As ad budgets contract, buyers are trying to make the dollars work harder, and media companies are getting creative to provide the sought after value adds and integrated opportunities. To that end, following the re-launch of its major city daily newspapers last month, Canwest unveiled a new look for canada.com this morning, with many new features designed to appeal to advertisers.
Ray Philipose, VP, strategy and product development for Canwest Digital Media, tells MiC, ‘for local advertisers on a budget who want highly targeted local advertising, to increased video ads and custom content integration, our ad products are intended to cover a broad range of budgets.’
Canwest has also refreshed the canada.com bi-weekly newsletter. ‘Advertisers were looking for more prominent placements above the fold and the ability to do more custom implementation,’ explains Philipose. ‘This layout and infrastructure allows us to do this.’
The new site offers double the most desired ad units (300×250), and has several new sponsorship opps with homepage visibility, including ‘Photo of the Day,’ ‘Most Popular,’ and on tabs such as Cars, Jobs, and Homes. Philipose also tells MiC a homepage takeover program has been launched on Canada.com that allows an advertiser to own all the media above fold, including 728×90 and 300×250 ad units.
The new look is being promoted via an interactive demo in the top banner position inviting visitors to tour the new features of the refreshed canada.com.
For 2008, comScore average monthly uniques for the canada.com network were at 4.9 million. In December, the network posted 39% growth year-over-year in unique visitors, attributed by some to the new look of Canwest’s newspaper sites which, in turn, received more than 54% growth in UVs. Canwest’s newspaper sites reached 2.9 million Canadians in December.
