Street Fight
The marketing coordinator for an independent video store in Seattle tells Stephanie Miles that print offers the best return — in terms of verifiable foot traffic — among all her ad spending, which includes advertising on hyperlocal sites and alternative weeklies, discounts for public radio supporters and promotions for Foursquare users. “Print works well,” says Jen Koogler of Scarecrow Video. “These things are really hard to track, but when we put a coupon in an ad, for example, people will actually come in with that coupon clipped out of the paper and say, ‘I saw this was on sale.'” Because the store offers a discount to members of a public radio station, she can track that, too.
But she doesn’t have a sense of the return she gets for ads on hyperlocal sites because she doesn’t get regular clickthrough reports. She’s lukewarm on Foursquare, saying, “We don’t really get a lot of check-ins.” In the original version of the story (since corrected) Koogler said that she advertises with Next Door Media, but Cory Bergman says that the last time Scarecrow advertised with the company was a year to 18 months ago. Amy Duncan, publisher of My Green Lake, where Scarecrow does have a current ad, said the ad is handled by another hyperlocal site. (Disclosure: Cory Bergman is a member of Poynter’s National Advisory Board.)
Comments