Back on Dec 9th, 2009, Chris Saridakis, Gannett senior vice president and chief digital officer (and our fearless leader) shared part of the ShopLocal success story with analysts at the UBS Media and Communications Conference.
Below are the two relevant parts to ShopLocal of the overall presentation that spans all of the assets that make up Gannett Digital. It’s great recognition of the successful integration with PointRoll and Gannett, and its always fun to see one of your “babies” (i.e., CircularCentral) get such clear promotion on the big stage. So here’s to another record year in 2010.
“Our acquisition of ShopLocal continues to exceed our expectations. We saw a significant improvement in profitability in 2009 and as we are still executing on synergies between PointRoll and ShopLocal, we expect to see further financial improvements in 2010, most notably on the topline. ShopLocal continues to grow its roster of clients and powers 44 of the top 50 retailers’ Websites.”
If there is one image that the team here at ShopLocal is proud of, its not of any of our digital solutions that we bring to market. Rather it's an image of our clients and the relationships we have with each of them. The longevity and multi-year partnerships that most of the retailers have with ShopLocal is truly unique and exciting.
“One of the big product initiatives for ShopLocal in 2010 will be CircularCentral, what we believe could be a newspaper industry solution for retailers’ preprint programs. As consumers increasingly move online, circulars must extend their presence online to remain relevant. CircularCentral is a product that replicates the Sunday print experience by delivering digital versions of national and local circulars in one location. It can be distributed across any digital medium from PointRoll’s rich media ad units to mobile applications. It offers a powerful targeted and localized online ad solution for retailers, while offering publishers a way to defend their lucrative Sunday preprint business. We have rolled it out across all of Gannett’s newspaper and TV sites and as well as other major portals, including Yahoo. We continue to receive positive feedback from advertisers so far and are increasingly hearing from them that they want a scaled solution across the newspaper industry overall.”
CircularCentral is poised to become the digital distribution vehicle for preprint advertisers, both within Gannett and across other leading newspaper companies, as the need for large audience is key to success.
Advertisers asking (aka forcing by waving their dollars) publishers to think outside of the banner ad box is nothing new. Sure its a trend that has continued to pick up steam in the last 18 months where is seems like any large ad buy from a publisher includes something custom and unique. Everyone does after all want to be special. And large advertsiers feel that differentation pressure more than anyone.
So when you great friends over at About.com contacted the team here at ShopLocal a few months ago to help create an embeddable iFrame widget that would display T-Mobile phones, it seemed like a great opportunity to leverage
What we came up with was this T-Mobile storefront, specifically the phone finder module that is in the middle of the page. It’s a clever little Adobe Flex/Flash powered widget that allows users to browse all of various phones that T-Mobile currently sells. It was then seamlessly inserted into an overall page within About.com that has a bunch of other T-Mobile content on it. About.com did a great job of helping create a rich branded environment that has some utility and promotes the actual products that the advertiser (T-Mobile) is trying to sell to consumers.
Within the T-Mobile storefront, the phone finder / selector area in the middle left of the page is a ShopLocal powered iFrame app that pushes dynamic real time data into this embeddable widget.
ShopLocal is proud to welcome GNC as our newest SmartCircular client. So take a moment and check out their new local ad site. We are thrilled to have them on board and the core operation pieces up and running.
Built upon the core SmartCircular 2.0 platform, this site features some nice browse by category and brand expandable accordion menus in the left hand nav.
So two big improvements rolled out last week for a number of our SmartCircular Grocery clients that integrate 3rd party display ads in and around their weekly ad sites.
1. For the SuperValu SmartCircular sites that ShopLocal operates, display ads have now been integrated within the HTML / low bandwidth version so as to maximize display ad revenue generation. In the words of our forefathers, “let no page view go un-monetized”.
So a single leaderboard ad unit has been added within the header area of all of the HTML versions of the SuperValu SmartCircular sites.
2. For the Ahold SmartCircular sites that ShopLocal operates, an enhancement was made that finally maximizes the amount of revenue that can be generated via display ads on the site. The prior issue that this adjustment solves is that all of the page views that occurred within the browse by page modes only got one (1) single ad impression served regardless of the number of page views generated. This was roughly a 10:1 ratio. Ten page views generated, one ad served overall. Now however, this ratio is exactly equal, in that every page view now is getting an ad impression served. 10:10 is where we are.
By tightening up the integration between the flash page turning component and the publisher ad server, many more ad impressions can be delivered per user session.
OK. I have always been a bit of a skeptic over the importance of a shopping list. One of my mine primary rational has been the historically poor usage of lists by online circular users. However in the last 3 months, my perspective has changed dramatically, mainly by the below IRI study in which circulars are the #1 driver or input for consumers to make shopping lists.
This leads me to a conclusion that shopping lists are still a key tool to shoppers, however my current hypothesis is that online shopping lists (eg the tool or site feature) are just:
- Too hard to use
- Hidden or poorly visible
- Not well understood or the value prop to the user is poorly messaged
- Fear of not being to take the data contained within the list with them (lack of portability)
So the ideal grocery "planning" or "deal" site would include circulars+recipes+browse by category+coupons and ALL of this content would flow and drive into the user's shopping list.
With the competition to online lists being the traditional paper list / sticky note, its very clear that for online shopping list to be heavily used by shoppers, they will need to become nearly as easy, well understand and portable. Until then, I don’t suspect list usage online will jump. However this is exactly the challenge that ShopLocal has taken on and will continue to focus on, especially in the grocery space.
Circulars + Recipes + Coupons + Category Content = A Killer Grocery App In Which All Content Is Collected, Shared And Used Within A Shopping List
Not surprising that during this peak shopping period that the circular is a key influential source. However it is somewhat shocking that the the shoppers "list" has so much sway of store purchases.
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