Yahoo’s Newspaper Ad Program in My Hometown

Couldn’t help but notice and pay attention when I saw these ads running in the Tri-City Herald this week.

These are ads promoting the fact that my local paper (part of the McClatchy Group) is now part of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium. I wrote on SEL a couple months ago about the success of this effort — it’s a collaboration in which newspapers use Yahoo’s ad-targeting technology to sell more online ads.

I actually think these ads are pretty effective from the small business owner’s perspective. They explain the idea of targeted ads without getting too complicated. (You can click the image to go to Flickr and see a larger version.) The ad on the left is the first one I saw, and then the purple one is more recent. If I’m a small business owner thinking about local online ads, that ad on the left would probably compel me to at least learn more about how it works, what it costs, etc. It says

One of these women is shopping for a car. Do you know which one? We Do!

Meanwhile, I don’t think I’m seeing any of the ads themselves on the newspaper’s web site just yet; I still see DoubleClick ads, which are part of Google’s empire. I’ll be interested to see how well the ads are targeted to me when they launch. I do spend a fair amount of time on Yahoo properties and also visit the paper’s web site somewhat consistently, too.