The ads for the Bay Citizen, the year-old news website started with $5 million in financing from legendary San Francisco Investment Banker Warren Hellman, are all over the place in Oakland, from downtown to Lake Merritt, and populating AC Transit bus shelters. But who knows what they're about? No one, unless they happen to know the news website's managers.
The ads read "In Today's Journalism Truth Is Indeed Stranger Than Fiction," and has, in much smaller print, more gibberish, then finally BayCitizen.org way down at the bottom.
To prove this, I created a video today using an ad at an AC Transit Bus stop on the 600 Block of Grand Avenue and next to the intersection of Grand and MacArthur, just off the I-580 Grand Avenue Exit. The people I talked to about the ad took several seconds, well, really minutes, to figure out what it was referring to.
Here's the video:
Two women looked and guessed until admitting it was hard to figure out what was going on without reading it, and even then, as stated above and obvious in the video, the ad did not refer to a website until one read down to the very bottom of it.
Let's face it: most people just aren't going to do that, especially if they're whizzing by in a vehicle of some sort.
The second man I talked to agreed to be in the video, and said that he actually knows the managers connected with the Bay Citizen. He agreed that the ad was not communicating the right message - that its readers should check out the the Bay Citizen online. Then, he gave a recommendation fitting for Linkedin, that I would be a great consultant to them.
They don't have the guts to approach me. Won't happen.
What The Bay Citizen is trying to do in terms of hyper-local coverage is understandable, but, as I've said before, hyper-local is hyper-stupid. Without national and international news, it's traffic is far less than needed to sustain itself, and it's revenue potential far less.
The Bay Citizen needs to be repaired in many ways, else, it will burn through Mr. Hellman's money, and stop running online.
