The Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced is now online only. The Hearst Corporation, owner of the 146 year-old newspaper, was unable to find a buyer after putting it up for sale in January. The Seattle Times is now the only mainstream daily still printed in the city.
The Fine folks at MediaPost have shared videos from the OMMA presentations.
Here is: Retargetingto Scale
Last Wednesday (2/25/09), I spent part of the day at Stanford University to check out the 15th Annual session – The Delta Conference: The Impact of 2008’s Dramatic Events on the World of Digital Media and Technology.
Much of the event was unmemorable until Sir Martin came up to the front of the room. Sir Martin should have been the keynote. He spoke in plain English about how the economy was doing and about businesses making a profit, i.e. organic revenue growth versus finance schemes. Not that he is any slouch in using the capital markets to buy growth or access to new technologies…just an interesting choice of how to view it all. Still, Sir Martin Sorrell packed a refreshing wallop talking about the state of the global economy, the advertising industry and even WPP (disclosure: I am currently affiliated with a WPP-owned agency Grey Advertising).
Highlights
Low Points
Story in AdAge by Abbey Klassen. Amazing that in 2009 this is still being written about….the comments even more telling. Here’s mine:
Wow. It’s great that this issue is being raised. However, this is nothing new. Same story since the Web 1.0 days as this could have been written over 10 years ago…actually, I did in the Lilypad white paper!
The twist today is that too many so-called online “marketers” either protesth too much (like the effect of branding but want to pay like performance) AND/OR opt for the easy way out and fallback on search – a FUD mentality. The former is solved by better media-side negotiating and the latter by training and education.
It is called branding and it’s about way more than measuring clicks.
Why RSS Advertising?
So, it has been decided that you want to target that hard-to-reach segment. The one that hates advertising and doesn’t click anyway. RSS advertising with in-feed ad networks like Pheedo show great promise at reaching these folks; more interesting is that they seem to be getting them to respond at significantly higher rates. Measurement on the other hand is still a bit dicey.
They’re Just Not that Into You
RSS has taken off and in a sense has enabled publishers to cannibalize themselves by allowing access to their content in a largely ad-free environment. Almost all major media now have at least one feed and many have multiple feeds – some even personalizable. Being able to avoiding ad-cluttered Web sites is part of the RSS appeal: think 100% signal with 0% noise. Clearly,
Nolter offers a high-level look at the financial problems and opportunities facing the newspaper industry today. A couple of interesting themes emerge in the article that beg for a closer look, namely the FCC’s curious 180-degree turnaround and the concept of ephemeral media brands as valuable assets; there are even a few pithy quotes from the venerable Dave Morgan of RealMedia and Tacoda.
The cost of doing business is the same if not higher for newspapers (labor + newsprint) yet the revenues are long gone. Saddled with debt from propping up their businesses, they are now dropping like flies and clearly getting very desperate. Many newspaper companies will be forced to offer online-only products, limited print runs and some may shut down altogether.
Ironically, these same high-minded voices that prompted the FCC’s inane rules to begin with are now actually suggesting that local TV/radio stations buy the newspapers to keep them in business! Apparently, it is now OK to consolidate operations within a local market because of journalism’s higher-purpose not to mention saving jobs. Considering the political bent of the soon-to-be-unemployed highly-unionized newspaper manufacturing workers and journalists, one can guess what the the new do-gooder administration will do next. Prepare for the sappy journalism paeans and the FCC’s rules to lighten up, if not more creative government-bailout schemes for the well-connected.
Trusted Brands
The other really interesting aspect brought up by Nolter is the actual value of newspaper’s brands.
Specifically, it’s the credibility and trust borrowed from their traditional offline business. All those years of news reporting did have an impact – inuring or accruing to the the newspaper’s brand equity. From a financial analysis standpoint, such branding is often associated with that balance sheet intangible – goodwill. While it is true that technically, goodwill is just the difference between book value and market value these media brands haven’t disappeared either nor has their connection to their locales either. It is true that their prospects have both worsened and capital has become scarcer at the same time. Clearly, not a good place to be.
However, there is an arbitrage upside. Many have already gone negative in terms of goodwill, yet this has made them into financial targets. In the online media business, a newspaper’s brand name is probably their biggest asset and very bankable to both advertising agencies, local marketers and local audiences. Yet, to tap that online brand equity without being dragged down by an business model – the old management culture, legacy infrastructure needs to go…fast. The sclerotic thinking and corporate culture’s that allowed such obsolescence to exist are going to feel it. Expect more unusual bedfellows in creative destruction type deals, like Sam Zell and Tribune as well as Carlos Slim’s debt/warrant financing of The New York Times.
With newspaper jobs and all the associated votes now at stake, the diversity of media ownership pabulum is going to go out the door. It seems that minimal FCC regulation 10-15 years ago would have allowed the consumer and the marketplace to sort out this mess – not Congress, the FCC and ultimately the taxpayer.
All told, this situation brings to mind the classic Ted Levit business school case-study, Marketing Myopia. Levit’s article on the railroad industry of the 50s was spot-on; it spawned the thought-provoking question for managers and owners – what business are they really in? For railroads, it wasn’t the physical trains or railroads. Instead, it was providing transportation for their industrial customers. That was the problem that the railroad companies solved for their customers and therefore the “solution” they essentially sold.
Turns out for newspapers, their business is really the news and not the paper part.
Charlene Li formerly of Forrester and author of Groundswell (with colleague Josh Bernoff) gave an interesting talk at the SF AMA meeting held at Adaptive Networks in SOMA: The Future of Social Networks.
While it started off a bit slow, with an new agey: “Social Networks will be like Air” it got better. Overall, Charlene’s comments were very thoughtful though anecdotal at times but ultimately practical…she also did a good job of “crowdsourcing” and engaging the group of attendees.
“Nice-to-have” would have liked more formal research to back-up some of her propositions; granted, social media is likely to evolve for a while as a medium and marketing channel. Though the venue was a bit small and stuffy there were plenty of snacks to be had. All told, for $50 it was just this side of worth it.
The presentation deck is also available here:
The Future of Social Networks
For firms and folks that are dependent on site metrics tools (Omniture, Coremetrics, Google Analytics, WebTrends) to validate or measure the impact on a site from online advertising (take your pick of agency ad servers), Andy Greenberg’s recent article about Omniture may be of interest.
Andy’s point about the site metrics application being used to gauge the effectiveness of online advertising raises some serious marketing questions. I’ve personally been working on this on and off myself going back to the Web 1.0 days. Our boutique digital agency Streams Online Media Development’s developed the seminal online marketing tracking tool Lilypad to some industry fanfare. Reconciling these numbers today reminds me of the old Dueling Banjos tune.
Clearly, each tool bring their own technical process for counting and what is important to emphasize. Like how guitars and banjos are just plain different, so are ad servers and site metrics tools. Yet, well-intentioned people may still want to try to make them match.
As such, many of us continue to wrestle with these resulting issues…but at some level, unless your advertising campaign (paid media) is being measured on response – the benefit of harmonious tracking is academic. It i certainly safe to say that simpatico metrics does not always add value to the marketing.
Some initial thoughts:
More to follow…
…and they don’t see your ad. Did it impact your brand?
Back at it in SF.
Which tool is being used for ad effectiveness research can help answer the age-old, “If a Tree Falls in a Forest” riddle that relates to ad effectiveness in online media. Such online research has come along way since studying it with Professor Stasch back at Loyola’s GSB.
A question from Cindy on the WAA forum that struck close to home:
At GSF, we found that recruitment for media research is an ongoing challenge spanning study design, questionnaire development, funding, media partner alignment, statstical significance, recruitment technicalities and results preparation.
Especially thorny is achieving statistical significance when recruiting a target audience that is the least amenable to being surveyed. However, clients need this information often for internal financial modeling as well as the marketing value. Some findings:
ComScore shows alot of potential for a number of reasons: one interesting by-product of the panel-based approach is the potential to understand the context of what users were doing before and after being exposed to an advertising message – in addition to clickers. For example, what is the likelihood of a trademarked or category search or visiting the target brand’s Web site after being exposed? Turns out quite high.
For some background on what you can do with this (and handy industry benchmarks) be sure to check out their “Whither the Click” white paper from last December.
Good luck Cindy!
