What can one middle-America city tell us about trends in local advertising and marketing? This is a question we posed to the Houston Chronicle SVP of Advertising Ryan Kedzierski at L26. According to Kedzierski, it’s hard out there for local publishers given media fragmentation, but there are bright spots.
Before going into those drivers and dynamics, what’s the Houston Chronicle’s current positioning and operational scale? Kedzierski boasts Houston’s rank as the country’s fourth-largest DMA. Given its first-party and affiliate reach, he also says that the publisher reaches more people than Disney or TikTok.
That operational scale and reach are important because they underscore everything Kedzierski says with an elevated level of scale and stakes. That translates to universal takeaways for anyone in the local advertising game, with a few factors thrown in that are Houston-specific. Texas is nothing if not unique.
With that backdrop, what is Kedzierski seeing? The overarching strategic takeaway is that traditional local publishers have unique assets that can’t be replicated by digital-only players. So the name of the game is to identify those, and then lean into them hard. Cultivate them as key ingredients in a media mix.
Food & Fun
One exemplar in the newspaper world for doing all the above and navigating digital transformation is the New York Times Company. It has recognized its strengths in key areas like food and games, and built massive revenue centers around them. Just ask anyone who plays Wordle or frequents NYC Cooking.
Houston Chronicle has done similar when it comes to the food vertical. It realized that it had a wealth of knowledge and content around local restaurants, flowing from all its professional reviews. So it took that content and trained an LLM to power a front-end chatbot to answer questions about where to eat.
Another example is helping users lower their property taxes. As background, property taxes are a big thing in Houston. And local laws permit citizens to negotiate their property-tax rate. So Houston Chronicle synthesized all the public property data at its disposal to build an AI-powered database.
Subscribers can utilize this tool to see historical trends in their neighborhood, or what their next-door neighbor pays in property taxes. That data can in turn empower them to build a strong case to take to their municipality to negotiate their property taxes down. This has been a big hit for obvious reasons.
High Steaks
Beyond engagement strategies to drive digital subscription revenue, what about the other big revenue center: advertising? From an ad sales perspective, Kedzierski says that it’s all about “butts in seats.” Advertisers are looking for tangible outcomes, such as someone walking into their store.
They don’t care about the marketing funnel or other digital benchmarks like clicks and impressions – they want to know about ROI in real revenue terms. This is a Covid-era phenomenon that stuck, says Kedzierski. During those all-digital days, advertisers got a taste for precise attribution metrics.
One strategic outcome is that the Chronicle now hires differently. Ad sales are less about account management and steak dinners than demonstrating ROI in the face of a fragmented media landscape. That means reps who can talk tech and real ROI terms, not get clients floor seats to Rockets games.
But Kedzierski says it’s also important to work on longer-term brand building. Local businesses want to grow their market share and competitive positioning in addition to data-defined micro wins. So for Kedzierski, it’s all about aligning with an evolving formula of what local business success looks like today.
