Jim Haysom | This Is Your Life an internet professional in digital advertising

Advertising could’ve saved Ministry of Sound from Trinity Street collapse

The music industry's  latest victim from the credit crunch is music marketing and e-commerce provider, Trinity Street, who collapsed on Friday last week.  A shock to many, Trinity St. were powering the e-commerce channels for Ministry of Sound and other sites such as Oasis, Orson, Keane, Razorlight, whose websites have been shut down or temporarily closed.

Having worked for Ministry of Sound (MoS) over a year ago, selling the online advertising opportunities from display media, rich media banners, sponsorships, video advertising to ad funded content, I personally believe "advertising" could've saved MoS from this dreadful website closure, at least during the time that it's currently offline.

Last year, MoS decided to completely make over the website, and removed all advertising from the site.  It turned its attention to going back to what they know best.  Selling their music (both downloads and physical CDs), endless array of merchandise and tickets, together with promoting their own content, through MoS TV, Radio, Events, Club, etc.

The new website was long overdue.  The previous version was a mess of different templates, designs, platforms, e-commerce systems that didn't talk to each other, etc.  The new design was clean, very MoS, but all the advertising was gone and no opportunity for the likes of Nokia, O2, Vodafone, adidas, Nike, Smirnoff, Apple, etc,  to target their marketing to this youthful and very interactive audience.

The Daily Mail have quoted the CEO of parent company MSHK, Lohan Presencer,

Our website gets 250,000 visits a week but we've had to close it down. That means lost sales for tickets and downloads. We were given categorical assurances as recently as last Friday that Trinity was perfectly sound. Now we can't get hold of the money they owe us.

The website currently has a message on its website which says the following;

The Ministry of Sound Website is currently closed for maintenance and will re-open shortly.

We apologise for the inconvenience.

We're still selling tickets to the Ministry of Sound Club. Please click through on the links below for further details.

Imagine the opportunity for a brand to have 100% Share of Voice (SOV) on the homepage of www.ministryofsound.com?  I'm sure that the gossip and media exposure of this will cause a spike in traffic.

If the site is apparently getting 250,000 visitors a week, that's around 36,000 visitors a day (let's say).  If you sold this homepage to an advertiser for a 1 week roadblock, whilst you managed to sort out an alternative solution, you could sell this out for an attractive CPM / or tenancy.

Let's work out the maths. 

Site is down for a week, and you only monetise it through selling tickets on Ticketweb.  Incremental revenue for the week?  My guess, pretty little.

You lose all revenues from music downloads and MoS merchandise and CD's.  Impact, pretty big I'd imagine.

Offer a branded advertiser the opportunity to capitalise on the homepage for a week, maybe a huge ad format above the fold, it would offer huge click through rates to counter the disappointment of the site being down. 

Or, alternatively if I was in charge, I'd put up a video of Eric Prydz "Call on Me", one of the web's most sexiest and most viewed music video of all time, with an advertising pre-roll at the beginning.  Sell this ad for £50 CPM for 1 weeks exclusive inventory on the homepage, and you've got yourself just over £10,000 net revenue after agency discount to recoup against loss earnings due to the collapse of Trinity Street.

Unfortunately, Ministry of Sound don't do advertising on their website any more.  So it's a case of coulda, shoulda, woulda.  Shame really, because Advertising could have saved them, and turned around something that any publisher dreads when things go wrong - putting all your eggs in one basket, with no plan B.

So for your viewing pleasure, here is Eric Prydz's Call On Me dance track in the finest high quality.  Click video to enjoy.  Without the pre-roll.