Telegraph to embrace multi-platform advertising

The Telegraph is planning to use new editorial touchpoints to drive multi-media advertising.

Annelies van den Belt, new media director of the Telegraph Group, told the Association of Online Publishers' conference in London, that touchpoints - four daily editorial deadlines focusing on delivering news to different platforms and audiences developed as part of the Telegraph's integrated newsroom project - are key to new advertising plans.

She later told Journalism.co.uk: "The consumer now has a much more multi-media approach, duel media consumption, in many cases triple media consumption. On Blackberry, TV, internet, even all at the same time.

"It's about following that consumer [with advertising] and touchpoints are becoming incredibly important.

"We have done a private study to understand our new way of working and come up with 32 products that we can match touchpoints to during the day.

"The challenge is that there is such a wide range of [news] products out there, such a wide range of ways you can reach the consumer, that you need to find a platform that is quite close to your brand."

Ms van den Belt said it may be necessary to increase the number of daily editorial touchpoints to meet the demands of the consumer, which would in turn give multi-media advertisers the potential to better reach to their target groups.

"This highlights a need for some structural changes in our organisation, not just on the editorial side but also on the commercial side," she said.

"The digital age is a tool to understand much better what consumers want and how to be relevant and that may mean in some cases blurring the line [between editorial and advertising], but blurring the lines does not mean that you have to compromise on the quality of your editorial."

The Telegraph's new integrated newsroom, Ms van den Belt added, is complemented by a trading team to manage day-to-day advertising sales and an integrated solutions team that responds to the needs of clients and approaches advertisers with new ideas about using the Telegraph's multi-media outputs.
 
"I don't think there is an ultimate solution, it's about continuously finding out what your clients want, and what your consumer wants, and if we can understand that we can really come up with an integrated solution," she said.

"Multi-media isn't always integration, you integrate where it is relevant, where it makes you more efficient. Multi-media is just a new way of thinking, it is a cultural change."

Yet fundamental to any cross-platform advertising was the acceptance amongst targeted audience groups of the new range of news products.

"You have to understand what your brand is and for a traditional publisher like the Telegraph that is quite easy, we know what we stand for because we have been doing it for 150 years," she added.

"But it's that transition of 'how do we take that brand on to different platforms and continue to be relevant?'

"If you can do that then you can attract an audience, then the advertisers will follow."

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