CIR 7.01 -- HarvestINFO, the online advertising technology firm specializing in newspaper collaboration, is on a roll – or should we say, a rollout – with numerous products and newspaper conversions recently completed or in the near offing.

    Established in 1996 CEO Scott Bailey HarvestINFO’s primary focus has been the conversion of newspaper ads into an online format that is searchable and interactive.

    “That has been the legacy of the company,” said Larry Zimmer, VP marketing and retail products at HarvestINFO. “We’ve built up several hundred newspaper customers in our active portfolio,” he said, including daily newspapers of all sizes, weeklies, and a few alternatives. “We have a wide variety. We work with a number of major groups such as Cox, Gannett, and some Knight Ridder, so we cover the gamut.”

    The firm is now in the midst of a major transformation, ramping up its introduction of a multifaceted product line. “The transformation is really to empower the local publishers – the people who have the local franchise and the local trust of their readership in the local market –  to be able to extend that service and trust to the online world in a very effective way,” said Zimmer.

    Five new advertising products have been designed to help not only newspapers but also local advertisers reach their area market and successfully compete with non-newspaper threats such as Google, Yahoo, EBay and Craigslist.

    The first of the products, Deal Storm, will replace the current Marketplace Local.  The others are brand new launches for HarvestINFO – Shop Mountain, Exchange Tree, Dig it Local, and Click Lizard. These products work together to allow the papers to combine their classified, retail, shopping and sometimes even news information on one searchable platform.

    “We’re not finding a lot of reluctance to combining classified and retail,” said Larry Zimmer. “It’s a matter of how the [newspaper] client wants to do it, not if they want to do it.”

    Zimmer used Dig it Local as an example. “This is a search engine that will produce one set of unified results across the entire media company. And what we’re finding is that clients have different ways that they want the results to be displayed.”

    Zimmer explained that newspapers don’t want the Dig it Local search results to be so massive that the user can’t find what she or he needs. On the other hand, the papers want their users to know that there is an extremely rich inventory of information out there that the paper is bringing to them.

    “With Deal Storm,” said Zimmer, “we have the capability to combine ROP ads with classifieds in a single results set. On the other hand, we can also bring the Shop Mountain solution, which is our inventory of millions of products available from hundreds of national online retailers.”

    Zimmer explained that some newspaper clients are asking HarvestINFO to combine the local and the classified because those lines seem to be blurring a bit, while others are saying that they really want to keep them separate. With the HarvestINFO Dig it Local product a newspaper can also incorporate a Yellow Pages component into its search results as well.

    Several newspapers are ready to replace their Marketplace Local with Deal Storm, including The Atlanta Journal Constitution and the eight Southwest Ohio papers that make up Cox Ohio Publishing: Dayton Daily News, Springfield News Sun, Hamilton Ohio’s Journal News, Middletown Journal, Pulse-Journal in Liberty Township, Lebanon’s Western Star, Fairfield Echo and Oxford Press.

    The upgrade offers more powerful search and display capabilities and brings in the options for transactions that they’ll be implementing in the coming weeks and months.

    “We’ve used Harvest for three or four years,” said Jay King, advertising online manager for Cox Ohio. “It has provided our retail shopping solution. We’ve used Harvest as the fundamental building block of our retail strategy, giving us a shopping product where people can go to our newspaper Web sites and search for local advertising in the retail space.”

    King said that Dayton and the other Cox Ohio papers plan on merging classified merchandise ads into the shopping platform with HarvestINFO’s help. “Eventually, we’re going to merge products. I think users sort of demand it. If I’m a user and I’m looking for a sofa I want to be able to search new and used.”

    Click Lizard, the new contextual-ad product, and Exchange Tree, the new online classifieds platform that allows for image uploads, are a bit farther out in time. Click Lizard will give a paper’s advertiser the ability to go to the newspaper Web site and bid on keywords for his or her ad. Local merchants will be able to participate in a pay for performance mode.

    The Houston Chronicle and The Atlanta Journal Constitution will not only roll out updated HarvestINFO shopping products but will also offer e-commerce hot links as an upsell to advertisers. Along with search results that display the retailer’s applicable products, consumers will have the option of viewing all of a retailers’ products (with AJC). Also, should the retailer purchase this ability, consumers can be directed with one click to the retailer’s site to make an online purchase.  While Atlanta is not incorporating its classified liners as yet, the Chronicle is. Houston has chosen to implement e-commerce but has not upgraded to inventory feeds as yet.

    Catherine Kelly, HarvestINFO CTO, walked us through the use of Deal Storm at The AJC. “We use the original PDF we received to provide the item image,” she said. Kelly explained that the text is pulled out of the ad and made searchable. The user can also go back and look at the entire ad from which the particular piece in the search results is cut.  “We treat everything at the item level and not at the ad level,” said Kelly. “You’re never going to hit this ad, for example, in the results of the search set. You’re going to hit whatever item out of it you happen to be looking for.”

    Zimmer said, “our goal with Deal Storm is to be able to expand on those inventory feeds dramatically so not only will you be able to see the local ads that they’ve put in the paper, you’ll be able to see the full inventory of products that they have available and turn it into much more of a shopping site. That’s where Shop Mountain fits into this.”  Zimmer explained that with Shop Mountain,  HarvestINFO brings millions of products to the media company – as opposed to the paper having to go out and find those products itself.

    The Palm Beach Post will be incorporating inventory feeds, and e-commerce from its retailers’ site, in its shopping channel search. Dan Shorter, GM for PBPost.com, confirmed that The Post intends to implement Shop Mountain in January.

    “Having someone like Harvest digitize our data is what gives us the flexibility to do a lot of the nifty stuff we do like blending classifieds and display ads on the kiosks, or taking all our classifieds and displays and mingling the merchandise,” Shorter told CI.

    Both Atlanta and Palm Beach are bringing classifieds into the mix as well, through Exchange Tree. People will be able to create their own ads online. “Not only can the media company bill the advertiser online,” said Zimmer, “but the advertiser and the buyer will also have the opportunity to conduct a PayPal like transaction securely so the advertiser is assured of getting paid and the buyer is assured of getting the product.”

    What Zimmer stressed as an important plus of HarvestINFO’s product offerings for newspapers is its one vendor, one solution concept. “Some of the capabilities,” he said, “Are available piecemeal from some other companies. We’re bringing it under one umbrella,  which we think is really unique.”

    Janet Deaton, HarvestINFO director of marketing expanded on this. “Another benefit is the reportings available to our clients. We are able to give them one single source for several different reports.”

    “We’re bringing a lot of new revenue opportunities to the papers,” said Zimmer. “That’s a lot of what this is about – the ability to upsell and the ability to compete with EBay and Craigslist.”

    Because of the variety of products, customers and situations, HarvestINFO has a number of different cost packages for newspaper clients. Some of them incorporate an installation fee, and some a transaction fee based on volume. A subscription price model is available as well for papers that want the predictability of a monthly fee within certain parameters of volume. Some of the newer products, such as Shop Mountain, are strict revenue share because the retailers pay a commission and the commission is divided between HarvestINFO and the newspaper.