United Airlines allegedly broke a passenger’s guitar and refused to pay for the damage. Unfortunately, he was a professional musician who knows how to gain a following. Join the millions who have heard his song and seen his video on YouTube:
Posts Tagged ‘Business’
New study says consumers like ads. And it won’t change a thing.
Friday, July 17th, 2009Adweek Magazine and its parent company, Nielsen, have released a study that shows consumers believe in advertising, they accept adve
rtising as a way of subsidizing other content and, in some cases, they actually like it.
They’ll use this to try to change the rush of money out of traditional advertising, and they won’t succeed.
In an article announcing results of the study, Adweek states that: “67 percent of respondents agree …. (including 14 percent agreeing “strongly”) that ‘Advertising funds low-cost and free content on the Internet, TV, newspapers and other media.’ Likewise, 81 percent agreed (22 percent strongly) that ‘Advertising and sponsorship are important to fund sporting events, art exhibitions and cultural events.’ ”
The only thing startling about this is that such a large percentage of people seem to understand the media business model.
Adweek also wrote: “Respondents also acknowledged that advertising is useful to them personally as they navigate the marketplace. For example, 67 percent agreed (14 percent strongly) that ‘By providing me with information, advertising allows me to make better consumer choices.’ Respondents even confessed to enjoying advertising, at least some of the time, with 66 percent agreeing (13 percent strongly) that ‘Advertising often gets my attention and is entertaining.’”
This means two things:
1) Adweek is doing its job; it is, after all, a magazine for the people who produce ads, plan campaigns and buy space for them. This study will be a tool used by readers to convince advertisers to shift money back from the new and social to more traditional ad campaigns.
That’s especially evidenced by this finding in the article: “And there was a lackluster rating for ‘ads served in search-engine results,’ with 4 percent trusting these completely and 37 percent somewhat. Ratings for old media were closely bunched, with TV getting a typical rating for these of 8 percent “trust completely” and 53 percent “trust somewhat.”
In other words, Google’s astoundingly ascendant paid search model — traditional media’s Great Satan — isn’t as effective as many believe. At least, that’s the kernal that media reps are likely to grab onto and use.
Which raises the second meaning of the information:
2) There are lots of highly respected voices in media and advertising who still don’t get it. The epochal media meltdown we’re experiencing has nothing to do with the opinions of consumers.
Advertisers aren’t pulling campaigns because they don’t work; they’re pulling campaigns because they can now do what they’ve always wanted to do: reach consumers directly without an intermediary media.
Back in another era — the Internet bubble of the late 1990s — this was called disintermediation.
Disintermediation is why people book flights directly with airlines rather than through travel agents; it’s why Progressive and Geico have a higher profile than the independent insurance agents who used to do most of the selling in their industry; it’s why people will visit a magazine advertiser’s website instead of filling out a reader-response card in the back of a magazine.
Disintermediation is a simple process of applying new technology to eliminate an old and costly middleman. Heck, media is the root of the word; is it really a surprise that media is now a target?
So it doesn’t matter if old advertising works; it ads a layer that is no longer necessary. Just as there are still travel agents and insurance agents, there will still be media — as we recognize it today — far into the future. But it will be smaller than it used to be, and it will find its success by serving niches.
You can download the full Nielsen study here: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/trustinadvertising0709.pdf
A green GM logo won’t bring in the green
Monday, July 13th, 2009
It’s been reported in several media over the past week or two that GM is considering changing its logo to green to reflect a leaner, more environmentally conscious identity.
I can’t think of anything less meaningful to the company or its customers.
GM’s future has nothing to do with telling the world that it’s lean and green — which is what the new logo color is supposed to represent. The only thing that matters is whether the public comes to perceive that GM and its products reflect the right values.
Honda and Toyota do well in the U.S. (and most places) because, to a vast number of people, their brands have come to represent cars that are among the easiest and most enjoyable to own: affordable, reliable, durable and neither too ugly nor too fancy. People didn’t come to feel that way because Toyota and Honda continually told us that their cars were just right (even though they DO continuously tell us). People came to feel that way because their experience was consistent with all the wonderful things Toyota and Honda always say about themselves.
GM would argue that it’s making cars with these same wonderful attributes. Whether that’s true is irrelevant. What matters is whether people perceive that it’s true.
Further, it’s not enough for people to agree when GM says it. People have to assign these attributes to GM products without any prompting before GM can regain its role as a leader in the global auto industry. That’s what branding is all about. And it takes years — not just years of marketing, but years of consistency in what you promise and what you deliver. Today, GM is still too close to the Hummer for anyone to really believe that it cares a lick about lean and about that kind of green.
GM may engineer a financial recovery over the next couple years, and that will be a great thing. But it’s going to take far longer than that for people to know, in their bones, that GM stands for lean and green — if, in fact, that’s really what GM wants for the long haul.
And I don’t even think that’s the right message. Because in 15 years, green is going to be the price of entry in the car business; if your products aren’t environmentally responsible, then you won’t thrive. So is GM going to rebuild its very identity around meeting the next generation’s minimum standards?
Do Honda and Toyota really get respect for the energy efficiency of their fleets? Or do they get respect for pursuing a mission — building cars that people want to own — with so much focus that energy efficiency naturally became a part of it at the right time? Their fleets were energy efficient before the 2008 run-up in gas prices. The only thing that changed was the advertising.
If the new GM is smarter than the old GM, it will focus on the reasons people really buy cars — the perfect combination of price, style, durability, maintainability and lifetime affordability. Green fits in there for sure. But it won’t always be the headline. And even today, I doubt it’s the reason most people choose which car to buy.
A financial plan for the news’paper’ of tomorrow
Thursday, June 25th, 2009Peter Kafka, former media writer for Forbes and now blogging his own MediaMemo, asks the question (non-rhetorically), “What happens when your newspaper goes digital?” His immediate conclusion: Most of the staff gets canned.
In his blog, Kafka channels Outside.in CEO Mark Josephson whose business is to support local news operations with broad-based content as they make the move to digital themselves.
Josephson tells Kafka that his prototypical digital newspaper would have 6 content people (reporters and editors), 12 sales reps and a total staff of 20 (that would seem to leave room for 1 administrative type and one boss type — and no room for a graphic designer, web developer or I.T. person, which already makes me suspicious that his plan is too lean). He even provides a basic P&L spreadsheet for do-it-yourselfers who want to use his math as a starting point.
If the site does 40 million pages views a month (that’s a big number), augmented by twice that much traffic through third-party agreements, he figures it could earn about $2.6 million/year on $6.3 million in revenue. That’s a great margin — 41%. But compared to the kind of revenues daily newspapers are scaled for, it’s a pretty small business.
Plans like this are about 25% experience and 75% assumption, and anybody who would use such a plan would deviate from it almost immediately once into real operations.
But the takeaway is that, while existing media executives may not be able to swallow hard enough to scale down their businesses that much, they are currently being forced by the economy to cast aside lots of sales and content talent. It’s only a matter of time before that talent starts to challenge traditional newspapers companies with startups that aren’t burdened by guild agreements, large buildings, printing plants and boards of directors that demand every old-line revenue dollar to be replaced.
Back in the ’90s, when bookstores were being driven out of business by a previously unforseen competitor, new-age jargon had it that they were being “Amazoned.”
I’m curious what we’ll be calling it in the future. Journaled? Posted? Picayuned?
Selling what your customers want v. what they need
Friday, June 19th, 2009Content marketing guy Newt Barrett turns around conventional wisdom, suggesting that instead of working to develop a unique selling proposition, you develop a Unique Buying Proposition. This is more than a semantic turn. The UBP forces you to think like your customers. It changes the question from “Why should they buy from me?” to “Why do they WANT to buy from me?”
You can read Newt’s complete case here.
Would you do a better job buying this...
In the meantime, I’ll add this thought on selling: People will spend more to buy something they want than something they need. The corollary is that they’ll do whatever they can to avoid buying what they need, whereas they enjoy buying things they want.
So even if you’re offering business-to-business products or services, there is a benefit to communicating in a way that helps people WANT to buy what you’re selling.
... or this?
If they feel the product has value-added benefits, some kind of cache, or is exciting and transformative, they’ll buy more readily (and tend to be more pleased) than if they buy something because it has the lowest price or simply fills an urgent need.
That’s the beauty of Newt’s concept of the UBP: It helps your prospects to see your product as something they WANT to buy.
Most small biz doesn’t qualify leads or track marketing ROI. Surprised?
Monday, June 15th, 2009In B2BOnline, Christopher Hosford reports on a study by the Sales Lead Management Association that indicates “nearly 63% of small-business marketers say they can’t track the return on investment of their marketing programs.” And 56% say they don’t qualify their leads before sending them to sales. SLMA observed the prevailing attitude among marketers that sales should qualify their own leads.
The survey was conducted online, B2B writes, and of the 140 respondents, all had fewer than 250 employees and three-quarters had fewer than 25. The conclusion of the study: these companies are allowing sales and marketing to operate independently of each other without aligning their objectives.
I’ve observed it myself at one industrial business after another over the past decade, when interviewing marketing teams as part of the media sales process. The vast majority will say that leads remain their primary metric for measuring the effectiveness of their work.
And yet, they will also admit to doing nothing with the leads because:
- They aren’t very good;
- Their distributors don’t follow up on them anyway;
- There is no mechanism in place to qualify leads for sales.
What a cynical way to do a job: on one day demand that your media partners provide more leads to improve your ROI, and on the next day hide that “ROI” into the bottom drawer, pulling it out only when your boss comes around and asks, “What exactly do you do around here?”
It was just such a prospect who once told me, “I don’t think our marketing efforts are half bad.” Now armed with an actual benchmark, I could now reply to him, “Actually, they’re 63% bad.”
If you can’t bring journalists to the computer, then bring geeks to journalism
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism is turning out its first group of graduates in a master’s program that teaches computer geeks to be journalists, according to Time magazine. The idea is to combine advanced programming for computer applications and other interactive tools with reporting and journalism — making data and databases an integral part of the news.
Here’s a paragraph from Medill’s master’s degree course catalog:
The Digital Innovation Project (JOUR 435-0, 435-1)
This project challenges students to answer a specific editorial business challenge by inventing interactive solutions, often with a focus on innovative content delivery. Editorial challenges sometimes are posed by partner media organizations, sometimes by faculty or students. Students in this project have explored new ways of designing content for handheld devices, and new ways of creating interactive community, and in one case wrote a new software program to help a news operation engage more closely with its community.
In other words, if the medium is the message, this is huge. It has potential to change the very nature of how journalists work and what they do. Especially since Medill isn’t alone; among other schools starting to turn out journalist programmers are University of Missoure, Georgia Tech and University of California at Berkeley, according to Time.
Imagine an investigative article on government judicial conflict-of-interest, for example, that includes an application allowing readers to conduct their own searches by judge, defendant and plaintiff.
That’s admittedly a utopian view of journalism creating ultimate and constructive transparency — something it’s always strived to do and has rarely, if ever, achieved.
Or, I suppose, it could go the other direction: creating a bunch of people writing about the programming nuances of Wordpress v. Blogspot. Which would you rather see?
A must-read for all you content types (that’s ‘editorial’) in the old paradigm
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
Here are 7 non-nonsense rules for any editorial types who plan to survive the 2009 Media Meltdown and transform themselves into the content creators of the future. For the detail, read the original blog on Recessionwire, written by Laura Rich, a journalist and regular contributor there.
- Readers are your competitors — and your friends.
- Identify your expertise.
- Build your brand.
- Be transparent.
- Crowdsource (actively seek participation in the development of your story).
- Use self service tools.
- Interact with your readers.
You’ll find the full explanation behind each at the original blog.
Go forth, do good and do well.
