THE CATSKILLS — There's an ad in every pennysaver that never seems to change. The hardware store runs the same little box. So does the plumber. The insurance agency. The funeral home. The ad is updated infrequently, but is ever-present.
By modern advertising standards, this is a little strange. There is no campaign to optimize, no click-through rate to measure, and sometimes no particular offer at all.
So what's being purchased?
Presence.
Patrons are saying something both simpler and perhaps more important than buy this today:
We're here.
A pennysaver understands something about local business that we think is still true, but the challenge is that the machinery it uses to provide that presence has become increasingly difficult to afford.
A Model That Worked
For decades, a pennysaver wasn't a bad business model. It was an ingenious solution to a practical problem.
A local business needs some way to reach nearby customers. Printing something inexpensive and putting it into thousands of mailboxes did exactly that.
Businesses pooled their advertising dollars to finance the publication and its distribution. Readers received something filled with local retailers, services, announcements and bargains. Advertisers gained access to a geographically concentrated audience.
And it worked.
There's an important feature of the arrangement: the reader isn't the customer.
If 10,000 copies are printed and bulk mailed, the cost of producing and delivering those copies exists whether every recipient wants one or not.
Ten thousand deliveries are not necessarily 10,000 readers or customers. The advertisers are the customers, and their advertising dollars ultimately have to support the machinery required to create the audience they're trying to reach.
The trouble began when the economics around this model changed. Paper, printing and postage became more expensive. At the same time, local businesses gained countless other places to spend their advertising dollars.
When advertising demand weakened, publishers faced an unpleasant choice. They could reduce distribution, weakening the reach they were selling to advertisers. Or they could lower advertising prices in an attempt to keep the pages full.
Lower prices meant fewer dollars to support the same physical machinery.
Mailing the publication to thousands of local homes was the very thing that makes a pennysaver valuable, but was also one of the most expensive things it has to do.
The problem isn't necessarily that local advertising has stopped having value, but that advertising had been asked to pay for everything.
Putting It Online Wasn't Enough
The Internet seemed to offer an obvious solution.
Put the publication online!
Many publishers did.
There is an important difference, however, between putting a publication online and building a custom enterprise digital platform that integrates workflows. If the website is essentially another version of what appeared in print, the product has been digitized, but the underlying system hasn't necessarily changed.
The process can still amount to creating a publication, selling advertising around it, distributing the printed product and reproducing some or all of it online.
We've been experimenting with the opposite approach.
Instead of beginning with a printed product, begin with the community itself.
People. Businesses. Organizations. Places. Events. Articles. Photographs. Announcements. Advertisements. Archives.
Connect them.
Then print and digital become different expressions of the same underlying information network.
The website isn't the digital version of the newspaper. The newspaper isn't the physical version of the website.
Both emerge from the same living record of the communities they serve.
A Story Doesn't Have to End at the Story
Imagine reading an article about a summer festival.
The organization holding the festival has a profile. From there, you find its upcoming events and an announcement about a fundraiser. Th