/mar.ket.’nol.o.gy/

What a day.  First 70s iconic beauty Farrah Fawcett dies after a long illness.  Then, the King of Pop, Michael Jackson goes into cardiac arrest and, at 50 years old, is gone.  Wow…  Farrah’s death had, sadly, been expected, but Michael’s was a huge surprise and it sent both the Internet and TV into a massive tailspin.  I grew up as one of Mike’s many “biggest fans” so its definitely surprising…

There were some other surprises today.  At the top of the list are a couple of stories about teens’ consumption of digital media.  Adweek reports on Nielsen research which shows that teens are making time for both digital and traditional media rather than focusing exclusively on digital.  In fact, says PaidContent.org, in a story on the same study, teens spend less time online than people aged 25-34.  That’s good news for old media peeps - no nail in the figurative coffin for them just yet.  That story actually dovetails well with a story from MediaWeek on BabyCenter research which indicates moms with young children spend less time with traditional media and more time with social media making friends with their real-life friends and other moms.  Regardless of which group you fall into, PaidContent says, it appears that Microsoft and Publicis will be working to make sure the ads you see are better targeted towards your needs.  Oh, joy! More big brother behavior from Microsoft is just what I was looking for.  No, really…  Brand Republic says that TNS big wig, George Shababb, thinks TV measurement is insufficient for today’s needs and that the industry needs to embrace new technology. This is probably true considering measurement occurs in almost the same way it did when Ozzie and Harriet were TVs favorite parents.

MarketingCharts is pointing out that GroupM has a new 70-country report forecasting an ad spending recovery in 2010.  That must explain their willingness to work with NBC to grease the skids and get the upfront moving in the right direction.  NBC and GroupM have apparently finalized a deal for both broadcast and cable inventory in the upcoming season.  That’s good for everyone given this economic climate.  I’m going to guess, however, GroupM will wish they had seen this story from PaidContent which says that Hulu.com is now getting higher CPMs for shows viewed on that property than the networks get when the shows are viewed on air.  There goes the (Internet) neighborhood.

Other stories worth your perusal?

- Nielsen: Supermarket Prices Still Creeping Up [BrandWeek]
- Top 30 Global News Sites See Drop in Time Spent [MediaWeek]
- Tips for boosting the value of existing customers  [iMediaConnection]
- Vyoom: A Social Network Built From The Ground Up Around Real-Time [TechCrunch]
- Fortune-100 CEOs Remain Social-Media Hermits [MarketingCharts]
- L’Oreal Found Guilty of Discrimination in France [AdAge]
- Updated: Lowe Names Wall Global CEO [AdWeek]
- Moore Elected Chairman of The Interactive Advertising Bureau [MediaWeek]
- How Sharpie Is Staying Loyal to Print While Getting Into Social Media [AdAge]

Isn’t that enough?

This entry originally posted on mad42.com at http://www.mad42.com/dailyroundup/mad42-daily-roundup-june-25-2009.

If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, then Twitter must be feeling good about itself these days.  PaidContent offers this story on how Facebook has decided to follow Twitter’s lead and open up user profiles by default - allowing the world to see status messages and other postings just as they do on Twitter.  Let the battle begin.  One interesting thing Twitter has going for it is, as reported by AdWeek, its users buy more music than non Twitter users.  Guess that explains John Mayer’s almost 1.5 million followers.  One group looking to gain followers is newspapers.  To that end, according to MediaPost, a group of newspaper publishers including Hearst and Cox have contracted with Verve to create mobile versions of their newspaper sites.  This could be trouble.  Moconews reported today in separate studies from BestBuy and Zappos.com / BillMeLater which found that 31% of female respondents ranked their cell phones ahead of their significant other AND 60% of people said they’d rather not drink for a week rather than give up their cell phone?  The SO I get, but no liquor? Is nothing sacred!?  While we’re on mobile, here’s a quick article from iMediaConnection on what the new iPhone means for marketers.

We came across a really great story from BrandWeek about Pier 1’s using search ads to stay afloat during the recession.  With 2% lift and 300% return on advertising spend, it’s a case worth reading.  Also worth reading is a story from Adotas summarizing a study from DoubleClick which found that rich-media ads with video “result in a 2.30% increase in brand favorability” - nothing to sneeze at.  If, by chance, you do sneeze, you’d be wise not to let that sneeze happen while driving in New York City.  MarketingCharts’s says The Big Apple took the crown in an AutoVantage survey on the worst cities for road rage.  You know what else is not to be sneezed at? Jada Pinkett Smith’s new hospital show, Hawthorne.  Word from MediaWeek is that Hawthorne “retained nearly 100% of its … audience” for its second episode.  The Smiths must have the magic formula.  There will be a larger pool of movies with the magic formula for an Oscar nom this year. The folks at the Academy are increasing the best movie field from five to ten movies in an effort to increase ratings.

In Cannes news, this guy Zachary Rodgers from ClickZ wants to make you jealous by detailing his night out with the “Cannes Digerati.”  Don’t let him do it. Get your revenge by going to the Wrath of Cannes.  Also from Cannes, PaidContent reports that King Ballmer broke it to the media mavens in attendance that the traditional broadcast and print media will have to come to terms with an ever diminishing piece of the advertising pie.  If the tough love they’ve been getting with revenues hasn’t been enough, maybe the King’s warning will help.

As usual, a couple articles we’re just too tired to write about but are worthy of your kind eyes…

- Google is testing performance based ads; advertisers only pay if a purchase is made
- Energizer has created a new line of “Energi-To-Go” chargers allowing you to charge your iPhone and other devices on the go

Hasta mañana!


Originally posted on mad42.com at http://www.mad42.com/category/mad42-story-types/daily-roundup

In an effort to better serve the advertising community, Actuan launched Madison and 42nd, Mad42.com, in April. Mad42.com is a primarily a news aggregator for the ad industry but it also offers some other nifty features such as a job board, forums, etc…

We’ve come to realize that sifting through all of the news on the site can be a daunting tasks, so we recently created a new feature, the Daily Roundup. In it, we cover what we think are can’t miss stories of the day. It will be posted each evening and available to you when you arrive at your desk in the morning. Click here to see our most recent daily roundups.

I came across an interesting article from Brandweek. Apparently, the recruiting firm Heidrich & Struggles recently surveyed 111 marketing executives from $1+ billion companies and found that a large percentage of those executives were disappointed by the performance of digital. Interesting article given that so many marketing dollars are shifting to digital. Give the article a read. It must be said I came across the article by chance on Madison and 42nd, Actuan’s news aggregation site, but the H&S partner quoted used to head the NYC office of an agency I worked at many moons ago.

I came to a realization a few minutes ago. I pay for content on the web. I pay download music. If I want to watch a movie, I pay for that. I was one of the few people who paid, for a while, to join some sort of premium access to last.fm. I subscribe to Consumer Reports and, as part of my home delivery, the Wall Street Journal online. I pay for plenty of content online. Yet, I won’t pay for regular ole news (except for WSJ). You know why? Because it can be told to me pretty darn easily.

The reality we as Americans have never paid for news. It may seem as though we have. In reality, we’ve been paying for the paper on which the news was printed and by which it was delivered to us. Think about it… News came out today of the pilot from the USS Alabama, Richard Phillips, being rescued from hostages. Once you’ve heard that three pirates were killed, one was arrested and the pilot is safe, what else do you need to know? Nothing - with the exception of a small few of us. Your friend who happened to catch the news elsewhere can give you those details. The same can’t be said for music.

Can you imagine someone telling you how the latest Coldplay song sounds? “Well, this guy is singing in a pseudo-melodic tenor over a repetitive bed while a mild drum plays in the background. The song goes for 3 minutes and 23 seconds.” I don’t do Coldplay justice - nor would the average person. A similarly poor telling of a movie would occur. We have to pay to get the full impact of that content.

What makes news valuable is its perspective. Fox News does so well because its stories are so obviously unfair and unbalanced. In this age where all news content is expected to be free, the winner of the news wars will be those who identify their voice and allow each story to be told in that voice - in a way that makes it more and more challenging to repeat the story without losing some meaning. If news sites want people to pay for content, they’re going to have to become more like the music and movie business. Make the stories an experience that cannot be easily retold and people will pay. It’s what National Public Radio (NPR) and it’s huge part of what makes people so willing to contribute to their local public radio station. The vast new media resources available make such stories more feasible than ever. Now it’s time for old media world to start doing some out-of-the-box new media thinking. If they don’t, it will certainly be easy to tell their story “They died off like the dinosaurs they were.”

In my last post I suggested newspapers begin to devise ways to compete with the likes of Craigslist while capitalizing on the benefit of knowing their local and regional preferences. I said it thinking about my own local newspaper web site, nj.com, and its apparent lack of imagination. Too many newspapers follow the same bland modus operandi of that site.

Though I’ve never lived in Atlanta, I call it my second home because its someplace where I feel at home. So, it comes with some pleasure to find out that the major news paper in my second home, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC), has already done just what I suggested. They apparently built a classified site, ajcexchange, which competes head-to-head with Craigslist. Their goal was to provide local users with a Craigslist alternative that didn’t have some of the unsavory elements for which Craigslist has recently become known.

I have to tell you. I think they did a pretty good job. Go visit the site yourself and let me (and them) know what you think. It looks like they built it from scratch using Ruby on Rails. Kudos to the AJC team for leading and being imaginative about ways to get ahead of the troubles facing the industry.

Unfortunately, I came down with some sort of bug today. Said bug has me in bed watching Phil Bronstein, Editor-at-Large for Hearst, on Stephen Colbert. Interesting interview. Like many news folks these days Bronstein argues that giving news away for free is killing newspapers. I won’t disagree. I get my news for free and, truthfully, rarely look at a newspaper – save for the weekend issues of the New York Times (I also have a subscription to The WSJ but usually read the stories online). That being said, I do not believe that free news is the only problem facing newspapers. Instead, I believe the major problem is a lack of imagination.

The news has never paid for itself. Few newspapers, if any, survive solely by printing news. They rely on ads – classfied ads, ads from the little shop down the street offering 30% off of all shoes in stock and those very expensive full-page mea culpa ads companies take out when they’re caught doing something dastardly. Different styles of ads – all with the common purpose of generating revenue for the company. The Internet comes along and all of a sudden people aren’t buying newspapers any more and so people aren’t as willing to advertise in newspapers. They have to advertise someplace, though, right? Have people stopped wanting to sell things? Don’t people still have let people know about the 4 puppies they have available? Don’t stores still have to inform people about their upcoming sales? They do – and they are – just not in the newspaper.

Go visit your local newspaper’s web site. I can almost guarantee you it’s chock full of news. In fact, your newspaper was never so chock full of news. Sure, there are display ads but our Internet savvy eyes have been trained to ignore those. The classifieds section, the bread and butter of newspapers, is now relegated to a mention in the top nav or even worse, way down below the fold. Huh? And this is how you expect to make money?

Here’s the reality. Craigslist and Google AdWords are killing newspapers. Anything I want people to sell I can either advertise on Craigslist or buy some keywords and inform people while they’re doing their web searches. Who can blame marketers? Craigslist is free and with AdWords, I can track people from the click to the web site and to conversion. Try doing that with a newspaper ad. The sad part is newspapers are letting Craigslist and Google AdWords kill them. They sit there complaining about what’s wrong rather than thinking about how they can beat them at their own game.

Come on… One thing local newspapers have over Craigslist is regional insight. How can they use that to their advantage? Newspapers generally have significant reach in the local area and can perhaps reach people who might not visit Craigslist. Most newspapers, whether they know it or not, have a trusted brand recognition in their communities that can’t be easily dismissed. To my mind, newspapers can use these benefits to create local portals which serve news but also focus on what people got used to with their newspaper … ads – on every page, in any position there isn’t story copy. That’s not to say it would be easy to do but it would be a start.

Here’s why newspapers won’t get it right – too many people. Craigslist works because it’s simple. Very minimal design. Only a few clicks to get the info you need. That’s because it was designed by one guy. Like all large companies, newspapers have a lot of stakeholders who all want input into everything. Think about what Craigslist would look like if created by newspapers. I won’t bother with a description, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be pretty.

It’s time for newspapers to head back to basics. There actually little simpler than placing an ad on a newspaper page – perhaps not in execution, but absolutely in concept. And what could be easier than turning a newspaper page and finding a news story surrounded by ads on the next page. The newspaper is just about as simple a concept as there is and it’s time newspaper folks went back to thinking simple and using their imagination to solve the problems they face. Pointing the finger at everyone else won’t prolong the industry’s survival. It will only make it so that people will be glad when they’re finally gone if only so they no longer have to listen to the yelling and screaming they did as they were going down. Now is the time to either figure it out or go down quietly. Personally, I’m hoping for the former.

I consider Facebook to be a form of entertainment for me. I love finding out about my friends’ lives through their pictures, 25 Things notes and their Wall messages. Most of all, I love their status messages. I’ve gotten to the point where my life just feels empty without a constant stream of status messages. Heck. It’s so bad I don’t want a stream, I want a river of status updates. I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels this way and so, it seems to be that Facebook’s latest update is a massive failure and could be the catalyst for people to “break up” with Facebook, as one of my FB friends put it. She’s taken up with Twitter.

Something has happened in the past 30-60 days. All of a sudden Twitter has reached Malcolm Gladwell’s “tipping point” and everyone is talking about it and (re)joining it. And you know what’s on Twitter? Status updates. There are no updates about quizzes my friends have taken which suggest they should live in “the country,” as if that’s a real place. I don’t get 20 updates about friends giving their friends turkeys or an additional 15 updates asking whether a friend’s friend will make a good friend. Instead, on Twitter I get a pure, unadulterated stream of status messages and the more friends I have on Twitter the stronger the current of the stream. Heck between Jimmy Fallon and ?uestlove, I’ve got a pretty good flow already.

Normally, I’d wonder if I’m the only one. Thanks to the New Layout Vote application on Facebook, I don’t have to wonder. As of this writing, there are 1,106,757 votes against the new FB layout (vs 70,074 for it). On top of that, there are 612,545 comments - most of which seem to be against the layout.

In Facebook’s effort to improve the site for marketers, which is all that seems to have taken place, they’ve made it more difficult for users to get the information they need - a critical faux pas. They’ve also created an awesome opportunity for Twitter.

I’m interested in seeing how this plays out. Right now, I’ve got to go update my status — on Twitter.

I just saw this article on Engadget Mobile about carrier’s reactions to Dell’s mobile phone prototypes. Apparently the carriers felt Dell’s phones lacked “differentiation.”

Dell became great during a time when differentiation didn’t matter. In fact, their business model is built on a lack of differentiation between devices. Their strength is their ability to offer cheaper prices because of scale. Cheaper prices haven’t been all that important in the mobile phone business. If people like a phone, they pay for it. Dell likely went to the carriers trying to get an exclusivity deal and “differentiation” absolutely matters there. Danger could have offered Dell some opportunity for differentiation by extending the range of their platform, but Microsoft snapped them up.

Given the economy, there may be some hope for them if they can get something out fast. A low-priced smartphone targeting parents and their tweens/teens could have some legs if it offered great parent-centric features without seeming too restrictive to the kids. Similarly, though RIM and Apple own the hearts of the most savvy cell phone users, most cell phones are a few years old and are dumb. In keeping with their business model, there’s a great opportunity for Dell to reach those users who need to upgrade because they want new features but don’t need the whiz-bang technologies of a Blackberry or the iPhone. That also happens to be a place where differentiation isn’t all that important as long as the target audience knows what the primary benefit is.

Dell has the heft to make a strong entry into the cell phone business. I’m they’re keeping their eye on the right bulls eye.

Okay, okay. It’s been a while, but let’s skip that conversation and get to the good stuff… Do you remember when the Internet first became popular? Most marketers weren’t all that discerning when it came to talking to their customers. They put up a web site, crossed their fingers and considered the job good enough. All of that marketing “theory” they learned so they could be called “marketers” went right out the window. They focused on every customer instead of segmenting and committed other cardinal sins that would have made their B-school profs withdraw their degrees. Thankfully, we’re smarter now — or are we?

As I’ve previously indicated in this blog, I love mobile. As such, I’ve recently imbibed on the iPhone Kool-Aid and have taken up investigating iPhone application opportunities. In doing so, I began to realize something interesting — marketers are right back in 1995 with their engage-the-masses, cross-our-fingers mindset. Case in point… Target. Yes, Target.

A recent article from USA Today indicates that consumers are trading down and companies like Target are being hurt in the process as consumers switch to WalMart and other lower cost alternatives. Per the article, Target’s net profit and same stores sales were both down last quarter as a result of consumers’ new found frugality. To my mind, Target is missing something because some shoppers should be trading down to it. And which shoppers in particular do I think should be schlepping into Target - everyone’s favorite customer, the 18-34 crowd.

This group, most recently flush with money either from their parents or from high-paying jobs, has shopped at Target and target.com for incidentals, but rarely for clothes. That’s what boutiques and mid to high-end stores were for, but not anymore. Those jobs are fading and parents’ portfolios aren’t what they used to be. The over abundance of money has faded, but this audience of fashionistas, urban hipsters, college students and young moms still have to purchase things someplace and to my mind Target and target.com should be that place.

Now, before I go on, I’d like to point out that much of what I’m about to say is based on anecdotal evidence. Though research indicates men are most likely to buy iPhones, my experience is that a significant number of women apt to shop at Target use iPhones. Additionally, more recent research tells us that iPhone owners are becoming more diverse and that since the launch of the iPhone 3G “the strongest growth in users is coming from those earning less than the median household income.”

I say all of this to say what. It’s time for brands like Target to act. Target has an application on the iPhone App Store that allows people to choose gifts for others. I can only imagine what users of the app are thinking - “What about me?” Gifts for others are great, but as a person who knows a thing or two about being selfish, I want to know how an app can help me. To that end, iPhone apps offer retailers like Target, who are losing their cachet, an opportunity to “speak” to buyers who are trading down. They may not be able to shop at Pottery Barn or Nordstrom, but they still need to buy things. An iPhone application can hone in on what they want and present it to them with an experience unique to the iPhone. Make users’ lives easier. Moreover, the device can encourage online purchases or offer unique opportunities that drive traffic to local stores - helping to maintain same store sales rates. To paraphrase speculators in the old West, “There’s gold in them iPhone hills.”

This entry is lengthy enough, but there’s something I like to remind people of with regard to marketing with new technologies:

• From platform to platform and technology to technology … marketing is marketing is marketing

To that end, remember to:

1. Always segment and focus on customers’ needs and making their lives easier
2. Seek out new opportunities with new technologies. Don’t use one technology the same way you’d use another. Innovate.
3. Stay true to your core. Don’t stray from who you are and your core brand message. You can lose your audience and it’s too hard to get back to center.