Belo Interactive Audience-Targeted Ads Outperform Run-of-Site Campaign's 7x Larger Reach

Belo Interactive Brings TACODA Behavioral Ad Targeting to Real Estate Clients; Builds on Earlier Success With Automotive and Leisure Travel Clients

DALLAS, Oct. 14 -- An audience-targeted ad campaign for a local home builder running on Belo Interactive's DallasNews.com has outperformed a run-of-site (ROS) campaign for the same advertiser -- even though the ROS program had seven times greater reach.

The ROS campaign and audience-targeted campaigns ran simultaneously with targeted ads served only to users who had visited the HomeCenter real estate section of DallasNews.com in the past 30 days. The targeted ads were served whenever visitors returned to DallasNews.com even if they were outside the real estate section. Using TACODA's Audience Management System to segment and target potential home buyers among previous visitors of the real estate section of the Web site, the campaign effort achieved a response rate of 6.1% among the target audience. Moreover, while the ROS campaign's reach was seven times that of the targeted campaign, the targeted campaign captured created nearly 50% more click-throughs. In addition, during the targeted advertising campaign, the real estate Web site saw more than double the traffic.

This builds on earlier successes DallasNews.com had with Automotive and Leisure Travel advertisers. In the automotive category, a DallasNews.com program campaign for a Dallas/Fort Worth Mitsubishi dealer provided banner advertising within the automotive section of DallasNews.com at the time of the site visit. In addition, banners were delivered to customers who had visited the automotive section within the past 30 days, using TACODA's targeting capabilities. These ads were served whenever visitors returned to DallasNews.com even if they were outside the automotive area. The response rate among the target audience was 7.7%, an improvement of 2200% over the industry average click through rate of .33%. Moreover, the audience-targeted ads doubled the number of credit applications the dealership received, and increased the number of online searches by 17%. The dealership also reported that the DallasNews.com campaign generated 44% of the total calls into the dealership at a time when eight promotions were running in other media.

In the travel category, DallasNews.com supplemented contextually-relevant content advertising with ads targeted outside of the travel section to visitors whose prior actions suggested a keen interest in the advertiser's message. The response rate at 8.15 percent was 2,400 percent higher than national average. Those that responded to the online campaign generally purchased a package within 10 days. In addition to increasing the advertiser's reach and the campaign's effectiveness, audience-targeted ads increased vacation package bookings by 50%, and revenue for the vacation broker by 38%. Furthermore, by use of sophisticated tracking mechanisms, the vacation broker reported that the DallasNews.com campaign generated 40% of the total revenue in Dallas for the month of June.

"The evidence that audience-targeted campaigns well outperform nearly every other form of online advertising continues to mount," says Eric Christensen, vice president and general manager of Belo Interactive. "Advertisers who have experienced these enhanced results are renewing faster and at higher levels. We will continue to move into new ad categories with TACODA-based targeting as we build out audience ad-targeting services for auto, travel and now real estate."

Belo Interactive, the Internet subsidiary of Belo Corp., recently installed TACODA Systems' Audience Management System, giving its 34 Web sites such as KING5.com in Seattle, WA; projo.com, the Web site of The Providence (RI) Journal, and KMOV.com in St. Louis, MO the ability to track and measure online audience demographic and geographic information, behavioral patterns and visitation trends. By integrating Belo Interactive's customer registration database with TACODA Systems' AMS, Belo Interactive sites can qualify audience value to national and local advertisers and create custom, targeted advertising campaigns that deliver a specific message to a defined audience segment.

About Belo Interactive

Belo Interactive is the Internet subsidiary of Dallas-based Belo Corp., one of the nation's largest media companies with a diversified group of market-leading television, newspaper, cable and interactive media assets. A Fortune 1000 company with approximately 7,800 employees and $1.4 billion in annual revenues, Belo operates news and information franchises in some of America's most dynamic markets and regions, including Texas, the Northwest, the Southwest, Rhode Island, and the Mid-Atlantic region. Belo owns 19 television stations (six in the top 16 markets) reaching 13.7 percent of U.S. television households; owns or operates six cable news channels; and manages one television station through a local marketing agreement. Belo publishes four daily newspapers: The Dallas Morning News, The Providence Journal, The Press- Enterprise (Riverside, CA) and the Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, TX). Belo Interactive's new media businesses include 34 Web sites, several interactive alliances, and a broad range of Internet-based products. Additional information is available online at http://www.belointeractive.com/ . For more information, contact Linda Fisk, Vice President/Audience Development and Management, at 214-977-4017.