Over at Newspaper Death Watch, one of my favorite industry blogs, Paul Gillin has started an occasional series that highlights new business models and is called “Revenue 2.0.” In his first post Gillin highlights Tapinko, an online service that links ad buyers with media outlets.

Gillin quotes one of the company’s founders and writes that Tapinko’s “approach is reminiscent of Google Print Ads, a service that the search giant shuttered early this year. Groverman believes Google’s mistake was in messing with the existing process. ‘Google Print Ads was a Priceline approach where buyers named their own price and Google owned the brand,’ he says. ‘Newspaper sales reps had no incentive to recommend the service.’

“In contrast, Tapinko merely serves as a connector. Buyers still do business with individual publications at individual rates. Ad reps still collect their commissions. ‘We’re piggybacking on the way advertising has been sold for hundreds of years,’ he says.”

It’s a great idea and a great formula that unintentionally turns the spotlight on two of the industry’s greatest flaws: its lack of marketing skill and its over-reliance on ad reps.

I’m not saying newspapers should or could cut their ad departments. Local ad reps are needed to land local, mom-and-pop clients. But newspapers should be complimenting their reps with an AdSense-type client that makes it easy for clients to set their own price for newspaper print and online ad packages.

Of course, as Gillin notes, Google Print tried that approach and failed, but not because it didn’t work for the client. It failed because of a lack of marketing support from newspapers. The industry has been so comfortable with its local monopolies and healthy profit margins that it has forgotten how to sell itself. When’s the last time you saw an ad for newspapers that made you sit up and take notice?

I’m a geek for cool advertising videos, and I’ll post some of my favorites and compare them to newspaper ads once I get to a computer.

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