Inkjet’s Age hear about the results of the high school football team on the other side of town, they would only see the scores from their home team. And ads would be for the local businesses doing business in that neighborhood. “I wouldn’t call it widely adopted, but it is being widely considered,” said Will Mansfi eld, Director, WW sales & marketing – Inkjet Presses, Enterprise Inkjet Systems, Kodak. “Publishers tend to be very conservative and quite risk adverse, and to make a change like this requires taking a risk and doing things diff erently than the last 50 years. Technologically it’s not hard to do at a distribution level, but it has some challenges, which can be overcome. Th e real challenge is rethinking the approach to editorial, stories, and advertising.” “I think the challenge with it is on one hand, you get the ability to address a smaller, more relevant audience—which is good and if you can do that eff ectively, have more valuable information you can provide—but the other side of that is how does it get funded?” said Mike Herold, director of Inkjet Technologies, Ricoh. “Today, people are advertising in a newspaper to a very large audience of the entire paper. But it’s been proven by studies that if ads are more specifi c, they are more likely to drive changes. For newspapers to be eff ective, they have to be able to drive the revenue on that deliverable in same way they do the content.” And that challenge—fi guring out how to sell ad space in an eff ective way to support a hyper local edition—is the biggest hurdle to adoption today. Th e content, in comparison, is relatively easy, with the system already set up to handle beats and reports who cover very specific areas or types of stories. Th at is very easy to transition to a hyper local model. On the other hand, right now, most newspapers sell their advertising based on the large number of impressions they will get across their entire readership. However, a hyper-local edition might see a small fraction of the readers, making fi guring out how to charge for it a more complex proposition. On the fl ip side, by having hyper local advertising, it means a newspaper could sell the same ad space several times over to diff erent communities. So the potential is there, it is just a matter of shift ing the way they approach the sales process. Disrupting the Status Quo Th ere is no denying that the hyper-local movement has absolutely taken off far quicker in other parts of the world than it has here in the US. Herold noted that he believes more publishers will start to look at the concept and consider how they could make it work for them. “To completely ignore this option is not a good idea for a traditional publisher,” he said. He went on to note, however, that he sees Hyper local newspapers are being run at Sogemedia, based in northern France, on a Kodak PROSPER 6000P system. 22 Printing News ® September 2016 PrintingNews®com
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