Mobile strategy: from mass to tailor-made advertising

“Mobile is going to be an advertising revenue-driven business as it is online,” believes Peter Vandermeersch, an editor-in-chief of De Standaard, a Belgian daily newspaper.

Mr. Vandermeersch spoke at the Web Goes Mobile seminar in Grimbergen in Belgium on Dec. 4, 2008. He gave there an overview of mobile strategy at his Corelio publishing group.

“It’s clear that content online is expected to be free by everyone. We still have a base of 4000 paying customers for our website; but this has been the case for a few years now and that base is not growing. So it’s an advertising revenue-driven business. So is the mobile,” he said.

The Corelio strategy on mobile web has two directions:

1. Proximity. Within a site of the company’s popular newspaper “Het Nieuwsblad”, they have 309 local sites. One for each city, town, village in the Dutch-speaking area of Belgium (Flanders). Very local news and… very local advertisers!
2. Quality. De Standaard – a Corelio’s quality paper – focuses not on local news, but on quality national news covered by professional journalists. 

 
Peter Vandermeersch gave an example how De Standaard is delivering news on multiple platforms:

• When a breaking news is discovered, users receive an SMS with just one sentence of what has happened and a link to the mobile site for more informaton.
• Then a full article is published online (on desktop internet) with for example an interview or a short video.
• In-depth analysis, background information is given in the printed paper.

 
Currently, Corelio has three mobile sites:

m.standaard.be

Launch: June 16, 2008 (It has been launched in just 8 weeks!)

Content: news, business and showbusiness.

Traffic: 500,000 page views/month.

m.jobat.be

Launch: August 20, 2008

Content: classified advertising (originally “JobAt” is a weekly recruitment classified ad supplement to weekend editions of all Corelio newspapers)

m.nieuwsblad.be

Launch: November 30, 2008

Content: regional news, live sports results, agenda of things to do in town for ‘going out’

Corelio’s mobile plans

Currently, Corelio is not very strong in “mobile interactivity”: there are some info & breaking news alerts by SMS, some text games.

But in the near future, according to Peter Vandermeersch, Corelio wants to extend its mobile interactive features through polls, user-generated-content, gaming, chats, etc.

Corelio is going to implement “geo services” too: for example restaurant reviews of places around your current location and book ratings in a mobile friendly way for when you’re in a book shop.

Lessons

Here are some lessons that Corelio has learnt developing its mobile content business:

• build your mobile knowledge
• build a coherent vision
• team up with competent partners
• build real mobile sites
• focus on quality and speed

 

Challenges

Mr. Vandermeersch said there were some challenges for mobile publishers in Belgium:

• Different revenue sharing standards between the carriers and publishers are needed.
• Rates of data-transfer subscriptions are still high in Belgium.
• Monetisation: how to gain advertising and earn on interactivity?

 
“If we can overcome these challenges in the near future, we will believe very much in mobile internet,” said Peter Vandermeersch.

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