This morning’s Yahoo! press conference in New York gave the online advertising community a chance to see what Newspaper Consortium members have known for a while:  Yahoo! has developed a powerful set of tools for making online advertising easier to manage and a great vehicle for growing local interactive revenue.

APT is the new platform’s name and The Newspaper Consortium is the first group to get access to it.  Rollouts have started at the web sites of the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News and will eventually cover the sites of nearly 800 newspapers by mid-2009.

The APT platform will enable local newspaper company sales reps to sell highly-targeted advertising to local business on their own sites, on Yahoo! sites and the sites of other publishers who use the APT platform. 

William Dean Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group, joined Yahoo! management at the press conference where he called the release of APT a “defining moment” for the industry that “will drive a sea-change in how we operate and capture opportunities in the local online ad market.”

Singleton stressed the potential of sophisticated targeting techniques to raise the rates local newspapers are able to charge for online ads, as well as the ability to increase volume by selling Yahoo! inventory served to local audiences.

“We can also now offer advertisers much more targeted inventory by demographic, interest, and region - capabilities we did not have before,” Singleton said. “Today, newspaper advertising is heavily focused on selling sites and sections.  Using Yahoo!’s insights and targeting technology, we can now sell specific sites or audience-specific inventory.”

The Yahoo! partnership, Singleton said, fits nicely with MediaNews Group’s “online first” approach to local publishing.  “We have shifted our focus to the web to ensure we are providing the highest quality content to our online readers,” Singleton said, noting that APT will enable advertisers to target their best potential customers no matter what type of information they’re interested in. 

As an example, he noted that a local car dealer working with the Mercury News who wants to reach young males interested in buying a hybrid vehicle will be able to reach the specific target audience in ads delivered in places as diverse as coverage of the San Jose Sharks on mercurynews.com and political coverage on yahoo.com.

Many local newspapers first became intrigued with behavioral targeting of online advertising more than five years ago–and quite a few newspaper web sites tried their hand at selling behaviorally.  The results were often disappointing, in part because newspaper web sites had too little data and too little inventory to consistently structure significant BT campaigns.

Newspaper Consortium members are now gearing up to sell BT in a big way–with the soon-to-be unveiled new advertising platform from Yahoo!   The platform will be the drive train that newspapers use to propel ads into their own sites as well as into Yahoo! inventory served in their local area.

But even before the new platform has been rolled out, many Consortium members have scored BT successes by selling ads that target segments of the Yahoo! audience in their local markets. 

Behavioral targeting, of course, carries a premium CPM because it can deliver a message to consumers identified as likely to buy an advertiser’s product based on their recent web activities.  It fits in nicely as part of an overall media plan that might also include in-category advertising, run-of-site inventory, print, and sometimes lead generation or e-mail services.

Not surprisingly, local auto dealers have been among the most eager early adopters of BT advertising sold by Consortium members.  Working through their local online newspaper reps, dealers can now target consumers by the type of vehicles they’ve researched online–in segments such as economy vehicles, compact SUVs, luxury and mid-range.

Especially important at this challenging time for dealers, the newspaper’s ability deliver local behavioral targeting with Yahoo! is adding extra horsepower to local automotive campaigns.  And it marks another step in the newspaper’s transformation into a local multi-media marketing firm.