Charles Apple

After eight or so hours of hard work, the all-star RevenueTwoPointZero team that assembled in D.C. today to attempt to find us a new business model knocked off for the day.

Find our report of their morning activities here and our mid-afternoon recap here.

R2.0’s Matt Mansfield promises prototypes and in-depth explanations by Monday, to be posted at the R2.0 web site.

For the time being, however, we’ll recap some of the highlights glimpsed today via the project’s Twitter feed. (Again, we’re editing the hell out of these in order to make them readable.)

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CLASSIFIED TEAM

The goal for this team was to:

Create a better CraigsList.

Notes from the team’s final presentation:

• The team presented a simple, clean homepage for classified. It contains two main paths: “I Want” and “I Have.”
  
• The team wants a good search function with multiple filters. The example they’ll show Monday is built around a search  for “Honda” that results in classified “liners” plus display ads for new Hondas.
  
• The model also includes free and paid listings. Sales staff can “upsell” to advertisers options for ads at the bottom of the search windows, at bottom of free line ads, for featured listings, extra photos and for a longer shelf life than for free ads.
  
• What makes this model different from Craigslist? The model will show a large, detailed description of the car for sale, including large display photo. It’s a “very enticing look,” the team tweets.
  
• The classified concept “is far more attractive than what’s currently offered on news sites,” the team tweets. “Lots of depth for individual listings.”

—
SMALL BUSINESS TEAM

This team’s job was to:

Show newspaper-centric companies how they can better meet the advertising needs of small- and medium-sized businesses.

Notes from the team’s final presentation:

• There was a big focus on indexing and search-engine optimization. The goal is to make the newspaper’s web site the place to go for what’s on special, what’s on sale, for the best deals right now.
  
• A deals page would include feeds for a) Latest Deals, b) Deadline Deals — building interest through scarcity –and c) Most Printed Coupons.
• Extra benefits for advertisers: prime search-engine optimization, listing resyndication, a coupon widget, a mobile component, and periodic consulting w/customer.
  
• “Favorable group reaction to Most Printed feature and Deadline Deals,” the team tweeted. “Helping small and medium businesses is a big opportunity” for newspapers of the future.
• The team proposed a “killer concept map,” Matt Mansfield tweeted. “Full ideas will be explained in the Monday post.”
  
• Matt also gave kudos to Gannett’s Yuri Victor. “Excellent selling strategies from small biz group. Shows value proposition and return on investment.”
  

—
HOMEPAGE TEAM

This team’s task was to:

Re-imagine the homepage and display advertising.

This team got quite a bit of notice in our earlier posts, debating whether or not ads should appear on the homepage itself and the concept of annoyingly obtrusive ads vs. banner ads that are easily ignored.

Notes from the team’s final presentation:

• The homepage concept is “built around modular grid that would allow you to give priority to big stories by assigning it more space on grid. You can scale up, or scale down. We focused on living within a screen to minimize scrolling. A very clean look on a simple grid.”

Hmm. Sounds like an approach we print folks can definitely appreciate.

• “Banners are at bottom of the screen (again, above the scroll) One version features roadblock-style ad, while another has ‘Four Deals of Day.’”
• The group tweeted that “General response was that the look was clean and that banner really stood out because it seemed integrated.”

—
MOBILE TEAM

This team’s job was to:

Build an effective advertising model for news content delivered on smart phones, such as Apple’s iPhone.

Notes from the team’s final presentation:

• The team proposes a free application for mobile devices, with general features and five-tier upsells to cost 99 cents each. Packages would be “Mini Pro to Power Suite.”
  
• The team tried to “Keep it simple. Don’t overfeature things.” The initial list of paid applications, for example, was 30. They knocked it down to five.
• The team also tried to remember that “You never know what your users will want later.” The team left room for flexibility.
  
• A geo-enabled application would offer customization by locale: “Help people find what’s near them now. It’s the ultimate zoned metro section.”
  
• Buyers of the “upsell” mobile applications would be paying for functionality, not for content. However,” there could be an opportunity for paid content by individual market.”
  

These were hightlights of the final reports. Combined with the earlier reports, you get a pretty good picture of some of the brainstorming that took place today.

Again, detailed reports — and prototypes — will be posted Monday at the RevenueTwoPointZero web site.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Innovative ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.