Palm Springs Media Prep For Mobile Ad Boom
To most of America, Palm Springs, Calif., and the greater Coachella Valley is best known as California’s desert oasis. A little over 100 miles east of Los Angeles, the area acts as a recreational hotbed for frequently well-to-do snowbirds, retirees and tourists, and is home to major events like the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament, Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
To marketers and the media however, Palm Springs soon enough may be known as something else — a rapidly growing mobile market.
Media research firm Borrell Associates, a media research firm, projects that mobile ad spending in Palm Springs will increase an astonishing 299% by 2016.
“In an affluent market like Palm Springs, a lot of folks are on the cutting edge with their mobile devices,” said Larry Shaw, VP of research at Borrell. (The median household income is actually only $48,757, according to Borrell data, but that is due to the number of residents working in the area’s service industry whose lower salaries statistically mask the wealth in the area. The youth of those service employees also brings the median age down to 37.9, despite a large older population, Shaw said.)
“We saw a lot of growth over the last three or four years in the larger markets for local online advertising, and now the second tier markets like Palm Springs are seeing a lot of growth in local,” Shaw said. “The reason for that comes from mobile. Advertising in mobile is very well suited for local.”
Palm Springs is also well situated for mobile growth given the large number of locally-focused service-oriented businesses, and 74% of households are equipped with broadband, above the general national average of around 67% to 68%, Shaw said.
That said, the Palm Springs area is still a smaller market, with a total population at 444,660, according to Borrell. The local online advertising spend is $18.5 million today, and mobile ad spending today is a small slice at $887,900. Consequently, mobile growth among the local media players today is somewhat limited. Greg Burton, executive editor of the Desert Sun Media Group, which oversees local media outlets like The Desert Sun newspaper and the upscale Desert magazine, puts it bluntly: “We are not where we need to be in mobile right now.”
That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any progress among the leading media players. The Sun Media Group’s website, MyDesert.com, has operated a mobile-friendly version since 2006 that over the past five years has been renovated multiple times, said Nick Bolland, the site’s digital editor. The group doesn’t have its own news app — a corporate-wide offering from parent company Gannett is due before year’s end — but The Desert Sun did collaborate with Cathedral City High School to create and release the CCNews app this month, consisting of news content produced by students, and available on Apple and Android platforms.
“These are the millennials, and Cathedral City has a strong majority of Latinos,” Burton said. “We had trouble meeting that community with the print product. We have lectured in classes and kids have come here to talk to us. These kids are wired more than some of the people on my staff. They know the latest trends and help us see the future.”
Meanwhile local ABC affiliate KESQ-TV, whose KESQ.com bills itself as “The Desert’s Online News Leader,” has news apps for Apple, Android and Blackberry featuring top stories, weather forecasts and video reports.
Desert Media’s MyDesert.com is actually the area’s online news leader in terms of audience by a wide margin. Borrell data indicates newspaper sites made up 23.4% of all media sites visited during the past month in the area, and The Desert Sun makes up a significant portion of that percentage as the only local daily newspaper. Online research company comScore only began getting data from the site this past May, said Marketing Manager Carmela Aquino, but the average number of unique visitors from May through September is 205,000 per month.
By comparison, No.2 KESQ, owned by News-Press & Gazette Co. in St. Joseph, Mo., with a website co-managed by Internet Broadcasting, has an average of 53,000 monthly unique visitors in that time period, and an average 48,500 unique visitors a month for the year ending in September, according to comScore. (KESQ.com is actually the online home for multiple News-Press stations in the area, including local Fox, Telemundo and CW affiliates.)
Coming in third is KPSPLocal2.com, the site for locally-owned CBS affiliate KPSP-TV, managed by Inergize Digital, with an average 38,000 unique visitors a month. ComScore said it did not have measurements for the website for local NBC affiliate KMIR-TV because, according to Aquino, it does not meet comScore’s general minimum reporting threshold of 50,000 monthly unique visitors. (KPSP’s monthly average for the previous year-period may be below that, but it did top 50,000 monthly visitors last January and February.) According to Quantcast.com estimates, KMIR’s site is visited by an average 13,000 people a month.
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