Self-service ads and IPTV plans at MEN

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The Manchester Evening News (MEN) is planning to introduce an internet portal that will allow advertisers to themselves generate adverts on the newspaper's websites.

The MEN is also planning to use its Channel M TV station to develop an IPTV service.

The ad portal will be similar to Google's alpha portal that allows advertisers to create campaigns across a range of print titles.

The MEN portal, which is in development and planned to be up and running within 12 months, will initially allow ads only to be placed on websites, although developers hope to expand the service so that it can handle cross platform campaigns seamlessly and without the need of telesales.

"We've had some false starts with our internet business, we have not covered ourselves in glory over the last five or six years so we have drawn a line in the sand," Mark Dodson, chief executive of GMG Regional Media, told Journalism.co.uk.

"We have to get through to Greater Manchester with some social connectivity. It's vital that we have self-service ads. It's uneconomic to have telemarketing and inbound telesales for the amount of money that we are going to be generating on the web.

"We have to make it easy. EasyJet have this dynamic pricing model and everyone understands how to use it. We need to have something that simple for our advertisers."

The MEN was also planning, he added, to develop its Channel M TV service so it could eventually be delivered as IPTV, although he conceded that the service would not be happening in the near future.

"Channel M now is in a broadcast format, the future for TV will be in a narrow cast format and so we're going to use Channel M as a bridge almost from television into rich digital content on IPTV.

"If we rushed to IPTV at the moment there is no audience, trading or mechanics to drive cash or ad revenue. But we hope to tease people to it through digital bridges by saying 'did you like the program? Now you can watch it at a time you want to watch it and at a time you want to' and behind this broadcast offering we will have lots of rich sticky content. The channel will become a shop window for the content we have behind it."