Client Micro-sites

Advertisers on baltimoresun.com had expressed lots of interest in video advertising, and the site began offering it about a year ago, according to Director of Design and Development Thom Smith. At first, he said, they simply took a client's television commercial and embedded that in an online ad. Then they began to realize that, unlike watching television, which is very passive, watching video online is much more engaging, and they started trying to think about ways to make online video advertising more engaging.

One of the video products they now sell isn't really advertising at all; it's a marketing product they call a micro-site. Clients typically choose this product when they want to present complex or multi-faceted information in small, well-organized pieces that allow viewers to get specific questions answered quickly without having to go through information they already know or don't consider relevant. To create a micro-site, baltimoresun.com charges an hourly development rate that includes videography, video editing and site development. They can also host the micro-site.

Example: Sinai Hospital
Sinai Hospital wanted the opportunity to explain in greater detail its CyberKnife, an advanced surgical treatment for various kinds of tumors. It worked with baltimoresun.com to create video of doctors explaining the equipment and how it works, as well as testimonial video from a CyberKnife patient. Rather than post the video as one long infomercial, the baltimoresun.com team created many shorter videos, each between two and five minutes long, to answer very specific questions. The Web development staff at baltimoresun.com then created a series of Web pages, designed to match the hospital's existing Web site, where all the CyberKnife information and videos are organized and presented. The result? An area of the hospital's site where complex information is presented in an easily accessible manner, taking advantage of the strengths of video to demonstrate procedures and to offer advice from experts and testimonials from patients in an engaging, believable way.

How They Did It: Product Development
According to Smith, baltimoresun.com already had a well-established and knowledgeable Web development staff, and this was an opportunity to deploy it to local businesses as a marketing service. They needed to hire a videographer in order to produce the level of quality they wanted, and they invested in approximately $10,000 of equipment, but they have made back those costs and continue to bring in new revenue by contracting out the staff to clients for Web development work.

How They Did It: Sales
The sales staff for baltimoresun.com sells only online products, divided by category of business, although they work in tandem with the print staff upon request to accommodate client needs. The typical sales process involves a salesperson doing a needs assessment with a client, then meeting with Smith to discuss which of their online products would meet those needs, then generating mockups to take back to the client.

And what if the client needs something not currently in the baltimoresun.com portfolio? No problem. Smith and his team use these discussions to lead them to the development of new online products that hadn't previously been thought of, and Smith said he and his staff have gotten pretty good at devising ways to keep down the costs of developing these products until they've had a chance to prove themselves in the marketplace.

Newspaper Next Lessons Learned:

1. Focus on the "job to be done" and that will lead you to effective solutions. In this case it wasn't print advertising, it was local marketing agency expertise.


2. Build new-product development capabilities. The baltimoresun.com team was smart enough to realize that in order to meet its customers' needs, it was going to have to develop new products it didn't currently offer. Rapid prototyping was a key customer service skill.


3. Make it "good enough." Videos that baltimoresun.com staff produced were originally done in Quicktime, which is higher-quality but which creates barriers to viewership for people who don't have Quicktime software (or can't download it at work). They decided to switch to creating the videos in Flash, which is lower-quality but more universally accessible - an acceptable trade-off, in Smith's opinion, between artistic quality and technical ease of use.


4. Test, learn, adjust. Smith said one of the first lessons they learned about video is that many are too long. Most viewers have a very short attention span, which is what ultimately led his team to the idea of offering multi-page micro-sites, each with a short, easily digestible video on one specific aspect of the larger subject. As noted above, they strive to keep costs down until they've tested new product concepts and tweaked them successfully.


5. Look for new business models. Marketing services is an area where many local newspapers can grow revenue, by being the marketing agency for local businesses. This should include leveraging all our marketing assets, such as providing market information and doing design and production work not just for the newspaper but for other media and for the client itself.


6. Use a dedicated sales staff. As the Newspaper Next 2.0 report points out, relying solely on print salespeople won't bring in the new business every newspaper needs. Even one online-only salesperson, well versed in the specifics and pricing of things like search, email, and video, can generate six figures' worth of revenue quickly.

Embedded Video: Baltimore Symphony
When Marin Alsop, the new music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, arrived in Baltimore she brought with her the mantra of "accessible excellence" in music - world-class quality reachable by all. One of her major objectives was to help the orchestra break down as many accessibility barriers as possible, whether it was lack of understanding of classical music or just the cost of a ticket. The symphony has leveraged many technology tools in pursuit of this goal, one of which is what the symphony calls a Webumentary - a short online video of Alsop discussing an upcoming program or piece to be performed.

The original idea for the Webumentaries came from conversations between Beth Mealey, the symphony's vice president of marketing, and videographer and Baltimore native James Bartolomeo of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Protagonist Films. Mealey and Bartolomeo knew each other and Bartolomeo had been to several symphony performances, and he approached the BSO to suggest creating commercials for local television. The symphony had no budget for television advertising, but Bartolomeo still wanted to work on something that would show how a symphony conductor makes music. So he suggested creating short videos of Alsop talking extemporaneously about the music the orchestra would be performing in the 2007-2008 season, interspersed with video of her conducting.

There are currently 13 five-minute Webumentaries on the BSO Web site, all filmed in one day and without a script. In each one Alsop talks about a program or a piece in such a way as to make the bones of it understandable to a first-time listener. In addition to the videos' providing rich site content, a link to the appropriate video is sent, along with parking and restaurant information, to anyone who purchases a ticket and provides an email address, as an audience development benefit that doesn't feel like "music education."

The symphony paid to have the Webumentaries produced as part of a larger re-launch of the BSO Web site, so BSO marketing executives started looking for ways to leverage that investment. Embedding video in their online ads was a natural next step. BSO eCommerce and Promotions Marketing Coordinator Jamie Schneider distilled 30-second excerpts from each of the Webumentaries, and the BSO's online video ads now run on baltimoresun.com and on washingtonpost.com. The BSO chooses the content areas of the sites and geographic areas where users will see the ads.

According to BSO Director of eCommerce and Single Tickets Erica Bondarev, clickthrough rates on the video ads are around 40%, and while conversion rates are lower, online ticket sales are pacing well ahead of last year. Because the BSO is one of the first orchestras in the country to use this form of online advertising, there are no performance benchmarks yet, and BSO marketing executives are spearheading an upcoming industry-wide conference to share information and best practices in online advertising and to try to establish performance metrics.

Newspaper Next Lessons Learned
While the symphony is not a newspaper, its move into new media territory offers important lessons:

1. Focus on the "job to be done." If the job to be done is to find non-attendees who might be interested, to make them familiar and comfortable with the Baltimore Symphony experience, and to deepen the relationship with them once they've been identified, print advertising is not the right solution: it's too broad, it can't convey the experience effectively, and it has very little ability to build loyalty among existing customers. Video, site targeting and email, on the other hand, are much better solutions. In this case the symphony handles its own email communications, but newspaper companies can and should be developing that capability for local businesses.


2. Be the disruptor. The symphony couldn't afford ads on local television, but baltimoresun.com and washingtonpost.com, by offering video advertising and targetability on their sites, were able to offer the symphony a cost-effective way to get the same message out to its most likely prospects.


3. Leverage resources. The videos existed on the Web site already; the symphony simply found additional uses for them by embedding them in ads and sending them to ticket purchasers.


4. Develop metrics. Symphony marketing executives understand that they can only improve what they can measure, so they are now leading their industry in developing new success metrics for online marketing efforts.