Content Matters

Mark Cuban, always full of provocative ideas, has an interesting post on the Blog Maverick blog suggesting that Newspapers rethink their value proposition.

Rather than focusing on their editorial expertise, Cuban suggests that their core competency is local advertising sales.  And, much as Google has repositioned itself from being a search company to being a traffic monetization company, Cuban suggests newspapers are well-positioned to sell local web advertising on behalf of global media companies like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

As the post points out, Google and Yahoo will never have the feet on the ground to make small ad sales to local merchants.  At the same time, applications like Adsense remain too complicated for the typical local merchant to master on their own.  That leaves an opportunity for someone to step into that void and make web advertising accessible to local merchants.  Cuban suggests newspapers fill that void, though you could make a similar argument for yellow page vendors.

While Cuban's argument is logical, on a practical level there would be some substantial hurdles.  "Old media" companies have already found it difficult to convert their print ad sales reps to selling online advertising.  Though it would seem to be a reasonably easy leap, in practice it's not.  Many of the print sales people I've worked with are very resistant to learning how to sell in this new world (and those who are not have probably already moved to new media companies).  One approach used by old media companies has been to bring on a separate, specialized sales staff to sell digital ads.  Unfortunately, the print sales reps often view them as a threat (competing for same ad dollar) and don't give them access to their customers.

The other challenge would be getting a commitment to this model from the top.  Few of the C-level newspaper executives I've met could be considered innovators.  With ongoing consolidation, most are focused solely on cost-cutting, rather than investing to grow the top line.

That said, if a newspaper wanted to make this switch, here's how I'd suggest they make the model work:
- First, create a set of digital advertising specialists to work hand-in-hand with the local sales reps
- Next, build a set of tools and reports - call it "Adsense for Dummies" that could be used online or offline (so local merchants would not even have to get on the Web to manage their program)
- Then, incent your local sales reps by paying a substantially higher premium for digital ad sales than for print ad sales, even if it means double-paying of commissions (to sales rep and specialist)

Could this work?  I'm skeptical.  Tell me what you think.