September 20, 2011
AP launches iCircular weekly ad service for mobile news sites
Although many journalists hate to admit it, advertising circulars are a big reason why many people buy newspapers. This week the AP stepped beyond its core content mission to debut a new service that delivers weekly circular-style digital ads from top national consumer brands to the mobile presences of 40 partner newspaper…
According to an AP press release, the new iCircular service is a “mobile advertising service that appears under a ‘deals’ section on each of these newspapers’ apps and mobile sites.”
Initially, the service features weekly ads for 20 national retailers such as Kohl’s and Kmart.
The service is at least nominally localized and personalized. AP says the iCircular “automatically delivers geo-located deals and special offers nearest to the consumer. For smartphone users, iCircular also provides tools to create shopping lists, to connect to social media and to store loyalty card information.”
Such ad delivery services may be a good idea for newspapers, since—as U.K. researchers noted at a recent journalism conference, most newspapers are messing up their mobile strategies by failing to consider the business model and consumer value proposition in that environment.
The AP release did not disclose how revenues for iCircular mobile ads are handled.
For all partner papers, iCircular is integrated as a section within their mobile web site—a smart place to start if you want to reach the largest possible mobile audience, since feature phones still outnumber smartphones two to one, and since many feature phones and BlackBerry devices include web browsers. Some papers also are offering iCircular within their iPhone or Android apps.
It appears that some bugs may need to be worked out, both with how the service works on mobile phones and how its value is communicated to users.
On the technical side, I tested the San Francisco Chronicle’s mobile web implementation of iCircular. It had difficulty accepting my location data, and also generated an error when I tried to get information on local specials from Macy’s. But technical bugs can generally be solved.
Perhaps the larger challenge is that right now mobile visitors to a participating news site simply see a section heading called “iCircular” somewhere near the middle or bottom of the mobile news site’s home page. How are they supposed to know what this is? It might make more sense to label this “weekly coupons” or something similarly intuitive to consumers.
Also, clicking that section link in your mobile web browser yields a page that lists store brand names and logos, but no immediate examples of the kind of deals on offer that week. This might make it difficult for consumers to decide which store to check out first—and anything that makes clicking decisions harder means more mobile users are likely to give up.
Of course, this project is just beginning its pilot phase, so bugs are to be expected. It’ll be interesting to see this effort develop—and which other mobile advertising solutions emerge for newspaper sites and apps.
The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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Tags: mobile, business models, newspapers, advertising, ap
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A thoughtful article. Thought I give a quick update to your readers.
The technical requirements of an “app-within-an-app” integration are challenging and we are working through a number of bugs. We expect to release a hotfix shortly that should fix the challenges you experienced.
The short term technical issues aside, this is a very big opportunity for the newspaper industry. The excitement from the retailer community has been unprecedented. Already receiving calls from additional retailers interested in getting in front of the industry’s growing mobile audiences. On the other side of the fence, for years, newspaper readers have viewed the weekly retailer ads as a piece of content that they look forward to getting—a very unique form of advertising—and this is the right time to create a marketplace for circulars and to bring this content to them on the go.
Most newspaper applications/websites are placing iCircular under a “Deals” or “Weekly ads” tab that is part of the top level navigation. To see an example a mobile web example look m.stltoday.com from your iPhone or Android device. Also, the iPhone and Android APP integrations are even more promising.
As an industry we have a lot to learn about what the mobile shopper is interested in and this pilot test will give us first-hand information on their likes/dislikes. I expect that the learnings alone will be invaluable in shaping the future of mobile circulars generally and iCircular specifically.
— Jeffrey S. Litvack, GM Global Product Development and in charge of iCircular
By Jeff Litvack, 09/21/11 at 4:16 am
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