It began with a straightforward request from advertising to circulation at The Daily Oklahoman: "Could we please add a few more zones? I want to deliver to neighborhoods."
Ninety days later, an entirely new distribution system was up and running--one that allows the 220,000-circulation newspaper to target advertising in small geographic areas, some less than a square mile. More specifically, advertisers in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area may choose from one or more of 271 microzoned "plots" or from 68 ZIP codes, seven days a week.
The motivating factor was powerful--the Oklahoman was about to lose a million-dollar grocery account because individual store managers in a particular supermarket chain were prohibited from advertising in one another's territories. The newspaper was also experiencing increased competition from direct mailers and suburban newspapers.
A task force of staff members from advertising, circulation, marketing, information systems, transportation and packaging/distribution developed a homegrown computer system that completely integrates advertising and circulation operations. The paper also devised a coding system to identify plots and assign truck routes.
Harshad Matalia, NAA's post-press manager, says many newspapers are microzoning, but The Daily Oklahoman "is one of the pioneers, and it is doing it with great success."
Advertisers may select newspaper readers only or reach every household in a zone with a nonsubscriber product delivered by the newspaper's alternate-delivery company, Distribution Systems of Oklahoma (DSO).
Distribution control was the greatest challenge, says Circulation Director Gerald Beattie. With the help of his staff, including Ed Norlin and Doris Stearman, Beattie opened 11 distribution centers. All trucks receive load numbers so they can be easily identified and guided at the dock. Bundle wrappers are coded to identify the bundles' contents, target distribution center and microzone.
DSO prints route-delivery lists on narrow cards that carriers strap onto their wrists with rubber bands. Some 450 contractors hand-deliver ad packages to nonsubscriber homes.
The newspaper now competes more directly with the post office, which sells postal routes rather than ZIP codes to advertisers. "Microzoning gave us an advantage," says Beattie. "We were behind the curve, but now we're ahead of the curve."
Glenn James, packaging and distribution manager, says microzoning was a real challenge because the operation "has to be carefully controlled all the way from packaging through the contractors."
The newspaper uses four Sheridan Systems inserters--three 1472Ps and one 1372P--to handle the now highly complex packaging operation. The number of packages in the post-press area has grown by 20 percent. Some weeks, the packaging center produces as many as 270 different packages.
The ride was bumpy in the beginning, but is very smooth now, says Marketing Development Manager Clydette Womack. Besides keeping the key supermarket account, microzoning has also generated other avenues of revenue, she says.
"Now we can go after the smaller mom-and-pop retailers that wouldn't have advertised before. Microzoning is perceived as very customer friendly."
Judy Grande is a regular contributor to TechNews.
Sources
Harshad Matalia, NAA, 11600 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, Va., 20191. E-mail, matah@naa.org; phone, (703) 648-1185; fax, (703) 648-1216.
Gerald Beattie, Glenn James and Clydette Womack, The Daily Oklahoman, P.O. Box 25125, Oklahoma City, Okla., 73125. Phone, (405) 475-3311; fax, (405) 475-3733.
©1997 Newspaper Association of America. All rights reserved.