Andy Ellenthal picked a difficult week to take on the top job at a company that helps manage online advertising for newspapers. Ellenthal, as announced earlier, has agreed to take on the permanent post of CEO of QuadrantONE, the national ad sales newspaper alliance that was started by by the New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT), Gannett (NYSE: GCI), Tribune and Hearst last February. Since then quadrantONE, which aims to connect national advertisers to local newspapers, has been run by interim CEO Dana Hayes, who still held another post as SVP of sales at Tribune Interactive. He’ll remain on the board of quadrantONE.
I spoke briefly with Ellenthal about his plans and priorities as he moves over from his role as SVP at Visible World, a tech company specializing in managing TV ads. Ellenthal, a former DoubleClick exec, compared Visible World’s work to DoubleClick’s DART ad management system “but for the local TV ad industry. He added, “All the kinds of things you take for granted from an online media perspective, you can’t do on TV. You want to change out an ad? It takes days. You want to change weighting or targeting and switch to a different type of audience? It’s pretty difficult… It was my one foray into the TV space after spending 10 years online and I felt ready to come back.” Still, this isn’t just online; it’s the newspaper industry, which is fraught with its own particular difficulties these days, but Ellenthal is nothing but sanguine about the prospects he faces.
More on the economy’s impact on newspapers and affiliate focus after the jump…
— Opportunity in tough times: I asked Ellenthal about how the economy and the worsening condition of newspapers will impact quadrantONE’s members. Additionally, newspaper publishers Scripps (NYSE: SSP), AH Belo (NYSE: AHC) (NYSE: BLC) and Lee Enterprises (NYSE: LEE) posted declines in Q2 online ad spend this past week — all three are members of both quadrantONE and the other major alliance, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Newspaper Consortium. “It’s certainly a challenging advertising market for some right now. My assumption is that many papers are largely selling to local advertisers. What quadrantOne offers is the ability to take their local content, these audience and the ability to localize the message for national advertisers. And national advertisers get this type of media. You’re talking about people checking out local news. I don’t have the data in front of me, but the engagement on these sites is substantially higher. That will make a difference.”
— Affiliate focus: While Yahoo has been very aggressive about adding more newspapers — it reached 779 members in June — Ellenthal says he would rather concentrate on bringing more marketers to the table and wants to take it a step at a time. “We’re going to continue with what I consider to be an intelligent affiliate strategy. The best thing I can do with my time and as we expand the business is bring on more national advertisers. We’re going to double the size of the ad sales team within the next four- to six weeks. Keep in mind, this is a company that’s only 140 days old, so there’s only five or six sales people, 10 altogether including support. The way it works is, the better I do for my affiliates, the more affiliates I’ll ultimately have.”
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