(Note: This is a personal blog about the creation of Knox TN Today and what we’re all about.)
Stretch your brain around this: Traditional advertising is about selling you space in a newspaper or air time on radio or TV. Then it’s up to you. Salespeople are encouraged to “up sell” customers with new promotions and gimmicks. Then it’s up to you. If one bank or shoe store comes in, then the sales reps flock to its competitors. Ad buys from competitors pressure the initial advertisers to spend more.
Meanwhile, newspaper circulation declines. Fragmented radio markets are chewed up even more by playlists on personal devices and ad-free satellite radio. It’s so easy to record and fast-forward through television commercials (or just watch Netflix) that only the technologically impaired are still watching them.
Into this maelstrom, we birthed Knox TN Today.
Knox TN Today is unique. We didn’t read a book or talk to a professor to create our model. Shannon Carey and I simply brainstormed what we knew about advertising and the news business. We ruled out subscriptions, deciding to make our news free to readers and advertiser-supported. We talked some very fine people/writers to work for cheap while we got the business up and running. And I set out to sell some ads.
Space is a problem on websites. There’s just no place to put ads that say much. Readers hate ads that pop up in the middle of a story – some even cover the screen until the reader finds the little X to make them go away.
So, here are our foundational premises:
- Logo links. A wise media buyer said, “Advertisers don’t want to drive readers to your website; they want you to drive readers to their website.”
- Direct mail. We charge a flat rate that includes website logo links and direct mail. It’s a great blend of the tried-and-true with the new-fangled.
- Advertorial content. We share stories about ways our advertisers are involved in the community.
- Category exclusivity. We don’t sell ads to competitors. Once we lock in a partner, we give everything we’ve got to that business. One health care system. One auto dealer. One bank. One restaurant. One real estate company. One two-year college. One non-profit. One grocery chain.
Will this work over time? Who knows? But I’d rather own Knox TN Today than any radio station or newspaper in town.