Category Archives: mainstream media

Interesting Reading, 11/13/08

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Traditional Media Hit Harder Than In Past Recessions

It used to be that three mainstream media channels – newspapers, radio and magazines – reliably predicted the economy’s decline into a recession and its recovery. That all changed about three years ago. Newspapers and magazines fell while the economy was rising and show no sign of anticipating a recovery. The results, writes Erik Sass:

While softening ad revenue anticipated the two previous economic downturns by about a year, in the most recent case, the slowdown for magazines, newspapers and radio began about three years before. In addition, the declines have already proven to be steeper in this pre-recession period than at the height of the previous ones. This suggests that all three traditional media, suffering from both secular and macroeconomic trends, are poised to suffer unprecedented losses in the economic downturn that is now unfolding.

Magazine Ad Pages Drop, Holiday Season Looks Grim

OMG, these numbers are terrible. At least we’re all in this together. Quoting:

On Oct. 28, the Conference Board announced that its consumer confidence index had plummeted to an all-time low of about 38 out of 100, a drop of over one-third from its level of 61.4 in September. The expectations index–which evaluates consumer sentiment about the future–went even lower, dropping from 61.5 to 35.5. Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board’s research center, said the decline in the confidence index was “the lowest reading on record” since the index began tracking consumer attitudes in 1985

Macy’s said it will eliminate all magazine advertising in the first half of 2009, although its holiday marketing budget is still largely intact. Subsequently, The New York Times reported that Neiman’s specialty retail segment–including Neiman Marcus Stores and Bergdorf Goodman–saw sales tumble 27.6% in October, while Nordstrom is down 15.7%, and Target fell 4.8%.

Online Retailers Tightening Belts

Here’s one explanation for the story above. Quoting:

  • In a Shop.org holiday survey, 30% of online retail marketers said they were trimming marketing budgets, while 16% said they were reducing promotional spending.
  • 45% of retailers said their budgets for free-shipping promotions were either significantly or somewhat higher compared to last year.
  • Forrester projects sales this holiday season will grow at the slowest rate ever, 12% vs. 21% a year ago.
  • 45% of online consumers plan to buy less overall this holiday due to uncertainty about the economy, up from 20% in 2007.
  • A full 21% of consumers plan to shop primarily or entirely online this season, up from 19% last year. And 24% of total dollars spent this season are expected to be spent online, compared with 22% last year.

Marketing Executives Networking Group Survey Finds Social Media Practices Still in Infancy Stages

A survey last month and found that 67% of respondents consider themselves beginners at using social media for marketing purposes. Additionally, more than 87% of respondents are not regularly measuring the ROI of their social media marketing efforts. “

The Viral Video Marketing Dilemma

Metrics expert Mark Ghuneim suggests that we still have a long way to go in evolving our thinking about viral video metrics beyond view counts. Marketers are beginning to think more holistically about how to measure success. Quoting:

According to a recent FEED Company study, some 70% of ad-agency and media-buying executives plan to increase budgets for viral video marketing in 2009. In addition, 72% of ad-agency executives and media buyers say their clients are “interested” or “very interested” in using viral video as an integral part of their marketing campaigns.

“Favoriting,” commenting, linking to, embedding, social network amplification and other action all constitute a level of user attention that must somehow be accounted for and given appropriate value.

In addition, a marketing executive would also want to know how users were discovering their video, as well as how quickly the view counts were growing. The velocity of consumption and adoption is an important indicator as well as factors beyond the standard impression and stream data. For example, are bloggers talking about the video? Are users micro-blogging about the video?

The Vote: A Victory for Social Media, Too

BusinessWeek is all breathless about the energy that social networks brought to election day, and there are some good stories/examples here. However, also listen to NPR’s story on turnout levels for a more sobering view. Turnout was good for the US, but we still lag far behind other democracies.

Top Five Ways to Piss off a Blogger

With tongue only partly in cheek, Peter Shankman lists Stupid PR Mistakes that annoy bloggers. Most of these have been annoying reporters for years!

Google Aims To Predict Flu Outbreaks

Privacy advocates may blanch, but I think this is a totally cool way to mine patterns from search behavior that contributes to the common good. What an innovative idea!

LinkedIn cuts 10 percent of its workforce

With an average member earning about $110,000 a year and more than $100 million in investment capital in the bank, you’d think LinkedIn would be sitting pretty. Yet the company is laying off about 36 people. Smart move. Don’t let VC love make you fat and happy.

Yahoo’s Yang Has No Regrets — He Should

Om Malik has little nice to say about Jerry Yang’s stewardship of Yahoo. Yang now basically admits he should have sold to Microsoft when he had the chance and the collapse of a partnership with Google is particularly painful. With the economy now in the tank, what’s next?

How To Win in the Search-Driven Media World

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Last week, I suggested that people’s information consumption habits have changed permanently as a result of tools like Google Alerts and RSS feeds. These technologies make it possible for people to subscribe to keywords rather than publications. While media brands will always matter, their importance will decline as people become more accustomed to selecting information by topic and new trusted brands emerge from the world of social media.

So what does this all mean to marketers? A lot. No longer is success a matter of placing messages in a few mass media outlets and hoping for the best. Marketers will need to segment their audiences and their media selections much more carefully in the future. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they also have the means to influence media more directly and even to become the media, if they so choose.

Segments

Let’s look at segmentation first. It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is in a terrible state. Circulation is declining between 6% and 10% annually and their audience is aging. A 2005 Carnegie Corp. survey estimated that the average age of a regular newspaper reader is now 55 and climbing. That figure is 61 for regular viewers of the TV evening news.

The trend is quite different in other media, however. Some print magazines are actually growing circulation. Runners World, for example, has added 200,000 subscribers in the last three years. In some emerging overseas markets, even newspapers are quite healthy. Also, while network television viewership is declining, some cable outlets are growing nicely.

This means you need to consider the audience you’re trying to reach and match it to the media you choose. Older customers can still be served effectively through mainstream media, while the under-30 age group requires a very different approach.

Segmentation also applies to interests. Technology enthusiasts have moved swiftly to the Web, a trend that has been dramatized by the collapse of many consumer electronics and corporate IT publications. However, traditional lifestyle media such as cooking, travel and fashion are holding up quite well. A big reason is that people interact differently with these products. Topics that are news- or transaction-driven migrate more quickly online than those that emphasize aesthetic appeal. The last time I checked, Brides magazine was still thick with ads.

You Are the Media

The more intriguing opportunity for marketers is to become the media. As I noted last week, search engines don’t have brand loyalty. The rise of super-bloggers like Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble demonstrate that trusted brands can grow quickly online. Regular readers may be tired of hearing me say this, but if you aren’t optimizing all of your business communications for search, you aren’t doing your job.

Google is now people’s first stop for information and insight on nearly every imaginable product. You can gain an unnatural advantage over even very large media brands by understanding which keywords bring people to your site and then optimizing around those terms. This is what I mean by “you are the media.”

But it isn’t just you. Other trusted brands are emerging online and those people can also be influenced to drive home your message. Using the right keywords in your communications to these new influencers can help drive your brand’s awareness through search. Sometimes you want to drive traffic to your own website, but at other times you may prefer the endorsement of a trusted third party. Again, the key factor is search optimization. Online media rely far more heavily on search visibility and external links than circulation lists. Use the same tools they use and you can piggyback on their success with astonishing speed.

Search Is the New Circulation

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From my weekly newsletter. Sign up in the subscription box to the right.

Recently, I had the chance to speak to two classes of junior and senior public relations majors at Boston-area colleges about changes in the media landscape. I find these sessions to be as enlightening to me as they are to the students because I learn a lot about their preferences and motivations.

With the accelerating collapse of the newspaper industry fresh in my mind, I was particularly interested to understand their news reading habits. “How many of you have read a daily newspaper either in print or online within the past day?” I asked. Nearly every one of the 45 hands in the two classes went up. “How many of you subscribe to a daily newspaper?” I followed up. Only one student raised her hand.

Welcome to Generation Y, the group of people born in the last 30 years who define the future of business and media. Every one of the students in these classes has grown up in a world where information is free and instantly available. The concept of paying for news is as foreign to them as the horse and buggy.

These students will enter the workforce over the next five years and they will shake our assumptions to the core. While they have some brand loyalty, their real affiliation is to information.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you’re like most communications professionals, you probably subscribe to several Google Alerts. This service e-mails you whenever the terms you specify – such as your name, your company name or a topic that interests you – turns up in Google’s search index.  Google Alerts have no concept of brand.  An article on an obscure website is as likely to top the list as one in The New York Times.  When you use Google Alerts, your loyalty is to the topic, not the source.

If you are a TiVo user, you know that you can subscribe to programs based on actors or even subject matter.  You don’t care which network carries the program; your loyalty is to the content.

These are just two examples of the ways in which attitudes toward media brands are changing.  While trusted sources will always have a special value, we are constantly discovering new sources of trusted information and modifying our assumptions about the value of trust.  For some information, we still want to consult the big media brands in order to get the real story, but for less important information we might be satisfied with any source as long as we get the basic facts.

The great equalizer in this equation is search.  Computers have no brand loyalty and search engines are tuned to deliver the results that best match our queries, even if the source is unknown to us.  Search is, in effect, the new circulation.  In the pre-Internet days, we gave publishers permission to get a slice of our attention for a one-year period.  This had great value to the publishers because they could be reasonably certain of a known audience for their products.

In the new world, there is no certainty beyond relevance to the terms that an unknown audience may or may not find interesting.  This is pretty scary if you’re a publisher.

It’s scary for marketers, too.  But it’s also liberating.  Next week I’ll discuss some of the implications of the death of media brand loyalty on our assumptions about marketing and public relations.

Digg Setback Calls 'Wisdom of Crowds' Into Question

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Journalism junkies have been closely watching the example of Digg.com to see if the wisdom of crowds really is better than the judgment of editors. According to David Chen, it isn’t. Writing on Mashable, Chen offers a detailed deconstruction of Digg’s recent decision to jettison some of its top users, apparently for trying to manipulate the system.  The weeding-out process was positioned as a routine cleanup intended to eliminate abusers of the community adjudication process, but it was actually an acknowledgment that decision-making by the masses has serious flaws, Chen concludes.

It’s been common knowledge for a couple of years that the Digg model lent itself to manipulation by a small number of people. In fact, there’s evidence that up to half the stories on Digg’s enormously influential home page were contributed by just 100 users.  By taking draconian action to ban members who had, in some cases, contributed hundreds of hours of effort to building the site, Digg is admitting that it has been unable to figure out an algorithmic solution to the abuse.

The problem isn’t in programs, but in people.  Individuals can attain fame within the community by contributing stories that are ranked highly by other users.  Active members discovered early on that by forming “friend” relationships with many others, they could enhance their performance and popularity.  In other words, the more you voted for another member’s contributions, the more the other member voted for yours.  As time went on, an elite corps grew more powerful, to the point that their contributions can achieve high visibility regardless of merit.

“In the years following its creation, Digg became less a democracy and more a republic, with a select few users responsible for the majority of front page stories,” Chen writes. Digg has tinkered with its settings to try to mitigate this factor, but some members responded by writing scripts that routed around the problem.  It became a giant cat and mouse game that eventually forced Digg to insert human editors at some levels to arbitrate the process.  So much for the wisdom of crowds.

Chen contends that the blockade may irreparably damage Digg’s reputation, although the site will continue to be a huge source of traffic for publishers who are lucky enough to be listed there.  At the very least, the conundrum points out the limits of a purely democratic model of news judgment.  Even successful sites like Wikipedia rely up a small cadre of elite editors to make most of the important decisions. People with significant experience in online communities agree that a very tiny percentage of members contribute the vast majority of content.  It appears that editors, whether bubbled up from the community or appointed by management, are inevitably needed to maintain order

Should this be taken as a condemnation of the community journalism model and validation for the rule of editors?  Absolutely not.  As Wikipedia has demonstrated, armies of ordinary people can create a phenomenal information resource.  However, leaving all decision-making to a group without providing rules or oversight invariably results in the ascendance of an elite.  in the case of Wikipedia, that elite is self-regulating.  In the case of Digg’s more juvenile crown, it’s a frat party.

Panel: Community is Content

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Venture capitalist Esther Dyson

MediaPost assembles a panel of a dozen experts to discuss the future of media. They include top editors, marketers, regulators and technologists. While there’s no single conclusion to this long and varied discussion, the group agrees that marketers’ focus is shifting away from content and toward audience. Publishers who attract the right audience – in whatever medium – will win.

Technology enables those audiences to be smaller and more focused than in the past. There is nearly unlimited opportunity to define and attract these new groups online. As a result, the group agrees that it’s a great time to be a publishing entrepremeur. They point to sites like Dopplr and yappr as examples of new Web 2.0 ventures that creatively combine member contributions in ways that amplify the value of the group. This community publishing model has explosive potential, they believe.

An example of this is Mint , a site that tracks personal spending and compares it to that of other members. A couple of the panelists think this is a great example of a new form of publishing in which the value is derived from the collective. “I now have the tools to figure out whether you really are giving me a better deal, because if you try to give me a worse deal, the Mint analysis tools are going to show I’m actually paying a higher percentage rate,” says Esther Dyson. “So it’s going to force vendors to offer better deals.”This kind of innovation almost necessarily comes from entrepreneurs and small businesses, not from large companies, panelists agree. “It is almost impossible to change human behavior. And when someone drives to the top of the big company…it’s very hard for them to incorporate new ideas,” says Brian Napack, president of Macmillan.

Much of the discussion centers on the future of newspapers. While there’s no consensus on where the business is going. everyone agrees that the economics of mass distribution are becoming irrelevant. “A newspaper is going to kind of bifurcate into, on the one hand, a magazine with pictures, perhaps, and then something online where the news is actually up to date, and where you get news that’s tailored for you,” Dyson says. “I want to know what’s happening in my own neighborhood. I want to know which of my friends broke up and that belongs online, because the economics of mass distribution doesn’t make sense.”

NBC uses character assassination to attract viewers

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Network television continues to move the bar lower in its desperate efforts to retain viewers. On Sunday night I witnessed a new low in Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the NFL” feature on NBC’s broadcast of the Patriots-Eagles game. This is apparently a regular feature on NBC, which demonstrates how little respect the network has for its audience.

When I heard the title of the segment, I assumed it would be about Michael Vick, who is a bad person by most accounts. Instead, the victim was Denver punter Todd Sauerbrun, who is apparently the worst person because he had two kicks returned for touchdowns by the Bears’ Devin Hester this weekend. For this mistake, commentator Olbermann administered a lashing of sarcastic abuse, concluding “Sauerbrun was once suspended by the league for violating the substance policy, perhaps now to be suspended by the league for violating the stupid policy.”

This was supposed to be funny, I guess, but it came across to me as simply mean-spirited and pathetic. Is NBC so backed into a corner that it has to resort to character assassination to attraction attention to itself? Could Keith Olbermann have embarrassed himself more?

Fortunately, the Patriots won, so I feel better :-).

My new blog chronicles the decline of newspapers

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I’ve started a new blog, Newspaper Death Watch, to monitor and comment upon the disintegration of the American metropolitan daily newspaper industry. If you keep an eye on this blog, you know that I have strong opinions about this topic. I believe that the collapse of this American institution will be stunningly swift and broad, with perhaps no more than a dozen major metros surviving until 2030. There’s more detail in this essay.

I take no pleasure in this turn of events. On the contrary, I love newspapers. But I find this process to be a fascinating convergence of subjects that fascinate me: publishing, technology and transformational change.

If you have any suggestions for topics or news items I should be aware of, please don’t hesitate to send them along.

Tech PR War Stories 14: Are CMP layoffs the death knell for IT print media?

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This week in the Tech PR War Stories podcast, David and I reflect on upheaval at CMP, which laid off 20% of its workforce last week and shuttered some print publications. I suggest that this is the beginning of the end of print publishing in the IT media market and note that the economics of online publishing in that area are now weighted toward using freelance and blogger contributors instead of full-time staff.

David points out that technology companies are becoming more aggressive about launching their own online and even print publications, and that some of the senior editors who have lost their jobs in IT media will move over to work for vendors. We agree that these custom publishing operations are legitimate targets for PR people to place their clients. Now that everyone can publish easily to the Web, the definition of a “media company” is becoming fuzzier.

In Cheers & Jeers, I praise Oovoo, a new videoconferencing service that sent customized video messages to journalists and bloggers as part of its launch campaign. My jeer goes to Dell Computer, which sent a cease-and-desist notice to Consumerist.com, an action that ultimately backfired on Dell. But at least Dell was contrite in blogging about the mistake and even linking to underground photos of unannounced Dell products. My, how times have changed!

Listen to the podcast here (right click to download): 15:05

CMP layoffs dramatize bigger industry changes

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The news came down today that technology publisher CMP is laying off 20% of its workforce and merging several publications out of existence, including Network Computing and Optimize. I don’t suppose this is a surprise, for the print business in the enterprise technology market has been on the decline for a long time, but the scope of the cutbacks and the extent of the changes to CMP’s portfolio were breathtaking. Most publishers have been bleeding away properties as print business has turned down. CMP’s action was like an execution.

It’s hard not to feel like an old codger at times like these, for I remember the days when Computerworld’s print business was so healthy that the company had to start ancillary publications just to handle the overflow of ads because the printer couldn’t produce issues that were large enough to hold them all. I don’t pine for those days, though. There were times when the editorial staff was slapping almost anything it could find onto a page in order to fill space around the ads. No one was well-served by that. What’s different about online publishing is that the space expands and contracts to fill available content. There is much less of a need to provide some content — any content — to run around advertising. It’s perhaps one of the great under-appreciated benefits of new media.

People sometimes complain that one of the shortcomings of new media is that space is unlimited, meaning that writers can write as much as they want about whatever they want. I suppose that’s a problem in some respects, but isn’t the ultimate arbiter of value the reader? If writers don’t produce interesting copy, then no one will read them, and it won’t matter how many words they write. The Web is liberating in that way. In removing constraints of space and time, it frees the writer to focus on content and the reader to make choices based upon what they want to read rather than what the publisher chooses to give them. I think that, in the long run, we’ll realize that this was a great liberator and a step forward both for the craft of journalism and the service that publications deliver to their readers.

For now, though, I feel badly for the 200 people who lost their jobs today. They were victimized not by any failure on their part, but rather because of a structural shift in the market over which they had no control. I fear that they are simply the first casualties of a much bigger change in consumption habits that will sweep over much of the mainstream media in the coming years. In the end, it will lead to a richer, more vibrant media landscape, but there is bound to be a lot of suffering in the meantime

Bloggers get a magazine of their very own

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Blogger & Podcaster magazine has launched simultaneously in print, online and as a podcast. Give credit for creativity coming up with that three-pronged launch plan. I actually used to work with the editor, Anne Saita, but I don’t know anyone else on the masthead.

One thing you can count on in technology is that publishers will quickly jump on a new trend and launch a magazine for it. The big thing this book appears to have going for it is that its audience has a defined set of interests. That’s important, since magazines that are specific to a single technology tend not to last very long. But I wonder about the business model. Not many vendors sell products specifically to bloggers/podcasters and the target readers tend to find tools of the trade for free where they can. They don’t have big budgets. Also, while bloggers/podcasters have a medium in common, they don’t share much else. The similarities between me and the guy who writes Daily Kos are few.

On first look, I can’t see much reason why this magazine should last very long, but I give credit to the publisher for giving it a try. You never know when you might hit it big.