Data-Driven Marketing: News meets Mobile meets Advertising

In case you hadn’t heard, on February 2nd Rupert Murdoch launched The Daily, a news site specifically created for iPads.

As the New York Times reported, “The Daily will be a first of its kind for tablet computers: a general interest publication that will refresh every morning and will bill customers’ credit cards each week for 99 cents or each year for $40.”

The publications goal, as far as we can tell, is to take USA Today’s approach to news and build it into a mobile format with interactive details like video, images and even games. (Incidentally Murdoch’s original plan was to call it The Daily Planet after Clark Kent’s newspaper, but DC Comics nixed that.)

While Murdoch and team are clearly pioneering the new approach to news content consumption, the mobile industry has been leaning this direction for awhile. And as newspapers go digital the question becomes how to include the ad experience within these digital news platforms.

“Despite the fact that most newspapers have been able to post rising online revenues, those gains have in no way come close to offsetting print declines. It bears repeating that although online is where the growth is, print is still where the money that supports the publishing is made. One of the reasons for the gap between online and print is that the advertising still doesn’t reach consumers eyeballs in the same way,” writer David Kaplan posted this week in PaidContent.org.

With that issue in mind the Associated Press has announced that it is releasing iCircular, a mobile version of the advertising and coupon inserts that come with weekend newspapers that will be in the form of an app. iCircular is meant to send you to brick and mortar stores, rather than an online retailers.

According to the Washington Post, with iCircular “Advertisers will be able to target customers on their devices by ZIP code. Readers will be able to search for specific products and share deals with friends.”

The AP says newspapers will sell the ads and build the iCircular feature into mobile versions of their websites and applications for smart phones and tablet computers.

AP plans to test the iCircular with a limited group of publishers over the next few months, but it should be interesting to see how this impacts digital news and tablet advertising in general.