The traditional competition for local advertising dollars between radio, TV and newspapers has morphed to a new arena with the rise of the Internet. It’s been happening for quite awhile where the local rep offers your dealer a TV or radio spot, a newspaper ad and then bundles in a banner ad on their site.
Here’s a slide from a presentation by Edison Research and Arbitron that tells us a lot about how the battle for consumers is going.
I’m surprised that local TV Web sites do so well especially seeing that they are tied with local newspaper sites.
I always felt that the local newspaper had more reporters on the street than any single local television or radio station and so I’ve always favored going to my local newspaper site to get the best and the most information.
However, it’s not all about reading news. For one thing we’ve seen the stupendous rise in video watching on the Web and that fits right into a local television’s expertise. Could it be that lots of people prefer watching the news than reading it? So, you go to the local TV station’s site. And, radio stations are great at promotions, contests and, of course, music and talk.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this slide for brand managers. The biggest one is that a good percentage of consumers are going to local media sites and your dealers need banner ads and landing pages to reach this audience. So, give them the tools to build the banner ads, give them the tools to build a landing page that you control and monitor and track everything that happens to improve your ROI.