Category: direct marketing

Free MediaBids’ PowerHour: 3 Critical Questions Every Ad Sales Pro Must Answer

Join media/advertising sales expert Ernest F. Oriente, the founder of PowerHour, LLC ,the live weekly PowerHour Advertising Sales Academy and Jedd Gould, CEO of MediaBids for a free MediaBids Powerhour on Thursday, Oct. 13,  at 1 p.m. Eastern/New York time focused on “3 Critical Questions Every Ad Sales Pro Must Answer.”

To Register for Free, Click Here: https://www.mediabids.com/m/t/teleseminar-registration

During this 60-minute MediaBids PowerHour we will discuss the points below plus field your specific questions:                                                                                                                                                           

  1. Who reads your publication? Who visits your website?
  2. What do your readers buy?
  3. What is a new customer worth to your advertisers


Registration Information
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When:  Thursday, October 13 Please note, the above MediaBids PowerHour starts at 1:00 p.m. Eastern/New York/Toronto time, which is:

12:00 p.m. Central/Dallas/Winnipeg time
11:00 a.m. Mountain/Denver/Calgary time
10:00 a.m. Pacific/San Francisco/Vancouver time
9:00 a.m. Alaska time
6:00 p.m. GMT/London time

Fee:  No charge

Recording is available after the MediaBids PowerHour, but you must register below to receive it.

To register, please click here.

For additional registration information, please contact MediaBids.com at 800-545-1135 or E-mail jpeterson@mediabids.com


Holiday Ad Spotlight: Fairytale Brownies

Fairytale Brownies

 

Fairytale Brownies are back this holiday season at Mediabids. Fairytale Brownies make a terrific gift that everyone is sure to love. Their brownies are made from the ”finest all-natural ingredients like rich Callebaut Belgian dark chocolate, creamery butter, fine cake flour and fresh eggs.” They also don’t use any trans fats, preservatives or artificial colors and they’re certified kosher. Fairytale Brownies are delicious and come in eleven different flavors from cream cheese to mint chocolate and raspberry swirl to toffee crunch. Fairytale Brownies also offers gourmet bars and cookies for nearly every occasion in their own uniquely designed gift boxes.

 

FB Brownies

Their ”Christmas Brownie Bliss” gift box includes thirty-six individually wrapped, bite-size brownies in six different flavors. This special holiday gift is regularly $54.95 but is being offered for a limited time at $39.95 (25% off!) plus FREE shipping. A delicious holiday gift at a great price point for gifts to family, friends and associates. Visit Mediabids.com or call us at 1-800-545-1135 for more information or to request an ad today. The holidays are fast approaching!

Holiday Ad Spotlight: Crown Maple Syrup

Crown Maple Holiday Ad

 

Crown Maple is artisan quality, estate-grown maple syrup from Madava Farms and 800-acre organic, family farm, established in 2010 in New York’s Hudson Valley. In addition to maple syrup, their product line-up includes maple sugar, maple-infused condiments, maple-flavored snacks and craft beverages with Crown Maple.

 

Crown Maple image

 

This holiday season Crown Maple is offering three special gift options, each at 25% off! The three options include the ”Pancake Breakfast Gift Set,” the ”Bourbon Barrell Aged Organic Maple Syrup” and ”Infused Organic Maple Syrup Trio.” Customers can buy one or all three. Shipping and handling is only $5 per item. These are great gifts and a good value. Perfect for giving this holiday season to family, friends and associates.

We have display ads and a classified liner ad for this campaign. The ads are available in both color and BW. Visit Mediabids.com or call us at 1-800-545-1135 for more information and to request your Crown Maple ad today.

 

 

Mediabids Announces Over 1,000 Holiday Ad Placements

MediabidsLogo_Black-Orange

 

PRESS RELEASE

MEDIABIDS ANNOUNCES OVER 1,000 HOLIDAY AD PLACEMENTS & COUNTING

Winsted, November 13, 2019 – This year marks the beginning of Mediabids’ second decade of being a leader in national print advertisers, on a performance-basis. Since 2008 Mediabids has generated nearly 5 million phone calls for hundreds of consumer-facing, direct-response advertisers. Mediabids has newspaper and regional magazine affiliate-partners nationwide and currently more than fifty different advertisers delivering print revenue. These advertisers believe in the quality leads and customer relationships that can only be activated through print media platforms and they want to be in more publications.

For the 2019 holiday season, Mediabids is offering six great gift advertisers. Omaha Steaks is back for the eleventh year. After Father’s Day, the holiday season is the second best time of year for Omaha Steaks sales. Hale Groves, Pittman & Davis and Crown Maple are back again this year as well. Finally, rounding out our roster of 2019 holiday season advertisers are Fairytale Brownies and Nueskes. Visit http://unbouncepages.com/holiday-ads-2019/ to see the ads and consumer offers.

Through November 12th, we’ve already exceeded 1,000 holiday ad placements. Our strongest season yet and still a month to go! Visit http://www.mediabids.com to view all our holiday ads and request yours today. We have the ads in all sizes and in color as well as black and white (including a classified liner ad for several holiday campaigns.) If you don’t already have an account at mediabids.com registering is quick and free of charge.

Contact:
Jim Jinks
VP, Business Development
jjinks@mediabids.com

Dramatically Higher Payouts Are Here

What a difference a year can make!

Over the past year something really notable and exciting has happened in response-based, national, print advertising. Per response payouts have gone up A LOT and more and better advertisers are moving into the industry.

Payout Escalation

In October 2018, among our set of advertisers, the average payout per response was $18.00. One year later the overall average has gone up to $27.00 – a 50% increase! But this isn’t even the most notable change year-over-year.

In October 2018, among our top ten highest payouts, the average payout per response was $46.00. One year later, the average payout per response, among our top ten highest paying advertisers is now pushing toward $100. The average is up 80% from one year ago and is now at $83 per response.

Our highest paying advertiser is now at $175 per qualified response. One year ago our highest paying advertiser was $100 per qualified response. That advertiser has since gone up to $115 per qualified response but this year-over-year increase is 75%. These trends are great for the industry and especially for publishers.

A big part of our role at Mediabids is to prove to advertisers what we’ve known for years – leads from print readers are the highest quality leads in direct-response advertising. Full stop. Print readers are more informed and thus are further down the conversion funnel, once they pick-up the phone to call an advertiser. These higher payouts from advertisers is proof that they’re finally getting the message and more importantly, seeing the results. As such we anticipate we’ll continue to see more advertisers be more aggressive with their per response payouts. In other words we don’t see these higher payouts as an inflation bubble that’ll burst. We expect to see payout continue to gradually move up across most verticals in national, per response, print advertising.

Current highest paying advertisers at Mediabids:

Shelf Genie

American Standard Walk Ins

LeafFilter

Andersen by Renewal

ADT Security

Acorn Stairlifts

MobileHelp

The Hartford-AARP

World Health Link

A Place for Mom

 

Visit www.Mediabids.com to view the ads for all of our campaigns, including the new Holiday 2019 campaigns we’ve just posted – Omaha Steaks, Hale Groves, Fairytale Brownies and others.

 

 

 

Performance Print #1 for Conversion

 

Mediabids_Conversion_1

Mediabids_Conversion_2

Mediabids_Conversion_3

 

For a printable pdf version click here: Mediabids_Affiliate_Handout_v1

 

You Can’t Ignore Podcasts Forever

Podcasting

I tend to be a later adopter of things. I’m not a luddite by any means. But I still prefer CDs for music. I mean c’mon, the sound is far better than digital listening. I also still prefer newspapers and magazines in print rather than digital formats. I absolutely much prefer an actual book to an audio or reader version.

But I’m no luddite. Case in point, I listen to podcasts. Fact check: I listen to A LOT of podcasts.

I still haven’t listened to ”Serial,” the podcast that seemed to put podcasting on the map. But I do listen to other popular podcasts such as NYT’s ”The Daily,” ”In the Dark,” Slate’s ”The Political Gabfest” and the Ringer Network’s ”Bill Simmons Podcast” among many others that focus on politics and urbanism. If you’re already a podcast listener and you’re looking for something new, here’s a few lists of ”best podcasts of 2018:”

Esquire Magazine

Time Magazine

Vulture

The New Yorker

Discover Pods

Advertisers and publishers are somewhat like me in that so far they’re still late adopters of podcasting. Pods have been around for at least fifteen years and season one of the first podcasting hit, ”Serial,” originally aired in 2014. Yet spending on podcasts is still under $400 million annually in the U.S. (in a $200 billion ad spend market.) So ad spending on podcasts is still relatively small but emerging.

On the publisher side of things, despite the success of ”The Daily” from the New York Times, podcasts from media properties, especially print media are still somewhat few and far between. Quick…name another one! Mother Jones, is one example, that does a great podcast for those inclined to listen about politics with a liberal lean. Also, shout out to my local daily paper that does a daily podcast on local news – The Morning Record.

Generally speaking podcasting is exploding but if one works in publishing or advertising there’s a surprisingly limited number of podcasts worth your time. Here’s an unofficial list (from this unofficial podcast reviewer) of the better podcasts that focus on topics in content and advertising:

Ad Age Ad Lib

Rock Hard Ads

The BeanCast

Advertising Is Dead

Pivot

Marketing Over Coffee

There are many more podcasts that focus on more specific content and advertising topics – social media, site traffic, content marketing, affiliate marketing etc. etc. We’ll focus on a few of these in a future post.

In the meantime, consider giving these ad industry podcasts a try. Better late than never!

 

Contributor: Jim Jinks

Facebook: A Local News Company

 

facebook

Let’s not get carried away, Facebook is still the world’s second most visited internet site (after YouTube.) But no one can deny that the past two years have been bumpy for the leading social media company. Privacy scandals, post-2016 election revelations of Facebook’s failure to more forcefully counter the sharing of ”false news,” and an unpopular change to Facebook’s algorithms have all contributed to user defections and declining site visits.

Indeed even if some of the decline in traffic to Facebook is actually due to their users spending more time on other apps, Facebook’s Instagram and Messenger for example, Facebook’s much publicized announcement yesterday to invest in local journalism is as much about the priorities of Facebook’s core businesses, as it is an attempt to make amends for recent missteps.

First, what exactly are we talking about here? Facebook is granting over $300 million to a select group of journalism nonprofit partners including the Pulitzer Center, the American Journalism Project, the Local Media Association and several others. The grants are to fund the hiring of journalists to focus on local news and content as well as the development of technology for better ”storytelling and newsgathering.” Here’s a roundup of reporting on the story:

The Street

Axios

Editor & Publisher

Reuters

Second, why invest in local news and content? Because it is the backbone of social media sites, especially Facebook. Nearly half of Facebook users get news on the site and about half of those users share or comment on the news. In short, news is vital to Facebook’s audience engagement and community building.

Third, why are news audiences important? Aside from the fact that publications need subscribers and readers, news consumers tend to be better educated and have average to above-average household incomes. Advertisers value print publications and digital news platforms because they are ”trusted environments” for their brands. But social media users have said they tend to not have as much trust in the news they find on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Without trusted content, Facebook smartly knows they’ll have a harder time attracting advertisers and developing new revenue streams. Given that news consumers are most likely to trust strong local journalism, Facebook’s investments in local news production is a straightforward play for increasing trust, increasing engagement and increasing revenues.

 

Contributor: Jim Jinks

 

 

 

 

 

Hey Gannett, Why Buy More Papers?

networks

As of this writing, it’s quite possible that Gannett has bought Tronc (a.k.a. Tribune Publishing.) As many media watchers know, Gannett has made a series of offers to Tronc this year. Based on a report from Politico Media today, the deal appears to be all but announced.

Whether you’re inside or outside the media business you may be wondering why exactly Gannett is in such a hurry to snap up Tronc, one of the country’s largest metro newspaper publishers. One thing is for sure, it’s not necessarily about publishing more print newspapers.

Newspapers and journalism have been in the midst of a great deal of industry upheaval and change for the past decade. The future of newspaper publishing isn’t about growing print circulation. Rather, the future is about digital (meaning video, really) content distribution to a valued audience of reliable news and content consumers. Metro newspaper publishers are aiming to deepen their relationships, and drive revenue, by providing their loyal news consumers with more content overall and more mobile-friendly content, to be precise.

Tronc owns the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, the San Diego Union Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the South Florida Sun Sentinel and several other large metro papers. In other words Tronc has audiences in several top ten media markets. According to ComScore, Tronc’s online audience exceeds that of the Washington Post and nearly matches Disney. As you might expect, these are among the largest audiences on the web.

Gannett is already the largest newspaper publisher in the county. The purchase of Tronc, with it’s large online audiences, content distribution network and investments in video production,  position Gannett to be a major player in the future of content, information and entertainment. A future that is, more or less, already here.

Post by Jim Jinks

Audi & Tecate: Debate Night In America

debates

As you may have heard, the future of the free world is at stake tonight in the first of this season’s head-to-head Presidential debates. Back in the Fall of 2014, when many thought this election would likely be between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, I thought the debates would be big, even ”Super Bowl” big. After all, this was projected to be an election between yet another Bush and yet another Clinton. Little did I know, it would be Trump and Clinton and the hype for this first debate would be more akin to the Super Bowl and the World Cup combined!

Expectations are running high for an entertaining and decisive evening. Indeed, the viewership is expected to be 100 million or more. Given the size of the anticipated audience, this debate has become one of the largest TV and advertising (to a lesser degree) events of the year. Unlike the Super Bowl, however, you can’t really watch the debates for the halftime show or just the commercials. The debates are commercial free but the pre- and post-game network TV slots are going for $250k and up.

Here are two notable spots, you’ll see tonight, that perfectly tie-in to the moment:

Audi

Tecate

Considering the debates are about 90 minutes, there will be many words spoken tonight by the candidates. But these :30 spots from Audi and Tecate, when all is said and done, may actually convey more to swing viewers/voters.

Happy viewing!

Post by Jim Jinks & Darcy Mauke