MSearchGroove

USA Today has teamed up with 4INFO, a provider of mobile search and text messaging services, to offer a new service that cleverly combines mobile content and mobile advertising. The service delivers users access to free text alerts on topics including news, sports scores, stock quotes, weather, gossip, movies and travel. More importantly, USA Today enables advertisers to insert their ads “offering related of special offers” next to the text alert. “This service capitalizes on core brand strengths and offers great new real-time interactive services for readers and advertisers,” Jeff Webber, senior vice president of advertising for USA Today, said in a statement.

To date USA Today has three advertisers on board – Microsoft, Chevrolet and Citibank, according to this report in AdWeek. (In the case of Chevrolet, the ads accompany sports text alerts – Citibank delivers it message in connection with stock quotes and other similar content.) When users take the bait and respond to the ad, brands can follow up by delivering coupons, collecting user email addresses, conducting user polls, and providing “directions to the nearest store or physical location.” (Chevrolet, for example, delivers directions to the nearest dealer. Citibank tells users the location of the nearest ATMs.) The result is a new breed of service that sits somewhere between mobile search and suggestion, encouraging a kind of dialogue with individual users based on the ads they see and the responses they text in response.

Connect the dots and these mobile local search components – such as information about the nearest dealer or ATM – lay the groundwork for a fairly solid mobile search & monetization strategy. USA Today and 4INFO fail to detail their mobile search approach (even though the wording plays prominently in the release), but it’s easy to imagine how this could play out.

In many ways, the USA Today service (which lets users who text to a short code deliver free content alerts) is comparable to the services offered by mobile search provider AskMeNow. (Last month the company launched AlertMeNow, a push service delivering users content alerts, and hinted that there’s a lot more in the pipeline.) In a nutshell, AskmeNow has paired free text alerts – and more recently free mobile search – in an effort to drive and deliver targeted mobile advertising.

USA Today is pursuing a similar strategy – but it may yield superior results based on the fact that USA Today is a recognized media brand with an established audience. Put another way, USA Today, with its stock of content and its mobile search and advertising capabilities, has all the bases covered to introduce a completely self-sufficient and potentially lucrative mobile search & monetization scheme. It also helps that Gannett, which owns USA Today, has a minority investment in 4INFO.

The takeaway: USA Today sets an example other media companies are well-advised to follow. Indeed, media brands – if they partner with search providers — can create and operate an AdWords-like monetization scheme on their own terms and with their own content. Clever content owners will surely take this a step further and offer search and advertising as a service to their own partners and reciprocal sites.

• Posted in
• Mobile Search, Mobile Advertising

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