the next month as final 2011 financials come in and more jobs go away.

If you’re in the publishing business, are your people building toolkits, experimenting, and getting faster at time-to-market?

In the evening, though, on our oh-so-lean-back tablets, we can open up our au courant news apps and face a quite different reality.
Open up The Wall Street Journal tablet app this week, and you’ll find a garden’s delight of interactive ads. These ads grab the potential of the tablet and run with it — joyously. They move beyond what we’ve known as “advertising” and sprint into a new field of commercial conversation. These truly interactive ads are increasingly targeted to users, but more importantly they attract top-end advertisers, at good rates, into news products.
An early adopter of the iPad — the Journal’s launch date of April 3, 2010, slips easily off the tongue of Daniel Bernard, chief product officer of the Wall Street Journal Digital Network — the WSJ has a half-dozen or so cousins in early experimentation. Add The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, the Financial Times, Reuters, AP, and a few others to that short list of news companies with two years of development experience under their belts.
It’s the Journal, though, that seems to be making the most headway with this next generation of ads. In fact, perusing the Journal tablet edition reminds me of the wonder many felt viewing that Wonderfactory-created SI demo a month before Steve Jobs launched the iPad.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/02/the-newsonomics-of-ads-that-go-bump-in-the-night/