Advertisers, Users Responding to Local News Sites, Broadcast Executives Say
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Downplaying traditional brand elements of their call letters and channel numbers online, broadcasters have found success with websites that play up other features of the station’s local news coverage, executives said at a BIA/Kelsey conference Tuesday. In New York, CBS consolidated the websites of its WINS-AM, WCBS-AM, WCBS-TV and WFAN-AM into a single online news hub and has seen a significant increase in revenue, said president of CBS Local Digital Media Ezra Kucharz. “We are able to get more money out of the market” by integrating the websites and the advertising on them, he said. The consolidated site plan will be rolled out to 15 CBS markets by the end of the year and another nine in January, he said.
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Stations resisted the change but CBS is not giving up entirely on promoting the call letters, Kucharz said. “We have these great legacy brands and my goal in putting the strategy together was to make sure those brands lived on,” he said. But when most consumers go online, they go online to search, and “what we see crystal clear every day is that people tend to search on topics and subjects and not on brands,” he said. So stations still promote their traditional brands on air, and even direct listeners to go to the old website for more information, but those sites all automatically redirect visitors to the new market-wide site, he said. “It allows us to promote one brand and still have the individual brands work together through this process,” he said.
NBC also separated its traditional call letters and channel numbers from its stations’ sites but is embracing the NBC brand, said Greg Gittrich, vice president of digital media at NBC Local Media. And it’s introducing new local online products in its TV markets, such as TheFeast.com, which are geared toward local business listings but don’t mention any affiliation with the station.
Additionally, NBC has “been investing a lot into local franchises,” Gittrich said. “We pick areas in the market we know our audiences care about.” For instance its blog Ward Room on NBCChicago.com covers local Chicago politics, he said. In New York, it introduced a fashion blog called The Thread, he said. All the platforms are designed to share content, he said. And eventually, they might be models for affiliates, he said.
Developing the local websites is one of CBS’s top corporate priorities and the idea to streamline each market’s web presence came from CEO Leslie Moonves, Kucharz said. “The management team is highly engaged and there is an unbelievable commitment to really being a leader in this space,” he said. To get local sales representatives to push online ads on clients, CBS created strong incentives for them, he said. “If you put together incentive plans that allow people to see that digital will help them with their paycheck every month, they get very excited about doing it,” he said.