Scoop Advertising – All You Need To Know

Tuesday, 12 November 2002, 4:59 pm
Article: Alastair Thompson

CONTENTS:
1. General Information – Audience Statistics
- The Scoop Market
- Scoop Advertising Sales Contact Details
2. Why Advertise On Scoop?
- Increasing Brand Awareness
- Generating Profile For Announcements & Product Launches
- Generating Traffic To Online Services
- Generating A Response To A Specific Offer For A Product Or Service
3. Types Of Scoop Online Advertising
- Tile Adverts
- Skyscraper Adverts
- Banner Adverts
- Email Adverts
- Front Page Profile Advertising
4. Suggested Campaign Formats - Options
- An Online Presence Campaign For An Appliance E-Tailer
- A Launch Campaign For An Apartment Development
- A Traffic Generation Campaign For The Launch Of A New Technology News Website
- An Email Plus Branding Campaign For A Beverage
5. More Information – Who Reads Scoop & How Often?
- Scoop’s CIRCULATION

This page is updated intermittently, most recently on 14th May 2003. Information contained in it, including pricing, may no longer be up to date. For the latest information concerning advertising on Scoop contact Wade Bishop at sales@scoop.co.nz or 025 406 715.

General Information – Audience Statistics

Scoop is New Zealand’s leading independent online news provider. Our readership levels of 15-20,000 visitors a day provide advertisers with a credible – and extremely cost effective - alternative to advertising in the business newspapers (NBR, the Independent), and niche magazines like Unlimited.

- The Scoop Market

Scoop sponsor/advertising programmes provide marketing managers and communicators with affordable branding solutions that target a unique, informed, and powerful audience.

If you are looking for a sponsor/branding campaign that hits a select, powerful, and well-informed domestic audience, then Scoop Media is the medium that ensures you get exposure and receive an excellent return on your investment.

Scoop Media has available a range of sponsor/branding programmes which can be used to target your specific audience. Scoops tools include niche focussed media wire sponsorship, front page tile adverts, banner adverts, feature campaign pages and combination campaigns combining these elements with email alerts.

For more facts and figures (and graphs) see.. More Information – Who Reads Scoop & How Often?

Contact:

EDITOR: Alastair Thompson, phone: 021 70 70 44
or
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER: Wade Bishop, phone: 025 406 715
or simply send an email to: sales@Scoop.co.nz

Why Advertise On Scoop?

There are a range of reasons why people would wish to advertise on Scoop. Here are just a few…

Increasing Brand Awareness

Scoop offers brand advertisers a very cost effective media for raising profile and generating recognition of their brand. At prices starting at a similar level to the cost of a small single display advertisement in a newspaper for a one day, a brand advertiser can buy a high profile presence in front of Scoop’s 100,000 monthly readers for a whole month!

In addition Scoop offers branding advertisers very positive associations with qualities such as:
- excellence ( Scoop has been a consistent online media award winner since inception);
- freedom and independence (Scoop is quite obviously a fiercely independent media – clearly differentiating it from the other online news providers which are all associated with corporate media giants);
- consistency (Scoop has been serving its online readership for three years with a consistent product that they rely on to provide them with their inside knowledge of what is going on behind the news);
- uniqueness (Scoop is the only place on the internet where most of the news material it publishes can be found. This differs from the other news sites e.g. Nzoom publishes Reuters and other wire service copy, Stuff.co.nz publishes newspaper stories, Xtra publishes IRN radio news copy.)
- loyalty (Scoop’s audience like – and many love - Scoop, their voting in online internet awards confirms this)
- select/youthful/vibrant (Scoop is the favoured online news media of many youth media fashion arbiters such as Mikey Havoc, Russell Brown & Finlay MacDonald.)

(For more information on Scoop products for brand advertising see… Tiles, Banners, Email & Skyscrapers)

Generating Profile For Announcements & Product Launches

Scoop’s modus operandi, “raw news fast”, says it all. Scoops readers include opinion leaders journalists, politicians and PR professionals. A more receptive (and valuable) audience for an announcement of a new service, an event or a new product launch could not be found.

(For more information on Scoop products for announcements and product launches see… Banners, Email & Front Page Profile)

Generating Traffic To Online Services

All online service providers and e-tailers know the difficulties associated with generating online traffic to their product offerings. The only guaranteed way to keep increasing your online traffic is to keep your brand in front of your online customers.

For example: If online readers are aware for example that your online CD sales retail brand features on a site that they read regularly, then when they decide to make their first online CD purchase, they know immediately where to go to get to your website.

Scoop can provide numerous opportunities for online service providers to keep their service just one click away from a niche audience who have already indicated an interest in a subject area related to their offering. And the pricing for such opportunities starts at the spectacularly low level of just $200 a month – suitable for long running on-going campaigns.

(For more information on Scoop products for online traffic development see… Tiles & Skyscrapers)

Generating A Response To A Specific Offer For A Product Or Service

Online advertising is particularly good for offer based campaigns, e.g. “Buy a dishwasher receive a free set of glasses”, for a number of reasons.

1. With online advertising a variety of different sales messages can be tested to see which generates the best response (in terms of click-throughs), and then that message can be maximised;
2. With online advertising the precise performance in terms of reader views and responses can be tracked in real time;
3. With online advertising an advert with a precise offer can be linked to a page reinforcing and containing the detail of that precise offer. This compares very favourably for example to print advertising which may call upon a reader to call a number, or visit a showroom. The desired readers response is far more easily achieved.
4. When advertising online the offer can be easily switched for a new offer at the advertisers pleasure.

(For more information on Scoop products for online offer-based advertising see… Banners, Email & Skyscrapers)

Types Of Advertising & Pricing

Scoop advertising comes in a range of sizes, shapes and positions, each of which is best suited to a different purpose. The following is a guide to what is currently available on Scoop. Scoop’s marketing team is also willing to consider special requests from advertisers for other forms of advertising such as rich media.

Pricing Principles: Scoop's advertising pricing is extremely competitive and is based entirely on performance. The cost of each block (or advertising position) is calculated on a price per impression. (An impression is a set of eyeballs).

Quoted prices below range between $15CPM (CPM = $ Per One Thousand Impressions) and $35CPM.

Broadly speaking the larger an advert is and the more prominent its position on the page the higher the per impression price. Finally, as you will see when looking at the Example Campaigns, these prices are a guide, and most actual campaigns will also attract discounts.

Tile Adverts

IMAGE: Example of the a tile advert on the front page at the top of the “Parliament” wire.

Tile adverts on Scoop are 200x30 pixels and can be either animated or static. The file size limit is 5kb.

Each tile advert is associated with a Scoop Wire of which there are 11 - Scoops, Parliament, Politics, News Monitor, World, Business, Sci-Tech, Culture, Education, Regional & General. Each tile advert appears both on the Front Page and at the top of the index on every story page.

The best advertising positions are those on the most popularly read wires which are also the highest placed on the front page and therefore the easiest to read. These positions incur a premium charge.

Tile adverts are best for branding and online service promotion purposes. Their effectiveness is maximised by utilising them in a niche position which relates to the product or service being advertised and in combination with a skyscraper advert. (NOTE: When purchased in combination with a skyscraper advert a discount applies to the displayed price.)

Pricing: Tiles can be booked for monthly campaigns at a price per month of $15CPM (excl GST).

Sky Scrapers

IMAGE: Example of the a skyscraper advert on a business wire story.

Skyscraper adverts on Scoop are 200 pixels wide and can be from 200 pixels to 450 pixels deep. They can be either animated or static. The file size limit is 30kb.

Like tile adverts “skyscraper” adverts are associated with Scoop Wires, are therefore niche targeted on the basis of content. Skyscraper adverts appear on the right hand side of every story page above the story index (see example) – and on the right side of story index pages (see example).

The best skyscraper advertising positions (and most expensive) are those in the most popularly read wires. The most appropriate position for an advertiser interested in a targeted audience will depend more on the content – e.g. a technology advertiser may prefer to advertise in the sci-tech position.

Skyscraper adverts are best suited for branding and online service promotion purposes. Their effectiveness is maximised by utilising them in a niche position which relates to the product or service being advertised, and when used in combination with a “tile” advert. (NOTE: When purchased in combination with a tile advert a discount applies to the schedule price.)

Pricing: Skyscrapers can be booked for monthly campaigns at a price per month of $35CPM (excl GST).

Banner Adverts

IMAGE: Example of a banner advert.

Banner adverts on Scoop are of the Internet standard size. 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels deep. They can be either animated or static (animated is recommended). The file size limit is 20kb.

Banner adverts on Scoop are - to use the Internet terminology - served “Run Of Site”, which means they are presented in rotation across all Scoop pages carrying banner positions.

Banner adverts are best used for branding and product launching purposes as they have such a high profile position on the page.

Their effectiveness is maximised primarily through design, duration and timing of campaigns. Scoop can provide advice on the best methods to maximise click through rates and impact through design.

Typically campaigns of less than a month are not very effective as repetition of viewing can lead readers to click through to find out what lies beyond. It is possible however – for product launches and announcements – for Scoop to provide very high rotate campaigns (40,000+ impressions in a week) which will have a high impact over a short time period.

Pricing: Scoop sells banner adverts in lots of 10,000 for $20CPM (excluding GST).

Email Adverts

IMAGE: An Email advert as it appears in the inbox of the Pegasus Mail email program.

Scoop Email Adverts are 25 to 30 words long and are usually accompanied by a link to a page containing further information on what is being advertised.

Typically the link will be to the website of the advertiser, but Scoop can provide as part of an email campaign a page on the Scoop website with more information on what the advertiser is selling or promoting.

Email adverts are particularly well suited to offer-based, announcement related and brand advertising.

- For offer-based and announcement campaigns Scoop offers a highly attuned audience of readers who are likely to respond well to “newsy” offers and announcements.

- For branding purposes Scoop email based advertising provides the opportunity to advertisers to associate their brand to a regular news email which is compatible with their brand values. (See also… Email Plus Advertising for more information in this kind of campaign – in some circumstances naming rights and new email news products can be tailored to advertisers needs.)

Pricing: Email adverts are available on all our free to subscriber email news services, each of which has its own distinct subscriber base. For a full list of Scoop’s emailers…. CLICK HERE . Email advert pricing is related to the number of subscribers to the emailer. Pricing is available on request, please email sales@scoop.co.nz.

Front Page Profile Advertising

IMAGE: The Front Page Profile advertising position is the plum news photograph position on the Scoop Front Page

The dimensions of the front page space are 300x200 pixels and only static images are allowed.

Scoop’s Front Page Profile Advertising offer is unique in New Zealand and will probably appeal best to Public Relations related advertising .

What Scoop has on offer here is access to the front and center plumb spot in the middle of our Front Page.

This spot is ideal for advertising product launches and announcements (e.g. 42 Below Vodka, New Wellington Hotel ), publicity stunts (e.g. Bendon) and for generating profile for sponsored events such as conferences or sporting events.

The Scoop front page spot receives roughly 3000 views each day and typically will generate 100-150 click-throughs for an advertiser. By way of comparison a typical click-through rate on a banner advert is 0.2% (or 1 in 500 impressions), which means that to achieve a similar response rate 50,000-75,000 banner adverts would need to be served.

Front Page Profile advertisers can choose to either provide extra images (up to five) for a Scoop published story related to their front page image, or have the image link directly to their own website.

Pricing: $500 for a 24 hours of exposure. This price includes publication of up to five more images in a related press release where that is desired.

Several Example Campaign Formats

Because of the range of advertising products and the way they interact with each other Scoop encourages advertisers to utilise a range of products to meet their needs.

Scoop encourages innovation and is keen to try out new ideas.

We also support third party advertisement delivery – which means that an advertiser with the technical know-how can use their own servers to deliver the advertising images, and thereby make them dynamic (there is one example of this below).

Advertisers may also find that campaigns which link their online campaign to real media (print, radio & TV) campaigns can be particularly effective. An Online Presence Campaign For An Appliance E-Tailer

Components:
A front page tile on the News Monitor wire.
A skyscraper in the Business wire.
A banner advert in low rotation

Duration: Ongoing

Performance:
70,000 tile impressions a month
10,000 skyscraper impressions a month
10,000 banner advert impressions a month

A Launch Campaign For An Apartment Development

Components:
A Front Page Profile advert on the day the offer opens featuring an artists impression of the building.
A Front Page Profile advert at the half way point in the campaign featuring interior images of the building.
High Rotation banner adverts 20,000 a week for six weeks

Duration: Six Weeks

Performance:
6000 front page image impressions over 48 hours
120,000 banner impressions

A Traffic Generation Campaign For The Launch Of A New Technology News Website

Components:
A front page tile on the Scoops Wire (for one Month)
Tile adverts in the Science and Technology and Business wires.
Skyscraper adverts in the Business and Science and Technology wires.
Banner adverts in high rotation for one month and low rotation thereafter

Duration: Three Months

Performance:
280,000 tile adverts first month, 150,000 for second and third month
30,000 skyscraper adverts per month
100,000 banner adverts first month, 40,000 for second and third month

An Email Plus Branding Campaign For A Beverage

Components:
- A front page tile on the Scoops wire.
- A skyscraper advert in the Scoops & Sports/Culture wires featuring a signup form for the sponsored America’s Cup news wire.
- Email adverts in every Americas Cup news wire item (“Boat Race news brought to you with the assistance of… “
- 20,000 banners a week encouraging sign-ups to the Americas Cup news wire.

Duration: Three Months

Performance:
- 200,000 tile and skyscraper advert impressions per month
- 85,000 banner advert impressions per month
- 70,000 email advert impressions per month

More Information – Who Reads Scoop & How Often?

PLEASE NOTE: The following information concerns Scoop's audience stats at the end of 2002. New figures including audited circulation figures from Red Sheriff will be posted shortly.

CAPTION: Graph showing the growth in average daily number of unique hosts (computers or proxy servers) requesting information from the Scoop Server.

Scoop’s New Zealand domestic audience accesses our information from domains hosted by large organizations. It is largely made up of people who view our service from work or their place of study. Our domestic audience tends to view our content during the working day.

Scoop readers include a high percentage of lawyers, bankers, politicians, public relations executives, directors, CEOs, teachers, researchers, lecturers, civil servants, journalists, editors, students and people who are active in our society.

Feedback and surveys suggest the Scoop Market is outward-looking and is interested in what goes on around them. The Scoop audience contains people who:

1. are IT and internet literate;
2. make decisions;
3. provide solutions;
4. travel often;
5. participate in their society.

Scoop is:

1. one of the top five rating general news sites in NZ (source: hitwise.co.nz)
2. New Zealand’s top rating political news site (source: hitwise.co.nz)
3. Ranked the 24,656th most read website in the world by Alexa.com (compared to netguide.co.nz = 123,006, searchnz.co.nz = 27,720, searchnow.co.nz = 203,262th, idg.net.nz - 137,168 & newsroom.co.nz = 356,289th)

Meanwhile scoop has around 4400 subscribed news-by-email subscribers who receive 250,000 emails each month and rising.

This means Scoop presents an attractive branding medium with an online audience on par with established newspapers like New Zealand’s The Independent Newspaper.

- Scoop’s CIRCULATION

PLEASE NOTE: The following information concerns Scoop's audience stats at the end of 2002. New figures including audited circulation figures from Red Sheriff will be posted shortly.

CAPTION: Graph showing the growth in average monthly page views since Scoop’s launch in June 1999.

As at November 2002 Scoop Media receives:

1. 2.5 – 3.6 million hits per month –
2. 1.2-1.8 million pages accessed per month
3. 80,000 unique visitors a month (readers)
4. 180,000+ user sessions a month (visits)
5. 25,000 – 45,000 pages accessed, and 6000+ user sessions daily
6. 4400 news-by-email subscribers receiving in excess of 250,000 emails a month.

Scoop presently serves on average 1.3 million pages per month containing stories and press releases detailing daily news, parliament, politics, business, and foreign affairs. These are served to readers in 44 countries daily with around 70% of the audience in New Zealand.

GLOSSARY OF INTERNET TRAFFIC TERMS:
HITS = hits are requests for files off a Internet server. They are a highly unreliable method of measuring traffic as the more images a page contains the more hits it generates.
PAGE ACCESSES = each page access means a page has been requested by a reader. Typically each reader will access more than one page;
UNIQUE HOSTS = a unique host is a unique assigned IP address. This number is lower than the number of unique visitors as sometimes groups of computers (networks) are all recorded on the same IP address no.
UNIQUE VISITORS = a unique visitor is a visit by a unique computer, unique visitors are identified using cookies placed on their system. Each unique visitor may visit any number of times during the period in question.
USER SESSIONS = a user session is a visit by a user. The number of user sessions is higher than that of unique visitors as each separate visit by each computer is recorded seperately.

© Scoop Media

Alastair Thompson

Scoop Publisher

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

Contact Alastair Thompson

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• Email - alastair@scoop.co.nz