One Degree

By Sonia Carreno

Today I had the opportunity to catch up with Dana Todd, the Chief Marketing Officer for Newsforce. Newsforce is the freshly launched premium news network that gives press releases the widest and sleekest reach net they've seen online to date.

Newsforce launched in July 2008 after securing guaranteed premium ad placement on its network of 288 US newspapers.

The company offers PR Agents large and small the opportunity to gain remarkable visibility within prime news space across the country as well as a landing page with optimal SEO
qualities, attractive content display and full tracking.

Using IAB standard 300x250 space, Newsforce splits the banner into three separate advertising units with 190 lines of character for companies to place their headlines.

Dana showed a demo of the clean landing page that consisted solely of news content called upon from the banner text. Creating even further distribution opportunities, the Newsforce landing pages allow users to share, blog, email, IM or rate the article.

“Rewarding the users with interesting PR and news content is key to our strategy” said Dana, “the minute you degrade the experience by showing aggressive advertising content, you lose the reader”.

The business model is simple. Newsforce buys premium space from the top newspapers in the US, and splits the ad costs between multiple PR items at a discounted rate.

Taking the simplicity to new levels, the company has pre-packaged the product to guarantee a set amount of impressions for a fixed price, which includes the ad unit, media space, landing page and full tracking reports.

Newsforce is one of the most refreshing start-up models I’ve seen in a while. Here are some reasons why:

It addresses the PR agencies’ struggle with SEO and guaranteed news exposure
Focuses on premium content as a priority and secures highly desired placement
It simplifies (one-stop, pre-packaging) the buying process allowing all sectors to participate in the media landscape (big and small)
Provides an alternative to traditional ad units that can sometimes disrupt the newsreader’s user session and creates an environment of surfing vs. ad clicking
The neutral, highly functional landing pages extend the news story life from the traditional 48hrs to 30 days and provide rich SEO structure so that the news item can be easily accessed through search long after the campaign is over

While the company is currently focused on the US market with sales offices in New York, Dana plans to take the service across borders. Canada offers a rich playing field of news sites to buy inventory from and a healthy list of advertisers that are looking for this type of “conservative innovation”.

I’m looking forward to watching Newsforce evolve. My guess is that it won’t take long, as this online sector has been starving for this type of attention.