Mark Celsor

The Tribune Company, Gannett Company, Hearst Corporation and The New York Times Company are announced that they are combining portions of their various online advertising businesses to form a new 17 person, Chicago based company called quadrantONE. quadrantONE’s plan is to offer large advertisers consolidated access to place ads on the web sites of local newspapers. I feel like this is definitely a move by the papers to position themselves better against online advertising giants Google and Yahoo, who are increasingly moving into hyper-localized content and advertising. Will it work? Who knows. I feel like Google and Yahoo’s strategy of hyper-localized advertising focuses more on content matching. Users see ads related to the content they are reading rather than the geographic area they are coming from. For large national advertisers, I feel like this method of user self-identification is much more sophisticated for determining demographic information and delivering targeted advertising. Heavy handed matching based on location alone can be very effect for smaller, highly location-oriented businesses like car dealerships and pizza delivery but national brands and smaller companies with broad reaches need to focus relating to people as they see themselves in the internet community not just their physical communities. For example, I know a lot of people who firmly identify with the New York Times though they have never been to their in their lives. Actually NYT is a bad example because the quadrantONE alliance considers it a national paper (along with USA Today) and it specifically will not be included in the deal. Hopefully will combine it’s strong location-based assets and a strong content matching technology to Google and Yahoo a run for their money.