Marketing to Vericals; Fractured Advertising for a Fractured Market

Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 11 of August , 2008 at 11:42 am

Kate Kaye on ClickZ wrote a succinct piece on CondeNet’s new online advertising strategy. In her article she describes CondeNet’s new strategy of online advertising to vertical market paths rather than specific sites. Basically this just means that, instead of selling a chunk of ad space on Style.com, a beauty product company can purchase a block of space across multiple beauty and fashion sites. In a consumer market that is fractured across hundreds of magazine sites, it’s a smart move for multiple reasons.

In lieu of selling individual magazine sites, the company’s new sales approach pairs sales execs with particular content and advertiser verticals including food, travel, fashion and lifestyle, and teen. In the past, one sales group sold Style.com, Men.Style.com, and teen photo site flip.com, while another hawked Epicurious.com, Concierge.com, NutritionData.com. For example, someone selling “beauty” will offer it on Style.com, Glamour.com and Allure.com. One brand bought what Salomon called “the healthy footprint,” advertising on Self.com, food and recipe site Epicurious.com and nutrition information and tool site NutritionData.com.

Not only will CondeNet gain additional advertising revenue for their less-popular sites, companies with products to promote won’t be juggling for space on one site alone and get lost in the shuffle. Utilizing the space on the not-as-well-known mag sites will bring in new customers that might never see the product otherwise.

This entire plan is indicative of how consumers use the context and information on internet now. Instead of having one or two magazines that they subscribe to every month, consumers grew used to having 4 or 5 magazine sites that they visited. Over time their searches on health, beauty, fashion and especially travel netted them with search results for mag sites that would have never been popular enough to grace their coffee table a generation ago. As a result, the consumer market is too fractured to reach for a company advertising in only a couple of the most popular magazines and sites. This same principal holds for local advertisers trying to reach consumers in smaller markets. There is a broad range of sites for every local region, and it may just pay to take a lesson from CondeNet’s strategy. In order to reach a broad base of consumers, advertisers have to market across a broad base of sites that cater to their target.

                      Category: Local Online Advertising                      

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