Major metro newspapers are feeling the heat as classified revenues plummet. These same large papers are the most resistant to change.

However, some of our major metro clients are “reinventing classifieds,” but these papers aren’t in the U.S. — they’re in Latin America. These papers are just beginning to feel the encroachment of online classifieds on their revenue. But unlike their stateside counterparts, they’ve moving quickly and boldly to shore up their franchises.

In less than two months, El Tiempo (453,000-circ.) in Bogotá, Colombia, will launch a bold design and marketing campaign that will re-brand all their products to improve usability and emphasize value to readers and advertisers. I can provide details after they launch.

In Mexico City, the print and online classifieds were redesigned at El Universal. (247,000-circ.) I encourage you to look at aviso-oportuno.com.mx - the online classified site of El Universal.

Here’s a link to the before and after:
http://www.brasstacksdesign.com/images/aviso_before_after_01.gif

Here’s a link to the live site. Mouseover to reveal vertical-specific search criteria. http://www.aviso-oportuno.com.mx/

While the before-and-afters may seem relatively the same, the big changes are in usability and branding. In the old site, the landing page required you to wade through a page of clutter to find links for search in each of four verticals - users could not search classifieds from the landing page. Can you believe that?

And there were two other problems: the online verticals shared color schemes with their print counterparts, but had different names. And there were six brands: one for the newspaper (El Universal), one for the classifieds (avsio-oportuno), and one for each of the four online verticals.

So here’s what we did:

1. We eliminated all the visual clutter on the landing page and allowed users to search any category by keyword and/or vertical-specific search criteria. Now users can do all this from the landing page, without any need to navigate to other pages. In other words, they no longer needed to search for “search.”

2. We made the names of the online verticals match the print verticals.

3. We unified all classifieds beneath a single brand name, to make it easier to promote the entire franchise, both in print and online.

4. To promote online in print, we re-branded the print product with the name of the online site. Here’s a link:
http://www.brasstacksdesign.com/aviso-oportuno.jpg

This new banner may look like a web banner, but it’s actually the print banner.

These changes may seem elementary, but we’ve found that even simple changes to improve usability are difficult or impossible to make at papers in the U.S. That’s one reason why users prefer CraigsList — it’s easier to use than newspaper sites.

The redesign in Bogota hasn’t launched yet, but the results from Mexico City indicate that their redesign is working:

Prior to launching their print redesign in June, revenue was down 6.5 percent, year to date.

In the first two weeks of the redesign, those losses were cut in half to 3.8 percent, year to date.

In the first two weeks of July, they’re selling 2.0 percent more than last year.

They’ve also seen a spike in unique visitors at their online site, which was redesigned along with the print product.