oxbury
Billing itself as a "hyperlocal agency", Oxbury Media makes no apologies for jumping on the hyperlocal trend - the current buzzword of choice for established newspaper publishers, online news start-ups and non-journalists with a will and a self-publishing way.

The Guardian's new 'beatblogging' project in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Leeds; DMGT's expanding network of user-powered localpeople sites; and the impact of independent sites like the Lichfield Blog and Stoke's Pits 'n' Pots have not escaped the attention of Oxbury founder Jason Mawer and PR representative Richard Stone. But it's traditional "hyperlocal" print products that have allowed the company to create an impressive network of customers and clients just a year after its launch, following the acquisition of community website network UKVillages.

The Oxbury Media definition of hyperlocal is anything below the level of a local newspaper, explains Stone, and there are four tiers of titles the agency deals with, from slickly-produced, regional lifestyle magazines to parish newsletters.

The agency has built its own database of local print and online publications across the UK that fall into these categories, and now uses this to broker advertising deals for the titles with both decidedly local and national customers. Oxbury has plans to organise and network this space that have not been attempted before, and there's a deadline-driven attitude to supplying titles with ads and content that belies Mawer's national newspaper sales executive past, adds Stone.

"We think we're the only company in the UK that acts as a link between national, local and franchised brands and hyperlocal media in the way and to the scale that we do. We believe that we're the only people that can broker advertising with the range of magazines that we can," says Stone.

"People can give us a postcode or a region and a service an tell us to come back with the appropriate hyperlocal titles in that area. There just isn't anyone else around that can do that and there aren't the databases available to do that. It's a way for brands to give better return on their investment."

According to Stone, the agency works with more than 10,000 titles, giving it a reach of more than 10 million readers. But it’s not about selling advertisers on a 10 million-strong audience, but rather establishing a "genuinely local offering" between advertiser and title: "But of course it's not there for you to reach all of those people, it's not there for people who want to advertise to all 10 million. Conceivably you could be a TESCOs who did want to advertise to all 10 million, but you would use it to take difference messages."

For Stone its about providing a more intelligent and targeted service to advertisers and readers, giving the example of a hypothetical pharmacy advert: "If your pharmacy sells a product to help sufferers of rape seed allergies, why advertise in an area where rape seed isn't grown?"

The company will soon launch a product to for smaller scale content producers or publishers allowing them to "put together their magazine in a template or a template of their own, fill it with their own content and advertising from our network of advertisers, for which they get paid, and send it to print and take advantages of the discount that they would get from buying from a commercial publisher on larger scale".

"It makes the whole thing simpler but it also makes those content producers a part of a network," says Stone.

Creating a network will be important to Oxbury's future plans: the company is talking to online news aggregator Fwix and others, including regional and national newspaper groups, to develop its syndication plans. Stone says the agency isn't in competition with local newspaper groups and publishers in the regional space, but wants to disseminate news from the bottom-up and fill gaps in coverage, created either by a lack of resources or simply a lack of correspondents in that area.

The agency has voiced its support for the Press Association's public service reporting plans, for example, and many of the titles Oxbury deals with originated from a disillusionment with or a lack of local political and court news coverage. The agency has plans for a syndication network which would see revenue go to hyperlocal partners and allow this reporting to reach a wider audience.

For both content producers and advertisers the hyperlocal trend in the UK is still emerging, says Stone.

"For some time hyperlocal media has been a huge thing in the United States and that's because in the US, the sheer scale on which they work and have to cover, there's never been a national press of the quality that we have in the UK. So people have always looked to what we would regard as regional newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, as really serious news outlets. For them it was a much more logical step to go even more local," he says.

But even in this embryonic market, there are opportunities for advertisers looking for a better return on investment and publishers looking to disseminate news and information to their local audience, while reaping the commercial benefits of being part of a network of sites, says Stone.

"In the UK it's taken time for that to become a need and for a long time there was no need to go hyperlocal. But what we're seeing now is huge cuts in advertising spend, which of course has led to lots and lots of journalists losing their jobs. And I think that one of those things that has caused those cuts in advertising spend has been advertisers wanting to be much more targeted in their advertising. You can see that reflected in the work that companies are doing online," says Stone.

"People often get caught up with the idea that it's being advertised online and that's why people are buying it, but it not. They're buying it because they can be very specific online, they can advertise only to people who are interested in a specific thing, for example via Facebook Ads or Google Adwords for people searching for a specific word.

"You can do this in the print world as well by doing it at a hyperlocal level."

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