CareerBuilder To Show Off Gannett Muscle

Online recruiting site CareerBuilder.com‘s $28 million
multi-media advertising campaign is about to get more muscle, thanks to a
recent investment by Gannett , the nation’s number-one
newspaper publisher.

Gannett, publisher of USA Today and USAToday.com, recently took a one-third stake
in the joint venture alongside newspaper publishers Knight-Ridder , which owns the Miami Herald, and Tribune Company , parent of The Chicago Tribune.

As a result of the investment, Judy Hackett, chief marketing officer for
CareerBuilder.com, said the next phase of the site’s ad campaign will roll
out in 16 Gannett newspaper markets during the week of
November 7th. “Each week, we’ll add television, Web and print,
adding 10 or 12 more markets each week.”

The papers will be picking up ads from CareerBuilder’s current “Be One” campaign,
which first
launched in early September and have been appearing in Knight-Ridder and
Tribune properties in Boston, Miami and Chicago. Now, Gannett’s
numerous properties will be added to the mix.

Analysts who follow online classifieds see Gannett’s $98.3 million
CareerBuilder investment with the second- and third-largest newspaper
publishers as serious reinforcement to help the site challenge category
leader Monster.com for market share. Monster.com’s success in local
markets has largely come at the expense of the newspaper companies’ own
classified listings in local publications they own.

In addition to USA Today, as well as USAToday.com, Gannett owns over 400
publications, including USA WEEKEND, a weekly newspaper magazine that
appears in hundreds of newspapers around the country. It also publishes over
15 daily newspapers and 300 titles in the UK under its Newsquest plc
subsidiary. Gannett also owns 22 television stations.

“Monster.com had been a winner in the awareness category by virtue of their
advertising, such as its famed SuperBowl spots,” said Bruce Murray, of Corzen.com, a New York-based provider of
online market data, including indexes of the Web classified marketplace.

“I think what you’re seeing here is CareerBuilder.com’s efforts to change
that balance by adding substantial promotions through their properties,
especially Gannett’s network of television stations.”

The multi-million dollar media push is leaving no channel uncovered,
especially
the Web. On Wednesday, CareerBuilder and Earthlink announced that
CareerBuilder would be the exclusive provider of job listings in the ISP’s
career section on its subscriber’s “personal start pages.”

The deal means CareerBuilder’s 400,000 job postings are being piped to about
4.9 million Earthlink subscribers. “Through this agreement, we now extend
the distribution of the jobs posted by our corporate customers to
EarthLink’s subscriber base,” said Matt Ferguson, chief operating officer of
CareerBuilder.

Jupiter Research, which is owned by the same corporate parent as this
publication, estimates that US online recruitment sites
will take in about $800 million in listing revenues this year, and expects about $920 million in 2003. By 2007, the projection is just under $1.5 billion in recruitment
dollars being spent online alone.