The Palm Beach Post wins for Best Mobile Shopping Directory

NAA Digital Edge Awards – February 2008

The newspaper industry can’t let Google and Yahoo! and a slew of other international companies come into our local markets and take away mobile advertising revenue. Many of these dot-coms already are offering business directories via mobile, which list area hotels, restaurants and the such. We can’t give up this on-the-go audience. We need to own this local market as we do print and online.

To fight back, the staff of PalmBeachPost.com decided to offer every element of every display ad plus our classifieds via a mobile site and text messaging. Revenue for the first year is close to $750,000 with the largest sale being $40,000 to a grocery store.

Gina Wilcox, the digital development director, along with technical manager Dale Swain, mobile coordinator Shaun Flagg and online GM Dan Shorter created our site at shop.pbpost.com. “You can search about 25,000 goods and services that have appeared in Post ads in the past week. You can search for homes, pizza, cars, jobs or anything else that appeared in the paper. These items are also available on our Shopping channel. We even offer photos,” says Wilcox.

Some are images taken from display ads and then associated with the part of the print ad that was searched for. An example would be searching for a plasma TV and getting all the details in the display ad plus the color photo that ran with it.

We are already seeing people not just searching for plasma TVs but putting in specific UPC codes. It appears they are standing in one electronics store with their cell phone checking out inventories on our mobile site for competitors across town.

We also allow mobile device users without Web services to search via text messaging. They text shop to 72727 and then select a category. It takes a few more steps but they see the same items as on our mobile site.

We think mobile has a tremendous upside, since we know that more people in our market have cell phones and PDAs than have Internet connections.

Our vendor partner is CellSigns.

© 2008 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.