Creative Circle's app innovations were part of our mission to help local media get through the COVID-19 crisis
We created a series of innovative, new web applications to help local publishers recover some of the advertising lost to store closures and event cancellations during COVID.
Many will have a coronavirus angle and each will help turn this disaster into a positive. "What's Open" was followed by "Honor My Grad" and "My Election" to generate new revenue from local political candidates.
"What's Open," built and deployed in eight days after COVID started shutting down businesses and schools and everything else. It allowed anyone to plug in info about their business or school, what was open or closed and what terms they were working under -- carryout only, by appointment only, open with limited hours, etc. It was all free but businesses could upgrade their notice with directory like information and social feeds for a fee. We gave it to all our publishers for free to support them and sold it to non-clients.
We followed that with a graduation app to help schools, parents and students struggling to celebrate the poor class of 2020 who were missing out on prom, graduation ceremonies and so much more.
And then, for the election of 2020, we created an election app to generate revenue from the hundreds of low-level election candidates in every local market -- school boards, city councils, state reps, etc. It also manages election results, creating charts for every race and a results widget that showcases winners on your home page.
"Premium Pages" provides year-round, high-end digital special sections – eventually covering 24 high interest topics that will get the attention of both readers and advertisers.
Our national polling showed readers, who were largely stuck at home during the Pandemic, wanted more information about teaching their kids at home, home improvement, pets, learning to cook, health, seniors and even how to travel. Knowing publishers didn't have the resources to provide that content, we set out to find content we could provide our publishers and created Premium Pages. Initially, the service consisted of six COVID related topics but we've since expanded it to more than 20 topics with the potential to have a strong impact on readership or advertising.
We also added a national programmatic program, new pay wall capabilities and a paid obit platform during COVID.
At every turn, we were working hard to come up with creative solutions th help our publishers thrive even in difficult situations. No other vendor delivered so may innovations or reacted to COVID so decisively to help newspapers in their time of need.
Moving forward, we'll continue to respond to critical publisher needs with more Premium Page topics, content aggregation capabilities, first party data tools and a best in industry contest platforms.
To learn more about these new revenue options email us or call 401-455-1555.
Watch for more innovative new revenue and content solutions every year from Creative Circle.