The Associated Press has come up with a way of recreating the bulky Sunday paper, with all those advertising inserts, for the mobile age. The news organization’s board just voted to begin testing a mobile version of the preprint circulars that newspapers insert in their weekend sections.
The vote came the same week that News Corp (NSDQ: NWS). debuted its much-hyped iPad newspaper, The Daily. As newspaper companies look to replicate the print model for the age of tablets and greater smartphone use, attempts to find a way to transfer the ad experience along with the content has been a troubling one for news outlets.
The AP’s mobile ad solution, called iCircular, claims to differ from other online coupon and shopping tools. Instead of concentrating on e-commerce with ads that send users to an online retailer, iCircular is meant to be at users’ local brick-and-mortar locations. The tool also comes with a shopping list and features video. The wire service’s newspaper members will be able to incorporate iCircular into their mobile websites or apps.
While newspaper circulars reach 80 million readers a week, the AP says there is currently an existing mobile news audience of 28.4 million users. That number is expected to rise rapidly.
Despite the fact that most newspapers have been able to post rising online revenues, those gains have in no way come close to offsetting print declines. It bears repeating that although online is where the growth is, print is still where the money that supports the publishing is made. One of the reasons for the gap between online and print is that the advertising still doesn’t reach consumers eyeballs in the same way.
As NYT columnist David Carr once noted, a Tiffany ad has held a place on the corner of page 3 for decades. There’s no “page 3″ in most online publications. Tablets have offered something similar to a dedicated placement beyond a standard banner or a page takeover, the economics will be difficult. But the rise of mobile content through tablets and smartphones does offer the opportunity for merging the print and digital experience in a closer way. The AP and newspapers are certainly betting on that.
While the iCircular product doesn’t offer that kind pages of ad inserts that typically accompany the weekend edition of most newspapers, it actually might improve upon the old system by allowing local advertisers to geo-target consumers. Retailers would be able to aim ads in a given zip code and highlight sales or product categories. On the consumer side, users would be encouraged to search for particular items, and, importantly, share the deals with people they know. Release

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