iPad users most likely to engage with ads

iPad users are more willing to engage with advertising and pay for content than users of other devices, according to a study by Nielsen. More than two thirds of the 452 iPad owners surveyed have bought a chargeable app for their device, with games being the most popular purchase. Some 57% say they would engage with advertising if it led to free content and 49% claim they are more likely to look at an ad if it displays video content. More than a third are interested in what ads can do on their tablet, but only 8% have actually made a purchase through their device.

The cheapest iPad retails at USD499 but despite its hefty price tag Nielsen claims owners of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader are wealthier. The research firm says 28% of Kindle owners earn more than USD100,000 a year compared with just a 25% of iPad owners.

The results should prove useful for mobile app advertisers and developers as the availability of tablet devices rockets. A recent report predicts Apple will sell as many as 120m iPads globally by the end of 2012 while developers such as Samsung and LG are launching their own tablets in the coming months.

Source: strategyeye.com

iPad Ad Requests Soared In May

The iPad remains hot with advertisers two months after its release, with ad requests across the Apple device up 160 percent in May from April, according to the latest monthly Mobile Mix report from mobile ad net Millennial Media. And yet, Apple, the leading device maker on Millennial’s network since September ‘09, decreased nearly 10 percent month-over-month with approximately 25 percent share of impressions in April. In the meantime, Android is doing well, as ad requests for the Google mobile OS grew 15 percent month-over-month, with a 338 percent more ad requests since January. As Apple prepares to fully launch its iAd system on July 1, it’ll be interesting to see how that impacts Millennial Media’s tallies.
Other highlights from the ad net’s report included:
—In May, 90 percent of developers were creating apps for a single platform—56 percent of that was focused on Apple, and 29 percent on Android.
—While the media have been more focused on the growth of smartphones, consumers are still looking to feature phones and connected devices, which actually make up more than half of Millennial’s US Device OS Mix (see the chart on the left). So it’s important for advertisers to keep this in mind when they’re creating mobile ad strategies – Smartphones alone do not hit the mass of consumers using the mobile web.

Source: paidContent.org

Obama: Government without newspapers not an option

SPEAKING at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington DC on
Saturday 9 May, president Barack Obama said that "a government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media is not an option for the United States of America."
In what was mostly a speech packed with jokes and humorous anecdotes, Obama ended his discourse on a serious note about the state of journalism in the country, acknowledging that there were many good journalists who had recently found themselves out of a job.
Appearing before a mixed crowd of journalists, media chiefs, politicians and celebrities including actor Ashton Kutcher, who is one of social media tool Twitter's most high-profile users, Obama outlined the plight of journalism, with newspapers clearly at the heart of his speech. He insisted that the ultimate success of the industry is essential in ensuring the preservation of America's democracy, before referring to a quote from the nation's third president, Thomas Jefferson: "If he had the choice between government with newspapers or newspapers without government, he'd choose the latter."
"When you are at your best, you help me be at my best. You help all of us who serve at the pleasure of the American people do our jobs better by holding us accountable, by demanding honesty, by preventing us from taking shortcuts and following in the easy political games that people are so desperately weary of and that kind of reporting is worth preserving not just for your sake, but for the public's," Obama said. "This is the season of renewal and reinvention. That is what government must learn to do. That's what businesses must learn to do and that's what journalism is in the process of doing."
Before stepping down from the stage, Obama offered journalists his thanks and pledged to support the industry. His comments are timely, given that last week the US Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet convened at a hearing organised by Massachusetts senator John Kerry. The hearing entitled the Future of Journalism examined the plight of the newspaper industry, the knock-on effects of new media and what steps government - if any - should take to ensure its survival.
By the end of the hearing, whilst guest speakers helped to paint an accurate image of what newspapers were going through, what the role of government should be during this time remained elusive. There was no consensus on whether a government-lead bail-out would actually be enough to guarantee the long-term survival of the newspaper. Notably, those who were against the idea of government intervention, including the likes of Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, were confident that those newspapers which choose to embrace digital media and new advertising models, would not just endure, but indeed flourish.
President Obama's talk has, on the one hand, given the industry renewed hope of a possible government bail-out, as some news sites have been quick to suggest, yet this is in stark contrast to what press secretary Robert Gibbs told journalists at the start of May, when he categorically said there would be no such assistance on offer. Still, Obama's commitment to the journalism industry, in particular newspapers, will not come as a surprise to most people. Even before Obama became President and long before he was catapulted to the media spotlight, Obama often championed the notion that journalists were an essential component of the democratic process, and his thoughts on this and the power of media can be found in his book The Audacity of Hope.
Obama's presidential campaign also signalled in a new era of digital politics and since his inauguration in January, his administration has continued to embrace new media, exploiting the Internet and the various social networking tools to communicate and engage with a new breed of electorates. Whether Obama and his team decide to step in is by no means certain and there is no reason to believe that the government has suddenly changed its position from the previous week. With that said, it is unlikely that America's newspaper-loving President will stand by and do nothing. In any case, despite Obama's personal preference for print - and some say his administration's preference for unconventional media - Obama and his media-savvy team offer newspapers a well-placed and much-need ally.

source: editorsweblog.org

Is the worst of the advertising recession over?

Media companies including ITV, Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press reporting signs of let-up in ad revenue decline

It's not the end. It's not even the beginning of the end. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it may be the end of the beginning of the brutal advertising recession that has battered UK media over the past six to nine months.
Media companies including ITV, Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press are starting to see some positive signs of a bottoming out of the vertiginous year-on-year advertising revenue declines the industry has endured since mid-2008.
In the wider economy, voices are also being tentatively raised to say that the worst of the recession may be over.
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, today painted a mixed picture of the timeline for an economic recovery in the UK. On the one hand, King put back the forecast for a return to economic growth from the end of this year to mid-2010. On the other, he said that it was true that there were reasons for optimism as the pace of economic decline had now moderated.
However, analysts warn that the real litmus test of the road to recovery for the media industry will be how advertisers react in the months leading up to Christmas 2009.
Trinity Mirror today pointed out some glimmers of light in its May performance for its national newspaper operation – if not the ailing regional division.
The Daily Mirror publisher also said that it expects a better performance, at least on a relative basis, in the second half of 2009.
This is to be expected – when you're comparing quarterly advertising revenue with year on year declines of 30% and more for the same period in 2008, the new figures are likely to look rosier.
But it also alleviates at least some of pressure on publicly listed media companies that have had only horror stories to tell the City in their recent results announcements.
Johnston Press also today indicated that there had been "some stability" in ad revenue in recent weeks. John Fry, the company's chief executive, said:
"We have go to the part where it starts to get easier. Ads have stabilised, albeit at a much lower level, but stable week to week.
"It would be dangerous for me to start talking about economic recovery, but we are not seeing it [ad revenue] drop like last year. We are not in the green shoots area yet, we are still bumping along the bottom."
Daily Mail & General Trust in March reported signs of stabilisation in classified revenues outside of the recruitment sector.
"The industry buzz word is stabilisation," said Alex de Groote, a media analyst at Panmure Gordon, today. De Groote added:
"Things are not really getting better at this point but a bottoming out means they are not getting worse. The feeling is that in the fourth quarter last year and the first in 2009 things hit a nadir.
"The second quarter has not been that much better, fractionally maybe, but the hope is that the secong half will see the situation get a little better."
ITV, which is set to put out an interim management statement early tomorrow ahead of its annual general meeting, has also started to see some signs of stabilisation.
Brokers Numis expect ITV1's approximate 20% year-on-year fall in ad revenue in the first half of this year to narrow to a 10% fall in the second half.
However, one senior ITV executive warned that there is likely to be a W-shaped bounce for the struggling broadcaster. The predictions is for ITV to show signs of improvement, on a relative basis, in the final three months of 2009, followed by a challenging first quarter in 2010.
ITV is then is expected to see an advertising boost from the second quarter of 2010, fuelled by the football World Cup in South Africa and spending across the board in the run-up to a general election.
"Current trading is bumping along the bottom. There will be good months and bad months but things seem to be stabilising," said Paul Richards, an analyst at Numis. He added:
"The question is when are they going to get better. The fourth quarter is the key quarter. If we can see mid-single digit declines [at ITV] then we can safely say that things are stabilising, that the worst may be over and that we can then look forward to recovery."
The changing mood of the City about the prospects for media companies has also been reflected in an improved share price performance for some in the sector in recent weeks.
"The stock market priced some of these [media] names at almost zero worth, mega-distressed, when in fact in the last six weeks to two months there has been a clear, strong and concerted rally in these businesses in equity prices," says De Groote.
De Groote points out that, relative to the performance of the FTSE 100, Trinity Mirror's share price has risen 46% over the past three months; while Johnston Press - a worse than expected set of figures today notwithstanding - is up 286%, and DMGT up 20% over the same period.
However, de Groote less optimistic on when the UK ad market will return to real growth. "In terms of ad growth at some stage next year we may see positive growth in traditional media," he said. "Perhaps close to the end of the year."

Source: guardian.co.uk

Mobile ad spend up 99% in 12 months

UK mobile ad spend increased 99.2% year on year to £28.6m in 2008, despite a declining ad market, according to the first UK figures produced by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Bauer, Orange, BSkyB, The Sun, The Guardian, Yahoo and Microsoft are seven of the 21 companies that participated in the survey, representing hundreds of websites.
Mobile display ads, which include banners, text links, tenancies pre and post-roll and in-game, accounted for £14.2m in 2008 - just under half of all mobile ad spend.
Banners accounted for 82% of display ad expenditure, helped by the growth of social networking sites such as Facebook, which achieved mobile growth of 180% year on year. Pre and post-rolls and in-game ads only accounted for 2% of the display market.
Paid-for search advertising on mobile was estimated to account for £14.4m, 50.2% of all mobile spend.
A spike in mobile internet usage was a key driver of growth, from 8.6 million people in December 2007 to more than 11 million in December 2008.
Better handsets also contributed, with iPhone users seven times more likely than average to browse daily for news and information. More UK media agencies have also appointed dedicated heads of mobile.
Jon Mew, head of mobile at the Internet Advertising Bureau, said: "This is a landmark moment for mobile media. The study is a UK first and makes mobile a credible media channel. The advertising industry is taking mobile more seriously because advertising opportunities are starting to mature. Content on mobile has got better and more publishers are driving individuals to look at content via their mobiles."

Source: mediaweek.co.uk

Print media model is broken

THE business model for print media is broken and publishers should be looking to create their own equivalent of the iPod instead of misguidedly waiting for advertising spend to return, according to Maurice Levy, chief executive and chairman of Publicis Groupe.
Speaking to more than 600 delegates at the FIPP 2009 World Magazine Congress today, the head of one of the world's largest advertising and communications groups shared some sobering observations for both newspapers and magazines, which he labelled "analogue" media.
The chief executive did see a future for print media, but said it required "innovative thinking" and warned it would be necessary to "shatter common views, traditional sentiment and cliché" along the way.
"The end of the economic crisis will not be the end of the crisis for analogue media," he warned. "You are facing a deep, profound structural revolution and have to be prepared for a new world."
He urged publishers not to fall into the waiting-for-a-better-day-trap, in which the automotive sector finds itself, and realise they must adapt to survive.
"Circulation has been decreasing for years now and no stimulus package can stop this long-term trend," he said. "Moreover, who can believe, honestly, that young people, who we call the digital natives, are going to ditch their computers, their iPods, their mobile phones, and go back to print?"
Conference-goers, who had assembled from more than 50 publishing markets, were then told that, in the long term, magazines will not attract as much advertising.
Using forecasts from ZenithOptimedia, a Publicis Groupe agency, Levy said magazines' share of global ad spend is set to continue to contract right through to 2011, regardless of any financial recovery.
Publishers were also told not to expect a sudden "spurt of philanthropy" from advertisers, who are increasingly focused on digital opportunities, but to seize digital as an opportunity.
"Magazines own what is the most important thing to succeed in the world of media and particularly on the net: content," he said.
Citing Bill Gates' well-used mantra, the chief executive said content is still king, which means magazines are well-positioned to find new revenue streams online.
He noted that, although display advertising has proved disappointing for publishers and CPMs remain low, the internet is a very young media and its rules and framework are still being stabilised and finalised.
Using the music industry by way of example, he said it was possible to change free-content models into paid ones, but publishers will "need to think out of the box".
He confessed to being surprised by how little publishers take advantage of their brands and their already well-defined communities (readership).
Why, asked Levy, had magazine publishers not paved the way in user-generated content, performance-based advertising or social networking? And why could publishers not have invented the likes of Twitter and micro-blogging and the use of mobile applications?
Concluding, Levy warned there will not be one business model, no Holy Grail, no one-size fits all solution.
"Each company, each title, each media will have to find its own model," he said. "Do not stand still. Run and don't stop running, at least then your competitors will have to strive to catch you."

Source: MediaWeek.co.uk

No bailout for newspaper industry: White House

THE White House expressed "concern" and "sadness" on Monday over the state of the ailing US newspaper industry, but made it clear that a government bailout was not in the cards.
"I don't know what, in all honesty, government can do about it," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. "That might be a bit of a tricky area to get into given the differing roles."
Gibbs was responding to a reporter who asked what the White House thought about the recent closure of several US newspapers and a threat to shut down the venerable Boston Globe.
"Obviously (President Barack Obama) believes there has to be a strong free press," the spokesman said. "I think there's a certain concern and a certain sadness when you see cities losing their newspapers or regions of the country losing their newspapers."
US newspapers have been grappling with a steep drop in print advertising revenue, steadily declining circulation and the migration of readers to free news online.
The Senate subcommittee on communications, technology, and the Internet announced plans meanwhile to hold a hearing on "The Future of Journalism."
Among those scheduled to appear at Wednesday's hearing is Senator Ben Cardin, who recently introduced legislation aimed at helping US newspapers by giving them tax breaks as non-profit organizations.
Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax exempt and contributions to support coverage or operations would be tax deductible under Cardin's bill.
Others expected to testify include Marissa Mayer, a vice president at Internet search and advertising giant Google which operates the popular news aggregator Google News, and Arianna Huffington who is co-founder of news and opinion website The Huffington Post.

Source: AFP

USA: Newspaper Ad Revenue Could Fall as Much as 30%

NEWSPAPER advertising, already in its worst slump since the Depression, suffered by far the sharpest drop in generations during the first quarter of 2009, down 30 percent for some papers, industry executives and analysts say.
Publishers will start to report first-quarter results this week, but people who follow the industry and have had a glimpse of the 2009 numbers say it is clear that once again, even the most pessimistic predictions were not dark enough. They are expecting declines sharp enough to wipe out profit margins at many papers that, despite two years of battering, had stayed comfortably in the black, and to push already-weak publishers closer to bankruptcy, perhaps even closure. “I think over all we’re going to see a decline somewhere in the mid-20s” compared to the first quarter of last year, said Edward Atorino, a media analyst at the Benchmark Company, a research firm. “There have been a lot of signals that things have gotten much worse in the last couple of months — the furloughs, the pay cuts, the layoffs.”
John Morton, an independent newspaper analyst, agreed with that assessment, adding “from what I’m hearing, I suspect 30 percent won’t be too unusual for the bigger papers.”
One of the few publishers to make a public statement is the Gannett Company, owner of the largest and most profitable newspaper chain in the country. At a conference with analysts last month, Gracia Martore, the company’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, indicated that so far, 2009 newspaper ad revenue was down roughly 30 percent, and more than that at its flagship paper, USA Today.

-------------------

In filing for bankruptcy recently, Sun-Times Media Group, publisher of The Chicago Sun-Times and several smaller papers, disclosed in court papers that it had drawn up its original 2009 budget based on an expected 18 percent slide in ad revenue for the entire year, but had revised that to 30 percent.
More recently, some publishing executives, insisting on anonymity because they are prohibited from discussing figures that have not been made public yet, say they know of some other large newspapers that had a first-quarter drop in the 30 percent range. Declines above 20 percent, they said, were commonplace.
“This is far worse than anything any of us has seen,” said an executive at a major newspaper company. “We can keep cutting, but we need this to start to bottom out.”
Small papers generally fared better than large ones, though they also saw a sharp loss of revenue, experts say. In markets like Michigan and Florida, even some smaller papers have fared as poorly as the big papers, Mr. Morton said.
Offering at least a glimmer of hope, several executives and analysts said there were signs that the year-over-year decline in March was not as steep as those for January and February, even though the traditional pre-Easter advertising bump fell in March last year. (This year, it fell in April.) That and other factors, they said, could signal that losses for the rest of 2009 would not be as steep as the first quarter’s.
Lauren Rich Fine, research director at ContentNext Media, said that in all media, “as the economy grew much worse in the fall, companies really started to pull back hard on advertising” to save money. In particular, automakers, among the biggest advertisers, cut back as it became clear that their own futures were in jeopardy.
Ms. Fine said it was hard to predict when companies would readjust their ad spending limits, which depended in part on when the recession bottomed out.

-----------------

Broadcast advertising has dropped, too, but not to the same degree. Gannett said the decline for its television stations was about half as steep as for its newspapers. In a report released Monday, ZenithOptimedia predicted that ad spending this year in all United States media would fall 8.7 percent.
The worsening crisis has prompted many newspapers, including The New York Times and the Hearst newspapers, to begin developing plans for new revenue sources like charging readers online — an idea that most of the industry had rejected until recently — but it is unclear whether they will put those plans into action, or when.
Newspapers count on advertising for the bulk of their revenue, and for a decade they have been losing ads to the Internet, where advertising is much cheaper and there is far more competition for it. But until 2006, papers held their own.
Then in 2007, ad revenue for newspapers and their Web sites dropped 7.9 percent, according to figures compiled by the Newspaper Association of America. That was the first significant decline in a nonrecession year on record, and came as a surprise to most analysts and executives.
In 2008, the downturn in the overall economy magnified the long-term trend in the newspapers, and ad revenue fell 16.6 percent — again, far more than publishers and analysts predicted. The real estate bubble burst, financial firms tottered and fell, recession took hold and unemployment spiked. Some of the biggest categories of advertising, like real estate and help wanted, all but evaporated.
Nearly every large paper has made significant budget cuts in the last year, including laying off staff and reducing the number and size of pages they print. Recently, a number of publishers, including Gannett and The New York Times Company, have asked employees to take a pay cut — sometimes in the form of mandatory furloughs — and have raised the prices they charge readers.
In December, Tribune Company, publisher of The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and other major papers, filed for bankruptcy. Since then, Sun-Times Media, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, and Philadelphia Newspapers, owner of that city’s Inquirer and Daily News, have also filed for bankruptcy.
A handful of papers have folded or stopped publishing, becoming much smaller online operations. And companies have threatened to close other papers without major labor concessions, including The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst, and The Boston Globe, owned by the Times Company.

Source: nytimes.com

The Future of Advertising: Just Ask "What Would Google Do?"

Jeff Jarvis' new book, What Would Google Do?, is a must-read and a real eye opener. Here is a Q&A that Jeff graciously participated in for my column in Advertising Age...

How Google is Changing Advertising Agencies

Jeff Jarvis Suggests Asking "What Would Google Do?"

In just a little over 10 years, Google has built a business that is impossible not to admire. In fact, its success begs the question -- what would Google do (WWGD)?
Media pundit and thinker Jeff Jarvis tackles this question head on with a new book by the same title. In "What Would Google Do?," Jarvis breaks down Google's practices into 12 distinct rules and then applies them to aging industries like media and advertising.
I interviewed Jeff by email on Google's model to get his thoughts.

Steve Rubel: Since you titled the book with a provocative question, I will start the same way. If Google were an ad agency, What Would Google Do? How would they run it?
Jeff Jarvis: I'd say we already know: Google is a new form of agency-as-platform.

As Publicis' Rishad Tobaccowala pointed out in my book, Google served an entirely new population of advertisers who didn't have agencies and that enabled it to set new rules. Google sells performance instead of scarcity (a lesson the rest of media must learn in this post-scarcity economy). Because it rewards relevance, it encourages better, more effective advertising.
Through search, Google enables any brand to speak with customers without advertising. Google still does business with the agencies, of course, because they hold the checkbook -- and that is delaying the tectonic change that will come to advertising as it has to music, newspapers, TV, and radio. It's coming.

Mr. Rubel: A book, however, is very un-Google, as you noted in several places throughout. It's ranking well on Amazon. How did you apply the lessons in WWGD to the way you wrote/marketed the book and what can digital marketers learn from your experience?
Mr. Jarvis: As I write this, the book is up in the 500 range (on Amazon) and, of course, I hope this Ad Age coverage gets it back up to at least 100!

I do confess that in seeking this old-media attention and in publishing an old-media book -- instead of just putting it all online, where it would be searchable, linkable, correctable -- I am a hypocrite. I did not eat my own dog food. Why? Because the book industry still works well enough to pay me an advance. Dog's gotta eat, you know.
My publisher, HarperCollins, is trying many new things. They had me produce a 23-minute, sitcom-length video version of the book. We put full text of the book online (in a widget that that Google can't search). I shared 30 days worth of excerpts on my blog. Most important, the book began on my blog a few years before it was published -- as I explored ideas there and got help, even an entire chapter, from my readers -- and the discussion continues there and in Twitter now (I love seeing readers tweet their reviews and quotes).
Where this should go: Readers should be able to buy access to an author's ideas in all media at once. I'm impressed that O'Reilly books offers a lifetime subscription to updates of its digital titles. By the way, I asked in my hardback edition whether the paperback should be ad supported; this wasn't met with a resounding yes.

Mr. Rubel: In the book you stress Google's relentless focus on the consumer. And you wonder whether focusing on the consumer over the client makes more sense. Isn't this what ad agencies already do? And if not, what needs to change?
Mr. Jarvis: In the book, I quote an Australian ad exec saying that agencies should pay attention to clients instead of consumers. Then I quote the ever-quotable Toboccawala saying that agencies should focus instead on their customers' customers. I'd vote for the latter. The real question is whether agencies -- ad or PR -- can truly act as consumers' advocates. If a company has great customer service, do customers need advocates?
Mr. Rubel: Are customer service and peer-to-peer advocacy the new advertising? And if so, how does that change the ad industry?
Mr. Jarvis: Advertising is failure.

If you have a great product or service customers sell for you and a great relationship with those customers, you don't need to advertise.
OK, that's going too far. There is still a need to advertise -- because customers don't know about your product or a change in it or because, in the case of Apple, you want to add a gloss to the product and its customers. But in the book, I suggest that marketers should imagine stopping all advertising and then ask where they would spend their first dollar.
In an age when competition and pricing are opened up online and when your product is your ad, you need to spend your first dollar on the quality of your product or service. If you're Zappos, you spend the next dollar on customer service and call that marketing. If the next dollar goes to advertising, there has to be a reason -- and if the product is good enough, that reason may fade away.

Mr. Rubel: You also talk a lot about transparency. Google, however, isn't the most transparent company. What does the ad industry need to change here?
Mr. Jarvis: Google is not perfect. It expects us all to be transparent -- so we can be found in search, so we can benefit from our Googlejuice. But Google is not sufficiently transparent about its ad splits or its Google News sources. So, as our parents would say, this may be a case of doing what Google says more than what it does.

Online, it only makes sense to be as open as possible, to have answers to every possible customer question online, to join in conversations with customers as people rather than institutions. Transparency leads to trust. Transparency is just good business.

Mr. Rubel: How does WWGD apply to b-to-b marketing?
Mr. Jarvis: Customers are customers, communities are communities. In the mass of niches, there's nothing to stop every community -- moms or plumbers or chemical engineers -- from joining together online and sharing their knowledge and interests. See the success of blogs such as TechCrunch and PaidContent with targeted B-to-B content, advertising, job boards, and events. In the highly specialized world of online media, B-to-B represents a big opportunity.
Mr. Rubel: If Google were a Super Bowl ad, what would it look like?
Mr. Jarvis: It wouldn't. Google does not treat us as a mass. And it has better ways to spend its money.
Mr. Rubel: Can advertising become a platform?
Mr. Jarvis: In a sense, Google is that. It provides the means for anyone to reach anyone, whether through ads or through their own sites and conversation. This, I believe, is Google's greatest lesson for media, advertising, marketers, as well as government: provide a platform for your customers and communities to succeed and you, too, will succeed.

Is that advertising? Well, if we redefine advertising, it might be. Most every company and brand can become platforms for their customers and except for the means to accomplish that, there's nothing new in this. A great company always helps its customers do what they want to do. That's a platform.

Mr. Rubel: What parts of the advertising assembly line (e.g. research, creative, media buying, PR, direct, digital, etc.) has the greatest risk of getting Googled or the greatest opportunity to become Googled -- and why?
Mr. Jarvis: Everything is changed by the Internet, and not just by Google, of course: We have more means to learn more about customers today than focus groups or certainly panels, ratings, and samples ever told us.

Customers make the best creative when and if they recommend and talk about products. Media buying, I believe, will morph into network creation; in a mass of niches, there's opportunity in curating those niches to create critical mass and that work is being done today not so much by agencies but by technology, media, and network companies. PR becomes everyone's business in a company, which must have direct relationships with the public, person-to-person. Direct? The Internet is direct and we're still not done with the argument over whether it is anything more.
Everything in marketing is changed.

Mr. Rubel: Finally, in the book you wrote that "The agency and the advertising need to get out of the way in the relationship between customers and companies." This seems like it's an endorsement for public relations -- if it's done in such a manner. Yet, you are sour on PR and lump its future as questionable with the legal profession. Why? And what needs to change?
Mr. Jarvis: Though they can and certainly do use the Internet to improve their businesses, PR and law can't take on all the attributes of the open age because they serve clients and thus can't be transparent or consistent. The true test of a firm's willingness to prove me wrong would be firing a client that doesn't act Googley. I don't see that happening often.

Having said that, I know what you're fishing for here: If -- in my radical oversimplification -- advertising is failure and relationships are everything, is PR in a better position strategically than advertising?
Well, maybe, but there is this: A company and its employees must cultivate direct relationships with customers and communities without middlemen. So what is the role of the PR agency? It can advise and goad a company to build those relationships. But then, like a good consultant, it needs to get out of the way, to leave. I doubt we'll see that, either. The economics of agencies are built on getting clients to spend more, of course. So the real question is whether new economic models can support both agencies and Googlethink.

Source: micropersuasion.com

Newspaper ad revenue may plunge 22 percent

U.S. newspaper advertising revenue may plunge 22 percent this year as demand falls, forcing more publications out of business, a Barclays Capital analyst said.
Industrywide newspaper ad revenue will probably drop to $27.1 billion from $34.7 billion last year, including a decline of as much as 25 percent in the first half, Craig Huber of Barclays in New York said today in a research report.
"Over the next three years, a number of daily newspapers in the United States will be shut down given the various pressures on the business," said Huber. "Newspapers are in their worst competitive position in decades, if not ever, to raise advertising rates or even to try to keep them flat."
Five newspaper publishers have sought bankruptcy protection since December, including Chicago's Sun-Times Media Group Inc. yesterday, as readers migrate to the Web, where ad rates are lower. Publishers are halting print editions, firing people and selling assets to cope with plummeting revenue.
Classified sales will drop 35 percent, the biggest decline in any major ad category, followed by a 23 percent plunge in national ads, Huber estimated. Local retail advertising, which accounts for more than half of newspaper revenue, may fall 14 percent, he projected. He also predicted newspapers share of the ad market will fall to 11 percent this year from 12 percent.

Source: Daily Herald

News businesses must think about content, not just products, to ensure their survival

I work for a 126-year-old start-up company.
Since our founding in 1883, Gazette Communications has revolved around the newspaper that gave the company its name. As time went on, the company added a television station and various other products, but our focus was always on the products, especially that venerable core print product.
We developed a pretty good staff to provide content for the products, but their work always revolved around the products. Editors would meet daily in a conference room and talk about the stories that would be in the next day’s paper, writing slugs and story lengths on a whiteboard. The story lengths were not based on the amount of relevant content a reporter might develop. They were based on the interests and attention span of a mythical average newspaper reader and on the price of newsprint.
After two newspapers that were older than ours, the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, folded within the past month, it’s clearer than ever that a proud past doesn’t ensure a prosperous future. We are feeling the same pressures as all newspaper companies. In fact, beyond the national economic problems and the industry turmoil, our community is reeling from a historic disaster. Our company is cutting its staff from about 600 before the flood to about 500. I had to tell 14 journalists last month that their jobs were eliminated. But whatever turmoil our products face, the demand for content is stronger than ever.
So Gazette Communications is unhitching our content generation from product management.
If you just thought, “Huh?” you’re not alone. Our staff and some of our leaders are still working on understanding this concept. Content and product are so closely entwined in newsroom organizations and in the minds and hearts of journalists that “untangling” would probably be a more accurate verb for the paragraph above than “unhitching.”
A Mark Briggs blog entry in January quoted Tom Peters, summarizing the mental and cultural challenge we face: “Visa founder Dee Hock said it best: ‘The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.’ … Every enterprise (and every individual) needs a formal … Forgetting Strategy. We must be as forceful and systematic about identifying and then dumping yesterday’s baggage as we are about acquiring new baggage.”
So I spelled out the forgetting strategy for our staff, listing some time-honored terms and concepts in any newsroom (starting with the word “newsroom”): reporters, editors, photographers, columnists, deadlines, story lengths, space, gatekeeper, story selection …
This had to start with me forgetting and forgoing my title of editor, which, of course, I had been thrilled to accept last May. Gazette CEO Chuck Peters had suggested Information Content Creator or Moderator in his blog, but I didn’t like either of those. I countered by suggesting conductor. I liked three different meanings of the word: musical (orchestrating creative people), railroad (helping people get where they want to go) and electrical (carrying energy). Most important, it says we’re doing something different, forgetting something precious.
As conductor, I lead a start-up organization, which we are calling Content Creation & Collaboration. We will have about 30 entrepreneurial journalists whose sole job is creating content, some in topical areas, some providing enterprise or covering breaking news. Other staff members will lead the group or provide training and support. We will publish unedited content digitally in a multitude of forms: stories, yes, but also bulletins, updates, tweets, liveblogs, photographs, videos, multimedia, graphics, source documents, databases, links and whatever other form is appropriate.
We will sell our content to The Gazette and other products our company owns and they will edit the content to meet the needs of the packaged products. We also will sell content to external customers such as other media outlets and will seek ways to sell enhanced content (such as photo reprints or customized products) directly to the public.
Our start-up will collect revenue for advertising sold to accompany these streams of unedited content, though the journalists producing the content won’t handle the advertising sales ourselves. Gazette Communications’ sales staff will sell advertising, but we also can use Google or other third-party ad sales. We also hope to develop some direct-sales opportunities for business customers, though that responsibility will rest with our colleagues responsible for transforming our approach to commercial content.
We’re in the transition right now, making staff assignments, working out the details of workflow and communication and deciding which functions rest with the content staff and which are product-focused. We answer many questions by saying, “We don’t know yet.”
But here’s an example of how it will work: In the print-only days, a reporter covering a trial spent all day in the courtroom, then wrote a story for the morning newspaper that summarized the day’s action and presented a few highlights. That story might be 12-15 inches, more than many readers cared about but not nearly enough for people with strong interest in the case. Now that reporter will liveblog from the courtroom, writing perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 words and interacting with the audience. In a throwback to the days of “Sweetheart, get me rewrite,” a product editor will cut, paste and edit a story for the morning Gazette from the liveblog (probably not the 12-15 inches of days gone by, because our newshole is tighter). If the judge makes a key ruling, the reporter would file a bulletin to our breaking news blog, informing people who aren’t watching the case as closely and linking to the liveblog.
Because building audience will be part of our journalists’ responsibility, the journalist would also tweet news developments in a Twitter feed, linking to the liveblog. And the journalist would link to relevant external contact as well as to archived stories about the case that would provide context.
The basics of journalism remain unchanged, even strengthened: We’ll answer who, what, when, where, why and how in greater depth, free from the limits of products.

Source: KnightDigitalMedia

Don has been a leading researcher, author, educator and speaker addressing the sustainability of media supply chains for the last decade, and for over

WE expected bad news from the Daily Mail & General Trust today, and we certainly got it. Advertising revenue for the first three months of this year down by 24% at its national newspapers and 37% down at its regionals.
So, in response, the publisher says it will cut 1,000 jobs at its regional division, Northcliffe Media, to reduce the headcount by about 20% to 3,500. That's double the number of losses it envisaged in November 2008.
Though I am sympathetic to the plight of the people who will suffer the cutbacks, I think we waste our breath decrying these decisions. Every publisher, without exception, is taking similar action.
The DMGT announcement has to be seen in that context. The dramatic plunge in advertising in the past six months has produced an unprecedented crisis. The revenue that pays for journalism has, quite literally, vanished.
I know people will say that most companies remain profitable. But it's hard to be overly censorious about that when shareholders are clearly suffering (from falling stock prices and the cancelling of dividends) and when many senior executives are taking substantial salary cuts (and all of them surely should do so).
Profit margins have come down from their ridiculous levels of a couple of years back and there is no way now of retrospectively laying hands on that money. It's gone and there's no point in banging on about past fat cattery.
While the present round of cuts make financial logic for newspaper companies they are, of course, personally painful for the thousands of individuals who are losing their jobs.
Furthermore, I believe they are also painful for society, because they could well prove to be a threat to democracy. (Note that excellent quotation in the posting below).
I have long argued that we will eventually move from print to screen. What worries me, however, is that the transformation is being threatened by the immediate economic crisis. I fear that the death of print products will lead to the demise of the related online platforms too.
Anyway, are regional publishers really prepared to make the switch from one to the other? Are they devoting enough of their receding revenues to building vibrant online news outlets that will do the job of holding local power to account? Are journalists, for their part, thinking about a post-print world?
I believe publishers and journalists should be working together on projects to make as smooth a transition as possible from print to screen.
For example, in the basic and essential first stage of a new kind of web-based participatory journalism, skilled veteran journalists should be training people to become citizen journalists. They will need each other in future.
Almost all the blogs written by readers that are currently available on local paper websites are all about opinion. They need to have a reporting element if they are to have maximum impact in future.
This does not mean that we should abandon print at present (though print is clearly abandoning us). It means that we should be working towards a new form of journalism.
Journalism matters, as the National Union of Journalists so rightly reminds us in its campaigning slogan. It matters more than the platform that delivers it.
Local papers already have online platforms, but they are not getting the attention they need from publishers or journalists. The former cannot see how they can profit from them. The latter largely view them as a threat.
We need to get over that. If we want to ensure that our communities are not bamboozled by politicians and trampled on by big business, we have to preserve journalism. And, for the moment, that means preserving newspapers in their current form in order to provide the springboard to an online future.
To achieve that we need, at the very least, a series of informal concordats between publishers and staff. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, crucial to the social and political health of this nation.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Advertising spend collapses as economy grinds to a halt

Ad revenues fall by a tenth in the last quarter of 2008, with more declines expected

AN unprecedented plunge in advertising in the UK saw spending fall by almost a tenth in the final three months of last year, new figures revealed yesterday, with the economic crisis set to prompt even steeper falls in 2009.
The total spent on advertising in the UK in 2008 was down by 3.9 per cent on 2007, according to figures compiled by the World Advertising Research Center (WARC) on behalf of the Advertising Association. But the research reveals an astonishing increase in the rate of decline in the final quarter of the year, when spending was 9.6 per cent lower than in the same period of the previous year.
Colin Macleod, research director at WARC, said: "The fourth quarter was the worst of the year, and was tied in with the arrival of the recession. It was a sharp turnaround. The quarter is comparable to the levels seen in the economic downturn of 1991."
He warned that spending would fall further, but offered some hope to the beleaguered industry. "There is a feeling that advertising spending will go down quite sharply again, although it should pick up by the end of the year."
Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the advertising agency WPP, said the numbers were likely to be repeated over the next few months. "The first half of 2009 will be very difficult around the world," he warned. "There will be some recovery in the second half in relation to the first, and it should then get better in 2010." Sir Martin named the US and western Europe as the toughest markets for advertising in the current environment.
WARC said the decline in the UK had accelerated throughout the year. "In the UK, the amount of money spent, especially on display and classified advertising, tends to be driven by changes in consumer expenditure as well as the levels of corporate profitability," Mr Macleod said. "Both of those have been hit and that will bring spending down right across the industry."
The research reveals that spending is falling faster on newspaper advertising than any other category, down 12 per cent in 2008 over the previous year. Over the same period television advertising fell by 4.9 per cent
In the last quarter alone, the newspaper industry's ad revenues fell 18.9 per cent, with only magazines performing worse, down 19.2 per cent.
Mr Macleod added: "The newspapers, especially the regional ones, were particularly affected by the loss of classified advertising, with money moving online." One analyst estimated that advertising makes up 80 per cent of regional newspaper revenues, and of that 80 per cent is through the classifieds.
Classified adverts are dominated by the recruitment, property and motor vehicle sectors, all of which have been smashed by the onset of the credit crunch. Lorna Tilbian, head of media research at Numis, said: "Those industries are right in the eye of the storm." She added: "In a downturn, classified advertising always does worse than display."
Johnston Press, which owns The Scotsman and the Yorkshire Evening Post, announced last week that advertising revenues fell 17 per cent in the UK in 2008 and 23 per cent in Ireland. So far this year its total advertising revenues are down 36 per cent.
Other regional publishers including Northcliffe Media, owned by the Daily Mail & General Trust, and Trinity Mirror, which has a portfolio of local papers, have also suffered. The Local Media Alliance, which includes all three companies, has approached the Government for help.
The entire newspaper industry has been struck by the plunge in advertising, as companies across the UK slash costs and reduce headcount. But newspaper advertising still had the largest share of spending, with a quarter of the total spent last year.
Television advertising makes up 23 per cent and the internet accounts for 20 per cent. Online advertising was the only sector to enjoy positive growth in 2008, with spending estimated to be up 17.3 per cent. But even that was tempered, as it slowed from 39.5 per cent the previous year.
Mr Macleod said: "The growth rates on the internet are slowing. The more it has grown the harder it is to grow further, but it is also being affected by the wider economic issues."

Source: The Independent

How Financial Times Defies the Times

Famed Pink Broadsheet in the Black by Raising Price, Charging for Web

THE Financial Times is charging more for copies of its salmon-colored daily broadsheet and is making readers pay for its online content as well -- not exactly recessionary measures in the toughest times ever for the newspaper industry.
The Financial Times Group has bucked the newspaper trend, with 2008 profit up 13%. The robust performance saw owner Pearson's shares rise on a day when the U.K. stock market plunged to a six-year low. Not that the Financial Times is immune to an ailing global economy: Its ad revenue and newspaper readership both fell 3% in 2008, while management recently announced 80 layoffs and introduced the option of a three-day week over the summer to help cut costs.
But circulation revenue was up 16%, thanks mostly to a dramatic cover-price rise from £1 ($1.42) to £1.80 ($2.55) in the space of 18 months. And the 3% ad-revenue drop was minimal compared with those of some rivals that recorded 30% falls at the start of this year.
Perhaps most significantly of all for the long term, people must pay to view Financial Times content on the web. In 2008, the number of digital subscribers was up 8% to 109,609. On top of that, FT.com claims 1 million registered users, with 7.2 million unique users in 2008 (up 27%) and 49.2 million page views (up 68%). Daily newspaper circulation is 432,944, and worldwide readership is 1.3 million.

'Religious issue'
Charging for content on the web goes against the doctrine that information yearns to be free -- and supported solely by ads. "We've taken a lot of flak," said Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com. "People have a funny attitude on the subject. Some people associated with the internet see it almost as a religious issue. They take great exception to putting content behind a veil.
"Internally, we always believed we were doing the right thing," he continued. "Our main product is content, and we wouldn't feel comfortable in a world where we couldn't sell our main product."
The site, which has Asia, U.S., Middle East, U.K. and Europe versions as well as a Chinese-language site, allows limited access to non-subscribers, who can see up to three articles a month for free. After that, the browsers need to register, and for more than 10 articles a month, a paid subscription is necessary.
The standard subscription has recently been increased to £149 ($210) from £99 ($140), as the emphasis moves toward subscriptions to drive revenue in a weak advertising market.
The newspaper is based in the U.K., but 70% of its audience is overseas. Its web traffic is 40% from the U.K., 30% from the U.S., 20% from Europe and 10% from Asia.

Not chasing volume
Of course, the Financial Times has been helped in its staunch adherence to charging for content by the fact that it is essentially a niche proposition. It's aimed at global business decision makers and since there are never going to be more than a couple of million of them, there was never going to be any question of chasing volume.
"I've heard of some scary stuff going on [at rivals], with CPMs as low as 10¢," Mr. Grimshaw said. "At those rates, you need a lot of page views to make any money at all. There's a lot of what I call plain-vanilla inventory out there with only the [cost per thousand page impressions] to distinguish one site from another, which has pushed CPM through the floor. A lot of publishers and portals have pursued volume over other things."
FT.com, meanwhile, has focused on targeting technology and is still getting premium advertising from the financial-services sector, as well as luxury brands such as Rolex.
Vanessa Clifford, head of press at Mindshare U.K., said, "The Financial Times represents high-quality journalism. It is a very strong brand that has built up over many years, and they can command a premium for it. When budgets contract, advertisers stick with the trusted titles."

U.S. papers seek more circ revenue
The Financial Times isn't alone in increasing pricing, but it does charge more than its principal American competitors. The New York Times raised its metro weekday price to $1.50 from $1.25 last summer, and The Wall Street Journal upped its cover price to $2 from $1.50 around the same time. Both are increasing home-delivery charges, too.
The Journal also has online revenue to brag about. Although News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch initially suggested he'd like to take down the online pay wall, he changed his mind once in possession of the paper and adopted a hybrid of free and paid content. Last fall the Journal did away with a long-running $99 introductory offer for the print and online editions; that combination now costs $181.
The Financial Times is also expanding its circulation revenue more quickly than The New York Times or the Journal. The Times Media Group recently reported increasing circulation revenue 3.4% in 2008, despite losing 3.6% of Times weekday circulation in the most recent reporting period. The Journal said its fourth-quarter revenue jumped 9% from the same quarter a year earlier; its circulation held steady in the most-recent period.
The New York Times, of course, had tried cordoning its columnists and other "premium" online content behind a wall called Times Select, which was free to print subscribers and cost everyone else $49.95 a year or $7.95 a month. It got about 227,000 people to pay for online-only memberships, generating some $10 million in new revenue. But in September 2007 the company ended the experiment, deciding the revenue wasn't enough to offset the traffic and visibility the site was losing.
In another sign of circulation revenue's growing importance, the Journal recently argued loudly against an article in The New York Times that suggested the Journal was heavily discounting its prices to gain circulation.

Source: AdAge.com

Newspapers push case for share of advertising budgets

THE newspaper industry is pressing its case for a share of shrinking advertising budgets, rolling out research to prove its usefulness as a marketing medium.

Industry body The Newspaper Works, which represents publishers including News Limited, owner of The Australian, yesterday released the first in a planned series of "effectiveness reports", this one focusing on newspapers' usefulness to retail advertisers.
Still to come are at least six detailed case studies of individual multimedia campaigns isolating the contribution made by papers.
"We're going through a stage where everyone has to prove their value, and newspapers are no different," said The Newspaper Works chief executive Tony Hale. "Part of our role is to get advertisers and media agencies to understand how they can use newspapers as effectively as possible." While mountains of research had been generated tracking the effectiveness of TV ads, little of the kind had been done anywhere in the world on newspapers, Mr Hale said.
"With the fragmentation of media consumption ... it is necessary now to generate more information and more sophisticated feedback on how people are responding ... to prove the effectiveness of newspapers for advertisers," he said.
"(Retail advertising) is a very important part of newspaper revenue, so anything we could do to provide insight is valuable."
The research would mostly be used as a sales tool by ad sales reps in presentations to advertisers and media agencies, he said.
Total newspaper advertising in 2007-08 was $4.1billion, according to the Commercial Economic Advisory Service of Australia, of which retail accounted for about 30 per cent, or $1.2billion.
For the retail report, research firm Ipsos Media CT tested 36 ads among about 2500 people, garnering 7000 responses. Ipsos examined how consumers related to retail advertising in newspapers, which ads worked and which did not and how it could be made more effective. The best retail ads were found to belong to value supermarket chain Aldi and budget homewares maker Ikea, with their ads above-average in driving product sales and building their brand images.
The worst-performing were ads for Tabcorp offshoot Tabaret, which consumers struggled to recognise and failed to link with the brand, although Mr Hale said that did not mean they were not working.
"(The research measures) people's response to ads, not how effective they were in the market," he said. "But what it does mean for Tabaret is they could be using retail ads more effectively than they are."
In its head-to-head comparisons, the survey reported that Woolworths ads were much more recognisable than those of arch-rival Coles and that David Jones ambassador Megan Gale was more closely linked to its brand than was her model counterpart Jennifer Hawkins with Myer.
Ads that used distinctive, consistent templates performed better, and strong use of colour, such as Qantas's striking red, and having a "face" for the brand increased recognition.
Companies that successfully linked newspaper and TV campaigns included Bunnings, Jetstar and Target.
Newspaper retail ads are regularly criticised for being busy, often featuring lots of products and being jammed with information, but the research found "cluttered" ads for brands such as Officeworks, Bunnings and Dan Murphy's worked well.
But Mr Hale said many advertisers were ill-served by lacklustre newspaper campaigns generated by "lazy creatives".
"The standard of newspaper creative is really poor," he said. "They're putting all their effort into TV. I hope one of the effects (of the research) is that advertisers pay more effort to generating newspaper creative than the minimal effort a lot of advertisers give at the moment."

Source: The Australian

'Don't write off papers - we absolutely believe in them'

TRINITY Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey has said the group "absolutely believes" in local newspapers - despite closing 27 titles and cutting 1,000 jobs in the past year.
Bailey - whose group runs the Mirror, People, Record and more than 170 local newspapers - said newspapers were vital to local democracy.
She said advertising would return, added Trinity Mirror was "one of the few" companies that made money online, and appealed to the Government to allow more "consolidation" across titles.
Speaking to Sky News's Jeff Randall in her first television interview since becoming chief executive in 2003, Bailey said: "We absolutely believe in the need for consolidation.
"If you look at what's happening in the regional newspaper industry, we're facing structural challenges - but actually, the clear and present danger is the advertising recession.
"What we are saying to the Government is the industry needs to consolidate. The problem is the regulator looks at our industry and very narrowly defines us as print markets.
"What we are saying is no, we now operate in a much wider competitive market - not least with online.
"But I think there is a much, much more crucial point here - and that’s about the long term future of local media and local journalism.
"Now, this [local press] is not cat-up-a-tree journalism. What we are talking about is who turns up at the lower courts every morning, who is it that's holding councils to account, where is that planning application being properly debated?
"Local newspapers - and we absolutely believe in them."

'Ad spend will come back'

When asked by Randall to look into the crystal ball, and predict where “the bottom” is for newspapers, Bailey said: “Ad spend will come back, and with that we will see a return to health of the newspaper market.
"Don't write off newspapers. They’re not finished. If you just look at the numbers, 140 million newspapers are circulated every week in this country."
Randall reminded Bailey that, on starting her job, she promised to "stabilise, revitalise, and grow" the company.
He said she had been a "very effective cost-cutter", but questioned the growth.
"There are areas of growth in our company," Bailey replied.
"If you look at our digital growth, for instance, we now publish more online brands than we do print brands.
"That's quite deliberate - we are taking our brands and content across new platforms where our consumers and advertisers will want to be.
"[We had] 27 per cent digital growth last year, which is certainly outpacing that of the industry - so if you look at our company, there are absolutely areas of growth."

'Audience doesn't pay the wages'

When asked on the nature of the growth, Bailey said: "I'm talking about revenue growth. I think that's really important because yes, we want audience growth - and our audience grew by about 40 per cent last year – but audience doesn't pay the wages.
"What we have to do is make sure we are generating revenue, and we can convert that into profit. I think that's what sets us apart as a media company, because we focused very hard over the last few years on the business model of digital.
"It's not difficult to generate audience and to generate users. But if you can't charge for content, it's actually much more difficult to drive new revenues and make profit.
"If you look at our regionals business, almost 18 per cent of our profit last year came from digital. So yes, we are one of the few media companies that’s making profits out of digital."
Bailey added the company was cutting costs "without detriment to quality".
"We are closing titles if we can't find a path to profitability - reluctantly, I will say, but that's what we are doing, allowing management to focus on stronger brands," she said.
"We've cut headcount as we've cut titles, and we'’ve put in place a pay freeze across 2009. That's about making sure we can see our business through the downturn.
"But at the same time, of course, we do have to continue to focus on the longer term, and as a media company that’s about continuing to innovate, continuing to launch, and particularly we think it's important to modernize the very process of publishing.
"We are putting in new technology across the business, which is modernising the way we go about the business of newspaper publishing: more efficient, multi-platform publishing, which meets the needs of our consumers, and our advertisers.
"That's driving efficiencies, it's lowering costs across the business and - I think the important thing here is - without detriment to quality.
"That's about positioning our business for when we come out the other side of this recession, so we are a better business."

Source: Press Gazette

New Zealand: Newspaper Ad Revenue Down, Internet Up, In 2008

WELLINGTON: Advertising revenue across all main media in New Zealand was down slightly in 2008 to $2.317 billion , according to figures from the Advertising Standards Authority today.
This compares with the 2007 total of $2.335 billion.
The turnover includes data from newspapers, television, radio, magazines, outdoor, cinema, addressed mail, unaddressed mail and interactive media.
Hardest hit were newspaper revenues, down 8 percent to $760m, from $826m in 2007. Their share of the market dropped from 35.4 percent to 32.8 percent.
Internet advertising revenue rose nearly 43 percent to $193m from $135m in 2007. Its market share of advertising revenue rose from 5.8 percent to 8.3 percent.
Television ($647m), radio ($268m) and magazines ($249m) revenues remained similar to previous years.
The figures reflected what people already knew and the significant growth in the online market, said Derek Lindsay, media representative for the Communications Agencies Association.
Clients were getting used to online advertising, which was more accountable and measurable.
The drop in newspaper revenue reflected a drop in classified and display advertising and also a drop in property, car and job advertising.
Retailers were also using print less and major advertisers were taking out smaller advertising spaces, he said.
Since 1999 total advertising revenue has risen from $1.42 billion in 1999 to $2.317b in 2008, but newspapers' share of revenue had slipped from 39.8 percent to 32.8 percent and television slipped from 34.3 percent to 27.9 percent.
Interactive figures started in 2003 and have risen from 0.4 percent to 8.3 percent in 2008.

Source: guide2.co.nz

Focusing on newspaper print, ad revenues in difficult times

HOW to maintain and enhance print and advertising revenues - two of the key issues facing newspapers in the global financial crisis - will be the subject of two back-to-back global press industry conferences to be held in Barcelona, Spain, in May 2009.
According to the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), although digital innovation is a primary area of newspaper industry development, print and advertising continue to fund these new ventures, as well as being the profit centers for the vast majority of newspaper companies, even in these tough times.
The new “Power of Print” Conference and Expo, to be held 27 - 28 May, and the annual World Newspaper Advertising Conference and Expo, to be held on 28 - 29 May in the same venue, will showcase the best examples of revenue generating and cost-saving innovations at newspaper companies today.

Some highlights:

* The art of balancing print and digital, a presentation by Mikael Pentikäinen, president of Sanoma News in Finland, who has introduced a “long tail” strategy at Sanoma House, the publishers of the Helsingin Sanomat.

* According to Pentikäinen, the modern newspaper is like a portfolio of specialised magazines, but with one brand and style of content. Pentikäinen will speak about the factors used to create such portfolios and, perhaps most importantly, how they create commercial value.

* The “Individuated” Newspaper ­ or the personal newspaper ­ may finally be within striking distance as user-content selection evolves, workflow systems improve, digital printing develops and distributors grow accustomed to new practices, says Peter Vandevanter, VP for targeted products for MediaNews Group in the US.

* The individuated newspaper would make possible very targeted advertising and begin to compete with direct mail advertising, a category which has grown tremendously in the last 10 years.

* Profiting from hyper-targeted print publications, a presentation by Martha Stone, director of the WAN Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project, who will explain how three newspaper companies in Asia, the Americas and Europe have successfully launched a variety of highly targeted products. Stone will show how the companies conceived, developed and launched the products and involved editorial, advertising, marketing, circulation, production and printing departments.

The research is a preview of the soon-to-be-published Power of Print report, a part of the SFN annual series of strategic reports for WAN members.

* Printcasting: People-Powered Magazines, which will examine the “printcasting” experiment in print publishing that is fuelled by blogs and self-serve advertising. The project, conceived by Dan Pacheco, founder of Printcasting.com, is operated by The Bakersfield Californian, which has five years of experience with niche-focused print and online products.
Printcasting makes it possible for anyone to create a printable PDF publication online, whether or not they have their own content. Local bloggers and news organisations make their content available for printcasts in exchange for a share of advertising revenue that is generated through a self-serve advertising tool.

* Ten lessons from four age-specific youth-targeted newspapers in France from François Dufour, editor and founder of Playbac Presse, which has created four age-specific newspapers that have considerable attention among young people. According to Dufour, young people want news of interest to them and their age range, in colour and in a small format. They want to read for10 minutes a day, almost every day. They like cartoons, humour, photos, headlines, infographics, and opinion. They want to be taken seriously, but not in a serious manner.

* Evaluating and restructuring the sales department, a case study of the Manchester Evening News in the UK, which has reconstructed its commercial team and developed an excellent model for any publishing company that wants to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

The MEN model is based on honest dialogue between managers and staff, a clear flow of information and clear understanding of performance, and rewards and motivation to guarantee success. The presentation will describe both the process and the outcomes.

* Concept to design to market: the road to successful product development, which will examine the new lifestyle publications developed by The Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald that have brought in close to AUS$5 million (2.54 million Euros) of new revenue in under 12 months.

Far from being standard “advertorials” or special reports, these publications are high quality customised environments for select clients and are charged at a premium, says Kylie Davis, managing editor of the newspapers. She contends that customised editorial products are needed in today's market, and will describe the Fairfax approach, the editorial issues, how they were resolved, and the results.

Source: bizcommunity.com

Journalism's White Knight

ADVERTISING alone cannot save great journalism; in fact, it may just be killing it. As Walter Isaacson points out in his piece "How to Save Your Newspaper" in Time magazine, an over-reliance on advertising can have seriously adverse affects on journalism.
I would go a step further and say that the limitless choice and democratization of content provided by the Internet (and even the ever-expanding cable channel list) is having a serious impact on the quality of our news, as news stations must compete for ratings as I outlined in "All The News That's Fit To Monetize." Personally, I would love to see a graph of the number of pop culture stories covered by CNN over the last 5 years. My guess it is up and to the right.
A huge part of me truly believes that Isaacson is right, and that micro-payments for content is the way to go. The problem is, as he points out, we have been conditioned to expect Internet content for free.
This mind-set really began with cable TV. I pay my monthly fee for cable and, other than a limited a la carte and premium channels, I consume as much of as many channels as I want. Breaking this type of mind-set of the Web-savvy public might be nearly impossible, but then in rides a white (literally) knight. Thank you, Kindle.
Last week I read my first issue of The New York Times cover-to-cover. I had, for years, only darted in and out of nytimes.com, reading the articles by my favorite journalist, and those on the "most emailed" list. But with a single push of a button on my Kindle, I was charged 75 cents and got my own copy of the Times. I didn't even think twice about the 75-cent charge, and I would consider myself one of those Web-savvy people who have gotten very used to getting content for free.
But the Kindle is a different medium, with a micropayment system attached to the device/account. It's more like iTunes than paypal. The Kindle, or whichever digital reader becomes the killer device, can do for professional, quality journalism what the iPod did for music. What will make the difference is the way in which people access the content. We are very used to paying to download content.

Source: MediaPost Blogs

Local newspapers, blogs and the future

IN today's hyper communicative environment many blogs are like a bowl of popcorn compared with a full restaurant meal.
The idea of blogs and websites that use "crowdsourcing" assumes that eyewitnesses are the best reporters (this is not the case), and that participation is a given from a 'vibrant community' of readers. Sorry, but that's a mistaken assumption. It has been consistently shown that only about 5% to 7% of all readers of any publication (online or in print) will ever send in a letter, newstip or other contribution. Among those, how many have an axe to grind or are otherwise biased? How many of them can provide a photograph better than a snapshot or a video from something more than a cellphone?
The quality of a photograph or video or story matter, precisely because they tell the story better, more succinctly.

Professional journalists don't waste your time
Professional journalists perform a very valuable function in a democratic society. They sift through the information and, when they are good, provide as unbiased a view as possible. That's the job.
Instead of 3000 words about a community council meeting that was 'live blogged' with updates every 7 minutes wouldn't you honestly prefer 300 words that tell you what happened and what was decided?
Do you seriously want to simply be referred to a series of links where you must delve deeply into issues spending hours of time to glean the facts?

Print vs Online Advertising
Newspapers and websites both sell and display advertising. But a website ad is only worth about 10% of what an ad is worth in print.
This is so because print advertising actually WORKS.
You can say more, show more and it is often seen multiple times in the same home or family and kept around. Weekly newspapers have staying power.
Online advertising is often simply ignored, especially small square ads with annoying animation or no useful value driven offer. Worse, some ads appear virtually on their own, adjacent to nothing or so crowded into the tiny space on the edge of a web page that their message is lost. Online ads have their place certainly and can help brand a business but simply showing a logo is not the best way for a business to drive traffic to their store. Online ads are almost always quite small so for that reason alone they can't tell you much. How often do YOU click on an online ad?

Things change and so do people
While it is true that the cost of producing a news product on paper points to a diminishing return, an economic model will emerge that allows good papers to continue to publish over time, as enlightened readers grow weary of the information bombing presented by the blog, and twitter formats and embrace a more measured, thoughtful presentation of what is going on around them.
Real life has a way of asserting itself and people often come to realizations that their time is worth something.

Past is prologue
There are those in the blogging world and those otherwise enamored of online communication for whom newspapers can't die soon enough.
They point to the ability of the internet to deliver news almost instantly (have they heard of radio?), and provide a framework of interaction that allows the audience to become part of the newsgathering process.
This is purported to be 'better' than the 'biased' approach of a seasoned trained journalist who with some experience and judgement sifts through what is often largely unimportant information to deliver a concise report on what matters. There are pluses and minuses to this of course but what many of those who look at newspapers and their current dilemma fail to understand is that there are significant differences between these models of information as well as the potential effectiveness of the advertising the supposedly supports them both.
Predictions about the demise of many things in the past often did not come true. Television did not replace radio, and even in an age of digital downloads, believe it or not vinyl records are seeing a significant resurgence. This is not to say everything will remain the same but people love newspapers for very good reasons. Those reasons will still be why they love them for some time.

Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated
Some daily newspapers whose content is largely duplicated by other media WILL go away. That's clear.
But community newspapers are NOT going to be replaced by neighborhood blogs and are doing quite well though in an economic downturn some evolution is necessary for all media. In the weeks ahead you will see this newspaper change page size for example and we are re-launching our website to bring you more information and provide greater interaction. We think you will like it a lot.
We want to assure you that THIS newspaper is stable and devoted to the community and plans to be publishing in print and online for a long time to come.
We thank you for your readership and the support of our advertisers.
It's our honor and privilege to serve you.

Source: TheWestSeattleHerald.com