Friday Media Group winner of the
2012 ICMA Classified Media Innovation Award
The ICMA Classified Media Innovation Award is a joint collaboration between the ICMA and Helsinki-based consulting and portfolio development company, Vaibmu Ltd. The award was created to identify true innovations and innovation champions within the classified advertising industry worldwide and encourage ICMA members to support innovation and creativity in their organizations. Award submissions came from around the world, including the USA, United Kingdom, Turkey, Finland, Singapore and Canada.
Applications were judged in the categories of novelty, creativity, sustainability, and results by the ICMA Board of Directors. Due to the high quality of the applications received, 8 applicants were short-listed and four awards presented on April 21, 2012 at the AFCP and ICMA Global Summit in Atlanta, GA, USA.
Winners
Friday Media Group was the 2012 Classified Media Innovation Award winner for their Leadspring Innovation. For over 35 years the Friday Media Group has been bringing buyers and sellers together. Through Leadspring, Friday Media Group provides a fully managed online service that combines the core elements of online marketing to generate enquiries for our customers. The sites are heavily optimized for SEO and all activity including the telephone and email enquiries are tracked. The company “believes that it is one of the most innovative marketing solutions ever offered to local businesses”.
The positive outcomes of the innovation are that it has increased the company’s customer base. They now have 100 new clients since launching in early 2012. Customer retention is also stronger for existing customers and since launch they have only lost 3 customers due to poor performance. Although the business is still young Friday Media Group has ambitious revenue targets as it matures in 2012.
Schibsted Hungary and Gravity R&D, Hungary were the 2012 Show me the Money Award winners for their Dynamic Personalization Innovation. To improve website efficiency and enhance user experience, Jofogás.hu wanted to personalize the site by showing relevant content to each and every visitor. To achieve these goals, Jófogás and Gravity – Rock Solid Recommendations jointly developed a new recommendation system which learns the visitors’ taste in real time and displays the most interesting content to them. The expectation was to generate a content discovery effect and ease navigation.
Significant and sustainable improvement has been achieved in efficiency and user experience. Ad (item) page views/visit: 10.57% increase. Improvement by self learning: at launch, 19.8% of visitors clicked on recommended ads – 2.5 months later, accuracy of recommendations increased by 75%; 35% of visitors now click on a recommended ad. Number of contact requests among users (visitors and advertisers) – has risen by over 33%.
Dominion Insights was the 2012 Quick Implementation Award winner for developing Dominion Insights. Dominion Insights is a new analytics business that captures data from classified portals and presents them to commercial dealers as a tool for improving their business performance. Insights uses vehicle data and consumer search activity to create real-time pricing tools, competitive benchmarks for unit and dealership-level key metrics, and high level industry and market health indicators such as supply/demand that keep dealers informed about critical market and economic forces.
Initially launched in the motorcycle & RV markets in November 2011, Insights has signed 225 dealers to annual contracts worth US$81,000. The company expects to exceed 1,000 dealers within the first year, with annualized revenue of US$360,000. Insights was recently named by PowerSports Business as a winner in its Nifty 50 product awards.
Gumiyo, USA was the 2012 Technology Award winner for their Mobile Business Platform. Gumiyo’s platform‐as-a-service delivers information to any device. The platform boasts innovative data extraction and mapping capabilities that translate media assets into useful mobile websites, apps, QR code and SMS implementations. Tools and widgets seamlessly integrate with existing websites and legacy printed publications allowing the publishers to create multi-channel offering to their customers.
As the first wholly Cloud‐based initiative in the classified media space, the platform powers over 27,000 mobile sites and applications, 25,000 SMS campaigns, and hosted over 1 billion mobile page views in 2011.
About ICMA
The International Classified Media Association (ICMA) is the global leading community of leading players in the Classified Media Industry. ICMA’s community has recognized the need to act together to build the capabilities and support its members to respond effectively to the many challenges facing our Industry. We are dedicated to promoting excellence, co-operation, networking, market leadership, innovation and information-exchange at every level amongst our international membership. ICMA counts more than 71 members from 32 countries. Our publishers encompass high-quality classified ad publications and websites worldwide.
About Vaibmu Ltd
Vaibmu is a management consulting and advisory company. They work with companies worldwide on strategy crafting and opportunity development. Their R&D projects offer a hands-on approach to innovation.
Vaibmu works with growth seeking companies from across the globe. Their diverse customer base hails mainly from media and publishing as well as industry and institutional investors.
