An uptick in print magazine advertising -- however modest -- appears to be occurring.Could it be that print magazines are finally on the positive side of the “U” in their recovery? The most recent stats on print advertising activities suggest that this may be so – if only slightly.
In statistics released this past week by Publishers Information Bureau, this data aggregator found that across all of the magazines tracked by the bureau, print advertising rose ~2.5% during the first quarter of 2011 compared to the same period last year. While not large, it is a gain, which is better news than most publications have had in quite a while.
PIB charted advertising growth in seven of the twelve advertiser categories it tracks, with the following segments showing increases year-over-year:
Apparel and accessories
Automotive
Cosmetics and toiletries
Drugs and remedies
Financial, insurance and real estate
Media and advertising
Technology
As for the other categories, advertising was roughly even in women’s fashion and beauty magazines, while advertising categories that continued to decline were retail, food, home furnishings, and travel.
More specifically, how did some of America’s largest and most famous magazine brands fare? The answer is: “It depends.”
BusinessWeek: +49%
Elle: +15%
Vogue: +11%
Glamour: +6%
The Economist: +4%
The New Yorker: +4%
Time: +3%
There are explanations behind the outliers’ advertising performance. BusinessWeek has undergone an extensive redesign since its purchase by Bloomberg, and major resources have been poured into the publication to raise its profile and editorial muscle.
At the other end of the scale, Newsweek has struggled in the wake of its purchase by nonagenarian Sidney Harman, the retired chairman of Harman International Industries (Harman/Kardon) and husband of Jane Harman, executive director of Wilson International Center for Scholars and an ex-congressperson from California. Bringing Tina Brown onboard as “celebrity editor” at Newsweek hasn’t paid big dividends yet – at least in terms of advertisers returning to the magazine.
Does the uptick in advertising mean that print magazines are out of the woods yet? Hardly. Let’s not forget that the improved advertising figures are coming off of 2010’s low base levels that are nothing short of ugly. Print advertising is slowly emerging from the worst business environment faced by magazines since the Great Depression, after all.
I blogged recently about the financial travails of Blockbuster and its pending sale … indeed, whether the brand would survive or be liquidated instead.
It was a true battle between old and new forces … with Dish Network seeing Blockbuster as a conduit for augmenting its suite of services, and Monarch looking only to liquidate Blockbuster’s substantial real estate holdings while shuttering the enterprise for good.
When the dust finally settled, Dish Network was the victor, agreeing to pay ~$228 million in cash at closing, which is expected to occur within the next few months. In total, the deal came in at ~$320 million, which tracks with the current value of Blockbuster’s assets.
What in tarnation is Dish Network thinking of doing with Blockbuster? It turns out that the company is hoping to use at least some of Blockbuster’s ~1,700 store outlets to facilitate cross-marketing of its satellite programming and related video services.
The industry is already abuzz with what this really means. Is the Blockbuster acquisition by Dish Network a master-stroke … or a big blunder?
Dish Network looks like it will attempt to keep Blockbuster afloat by having it provide free or discounted rentals as a value-add to Dish’s pay TV subscribers. But industry watchers are also looking at potential online opportunities which could turn out to be more lucrative, since Blockbuster holds streaming rights to various video titles that Dish can use to expand its existing streaming offerings. It could also roll Blockbuster licenses into a Dish-branded online video-on-demand service offering.
In a likely related move, Dish Network has also acquired the assets of financially troubled satellite operator DBSD North America. That purchase provided access to a broadband spectrum that Dish can now use to roll out wireless networks for voice or data communications. This way, it wouldn’t need to rely on the broadband networks of other Internet service providers to stream the content to its satellite TV customers.
But with the pace of change and the fickleness of customers, any effort to bring synergy to these new acquisitions must happen very quickly. Dish Network doesn’t have the luxury of time to make things work; it’s got to happen in weeks and months rather than years.
So the coming months will be interesting in seeing how the Dish/Blockbuster union pans out. One thing is certain: Blockbuster won’t end up looking anything like it does today. But on the bright side, the brand won’t be thrown into the dustbin of corporate history – at least not yet.
And that probably surprises more than a few industry observers – the ones who have been loudly predicting the death of this iconic brand for months or years now.
Marshall McLuhan: The Great PrognosticatorI’ve been reading a new biography on Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian educator, scholar and social theorist who is notable for having predicted the rise of the Internet years before Al Gore or anyone else took credit for inventing it.
The succinct biography, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland [ISBN-10: 1935633163 … also available in a Kindle edition], is quite interesting and I definitely recommend it for anyone interested in mass communications and popular culture.
Reading this biography, one gets the impression that McLuhan was a man who correctly predicted a good deal of the world of communications in which we live today. Not only did he forecast the rise of the web 30 years before it came about, he was the one who coined the expression “the medium is the message” … and who spoke about the “global village” long before Hilary Clinton came on the scene.
It turns out that this extraordinary thinker led a pretty conventional life, actually. Born in Edmonton, AB, he spent the better part of his career in Canada, although it was as a visiting professor at St. Louis University where he met his future wife, with whom he would have six children. (Born an Anglican, McLuhan was influenced by the writings of G. K. Chesterton and had converted to Roman Catholicism by his late 20s.)
Although trained as an academician in Canada and at Cambridge – and being on the faculty at prestigious educational institutions like the University of Toronto where he eventually had his own research center – the demands of raising a large family drove McLuhan to more financially lucrative work in the advertising field as well. He also had consulting stints at large corporations like AT&T and IBM.
Although passionate about and partial to his teaching and academic work, it was as an ad industry personality that McLuhan probably made his biggest mark.
As early as 1951, McLuhan published a book of essays called The Mechanical Bride, which analyzed various examples of “persuasion” in contemporary popular culture.
In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” as he wrote of the influence of communications media independent of their content. He contended that media affect society in which they play a role not by the content they deliver, but by the characteristics of the media themselves. True enough.
And how did McLuhan come to predict the rise of the Internet? It was right there in his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy, which attempted to reveal how communications technology – alphabetic writing, printing presses, electronic media — affects cognitive organization and, in turn, social organization. Here’s what he had to say:
“The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its environment, and it will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”
Remember, this was written in 1962!
McLuhan also used the term “surfing” in a way that seems uncannily similar to its meaning today – in his case, using the word “surfing” to refer to rapid, irregular and multidimensional movement through a body of knowledge.
More books would come from McLuhan’s pen in subsequent years, including:
All of these volumes sound pretty fascinating – definitely ones to explore in the future, although the biography provides good synopses of their contents.
It is difficult to think of someone that has had more influence over the world of media and advertising than Marshall McLuhan. Sure, there are people like David Ogilvy, but his influence has been confined almost exclusively to the advertising industry alone.
By contrast, the McLuhan’s biographer contends that McLuhan influenced scads of writers and critical thinkers – I was pleased to see Camille Paglia among them – along with politicians like Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jerry Brown. McLuhan was even named a “patron saint” of Wired Magazine, and a quote of his appeared on the publication’s masthead during the first decade of its publication.
And finally, it’s nice to discover that McLuhan’s years in academia have been given their due as well: The University of Toronto has continued his work by running a center at the school named, appropriately, the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology.
By now, everyone knows that Facebook has pretty much won the social media wars, as early entrant and rival MySpacehemorrhages employees as it tucks its tail between its legs and slinks away.
And Facebook itself is a good chronicler of the hyperactivity of Facebookers wordwide. Recently, it published some stats on “what 20 minutes on Facebook looks like.” Among the revelations:
~10.2 million comments uploaded every 20 minutes
~2.7 million photos uploaded
~2.0 million “friend” requests accepted
~1.8 million status updates posted
~1.6 million wall posts
~1.5 million event invites sent out
~1.3 million photos tagged
~1 million links shared
Fan designations (or “likes”) are now reaching stratospheric proportions for some celebrities. And who were the most popular in 2010 based the “most liked” status? The results show a major skew towards the younger generation … and toward entertainers rather than political, scientific or academic leaders:
Lady Gaga: ~25 million people “like”
Eminem: ~24 million people
Megan Fox: ~20 million people
Vin Diesel: ~19 million people
Rihanna: ~19 million people
Where does President Barack Obama rank by comparison? He’s at ~17 million “likes” – right along with Bob Marley, Li’l Wayne, Justin Bieber and Shakira.
Personally, I found the trends in relationship status to be the most interesting. There were quite a few relationship changes … but perhaps not as many as you might expect considering that there are an estimated 600 million active users on Facebook these days.
For the record, here’s what happened with personal relationships in 2010:
~44 million people changed their status to “single”
~37 million changed their status to “married”
~28 million changed their status to “in a relationship”
~6 million changed their status to “engaged”
~3 million changed their status to “it’s complicated”
Notice that the number of people who migrated away from marriage were nearly equally matched by those becoming engaged or getting hitched. As the famous French saying goes, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)
Online display ad clickthrough rates have stopped declining ... bottoming out at 0.09%.The latest news in online display advertising is that ad clickthrough rates have now leveled off after an extended period of decline – one that was exacerbated by the economic downturn.
So reports digital media marketing firm MediaMind (Eyeblaster). According to a report released this past week, one key reason for the decline being arrested is the greater sophistication of advertisers in targeting online advertising to audiences and groups that are more likely to be interested in them.
That being said, the overall clickthrough rate has leveled off at an abysmal 0.09%.
That is correct: less than one tenth of one percent. In any other business, this would be a rounding error.
If that statistic seems difficult to believe, consider this factoid: The average Internet user in America is delivered more than 2,000 display ads over the course of a single month. We might think that users would be inclined to click on more than just two or three of these ads during a month’s time.
But it’s important to realize that when users are in the mood to shop and buy, they’re typically going straight to the sites they like … or they’re using Google, Bing or some other search engine to find their way.
And it turns out there’s really no such thing as an “average” Internet user, anyway. Research conducted by digital marketing auditing and intelligence firm comScore, Inc. has found that around two-thirds of people on the Internet never click on any display ads during the course of a month. Moreover, only 16% of Internet users are responsible for around 80% of all clicks on display ads.
All the more reason why search marketing continues to be the online advertising powerhouse that it is. And why not? It’s putting your business in front of the customer when s/he is in “search-and-buy” mode … not when s/he’s doing something else.
John Barlow of Barlow Research Associates, Inc. reminds me that it’s been awhile since I blogged about the dire straits of America’s newspaper industry. The twin whammies of a major economic recession along with the rapidly changing ways Americans are getting their news have hammered advertising revenues and profits, leading to organizational restructuring, bankruptcies, and more.
But with the recession bottoming out (hopefully?), there was hope that the decline in newspaper ad revenues might be arrested as well.
Well, the latest industry survey doesn’t provide much cause for celebration. A poll of ~2,700 small and mid-size businesses conducted this summer by Portland, OR-based market research firm ITZBelden and the American Press Institute finds that ~23% of these businesses plan to cut back on newspaper advertising this year.
The kicker is that these revenues are being spent, but they’re being put to use in other advertising media.
The ITZBelden survey found that a similar ~23% of companies plan to up their 2010 digital ad spending anywhere from 10% to 30%. This compares to only about 10% planning to increase their print advertising by similar proportions.
Moreover, the survey findings reveal that small and mid-size U.S. businesses have moved into digital marketing in a significant way. Not only do more than 80% of them maintain web sites, they’re active in other areas, including:
~45% maintain a Facebook or MySpace page
~23% are engaged in online couponing
~13% are involved with Craigslist
~10% are listed on Yelp! or similar user-review sites
One area which is still just a relative blip on the screen is mobile advertising, in that fewer than 4% of the respondents reported activities in that advertising category.
Where are these advertisers planning to put their promotional funds going forward? While newspapers should continue to represent around one quarter of the expenditures, various digital media expenditures will account for ~13% of the activity, making this more important than direct mail, TV and Yellow Pages advertising.
There was one bright spot for newspapers in the survey, however. Respondents expressed a mixture of confusion and bewilderment about the constantly evolving array of digital marketing communications options opening up … and they’re looking for support from media experts to guide their plans and activities.
And where do they see this expert advice coming from? Newspaper ad reps.
Perhaps the Yellow Book’s “Beyond Yellow” small business advertising campaign – you know, the one that touts not only the Yellow Pages advertising but also web development, online advertising, search marketing and mobile advertising – is onto something.
Now that social media has gone from being a novelty to becoming standard fare in marketing and communications programs, we’re seeing evidence as to where these tactics shine their best.
One aspect that’s become clearer over time is that the most effective uses of social media must have an underlying “hook”; it’s not sufficient simply to engage in social media as just “business as usual.”
An interesting example of this phenomenon at work is Bear Head Lake State Park in extreme Northern Minnesota. It’s located near Ely, a town that’s miles from nowhere but somewhat famous as the embarkation point for exploring Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
This is the most famous park you’ve never heard of. How so? Because it beat out every other national and state park in the country in winning a popularity vote on the Internet.
In a just-completed “America’s Favorite Park” contest co-sponsored by the National Park Foundation and Coca-Cola, Bear Head easily outpolled every other park in the United States by garnering nearly 1.7 million votes out of 5.7 million cast, far outdistancing the runner-up (Great Smokey Mountain National Park).
How does a park ranked just 11th in the state of Minnesota and visited by only ~100,000 people annually accomplish such a feat?
The answer lies in taking a fortuitous event and figuring out how to give it velocity through the social media world. In this case, the “hook” was a webcam that had been set up in the park by the Ely-based North American Bear Center to record the birth of a bear cub named Hope.
Hope and her mother Lily were given their own Facebook page and had attracted more than 112,000 fans, while another ~90,000 people followed the bears on the North American Bear Center’s own web site.
So when the Coca-Cola contest came along, the web site administrators went into action, asking the bears’ friends and supporters to vote for the local park as home to the research bears. They emphasized that people could vote as often as they wanted, which resulted in some friends placing dozens or even hundreds of votes for the park.
The objective wasn’t just to gain fame as America’s “favorite park.” The contest also included a $100,000 prize for the winning park. That was the big incentive in the case of Bear Head Lake, which as a small state park has an annual working budget of only ~$226,000.
Reportedly, the prize winnings will go toward building a three-season trail center, a project that has been on the drawing boards for years but never begun due to lack of state funding. “At a time when many parks are facing difficult financial and budget decisions and reducing services … this is quite an opportunity for us,” noted Jan Westlund, the park’s manager.
Lynn Rogers, a researcher at the North American Bear Center, summed up the success of the initiative this way: “None of this would have happened without our 200,000 fans.”
This one example of social media success tells us an awful lot about how to harness the power and “viral velocity” of social media as a tactic.
The key is to consider each event or opportunity that comes along and then envision what could happen if social media tactics are applied. By contrast, starting out with social media is approaching it backwards … and more than likely, mediocre results will be the result.
Reports from Japan are that facial-recognition technology is now being incorporated into mall signage wherein the age and gender of passersby are discerned before displaying “demographic appropriate” advertisements to them as they walk by.
NEC, a multinational electronics firm, is experimenting with biometric technology. the ability to scan faces to detect gender and age within a range of 10 years. Not only is the technology being tested in mall signage, but also in vending machinery where “helpful suggestions” will be made to consumers based on their presumed age and gender.
And of course, Japan today means the U.S. tomorrow. In fact, other companies are already testing “gender-aware” technology for outdoor billboards and mall signage here in the United States. Intel has partnered with Microsoft in such an endeavor to design the Intel Intelligent Digital Signage Concept.
Joe Jensen, a manager at Intel’s Embedded Computing Division, sums it up like this: “As stores seek more competitive advantages over online retailers, digital signage has become a valuable technology for dispersing targeted and interactive content to shoppers.”
If gender-aware technology proves to be effective, does this mean that gin & tonics will be now offered to older consumers? At the end of a long day at the office, that could be a tantalizing option for businesspeople hitting Grand Central Station to catch the Long Island Railway home.
Or consider this picture: Legions of “Divine” impersonators(see above) descending upon malls or food kiosks, just to test how well the signage and vending machines can determine true age and gender!
Kidding aside, it’s really no surprise that digital technology with its ability to serve highly targeted, relevant content would eventually work its way into billboards and signage, historically the most “mass” of mass communications. Marketers crave statistical results, and they’re naturally going to gravitate to anything that provides those metrics – no matter how imprecise they might be.
One of the reasons e-mail marketing has become so huge is because it’s so darned cheap. Compared to postal mail, e-mail costs just pennies. That means most marketers can achieve a better ROI for just a mediocre e-mail campaign compared to even the most successful direct mail effort.
However, a common complaint about e-mail versus postal mail is visibility. Since most viewers choose not to have their preview pane feature turned on, they must physically open an e-mail before they can view any of its contents.
This “one-step removed” dynamic means that many people never get to see and read a marketing message that would otherwise stand out if it showed up in someone’s postal mail delivery as a postcard or self-mailer promo piece.
In this scenario, the e-mail subject line becomes a huge “gatekeeper” element. What the subject says and how it’s said can make a difference in e-mail open and clickthrough rates. But just how much?
A new E-mail Marketing Metrics Report from MailerMailer, a firm providing e-mail marketing and newsletter services, provides some interesting clues. MailerMailer has been producing these reports since 2003. This report, the tenth one issued, was developed by analyzing a sampling of ~900 million e-mail messages sent through MailerMailer throughout the year 2009.
Among the elements tracked were the words used in e-mail subject lines. MailerMailer found that the most popular terms contained in the subject lines were:
Notice how each of these terms conveys a sense of WIIFM (“what’s in it for me?”) and/or a sense of time sensitivity. Interestingly, despite a prevailing concern that using the word “free” in the subject line risks more spam filtering, MailerMailer found that this term was one of the ten most popular terms used in subject lines during 2009.
And what about subject line length? The report found that shorter subject lines (containing less than 35 characters) outperformed longer ones. That’s generally just four or five words along with the corresponding spaces between them.
And the difference MailerMailer observed was significant: E-mails with shorter subject lines experienced an average open rate of ~17.5%, while those with longer subject lines had an open rate of only ~11.5%.
The same differential was found with clickthrough rates. For the e-mails with shorter subject lines the average clickthrough rate was ~2.7% … versus ~1.6% for e-mails with longer subject lines.
The MailerMailer report concludes that while composing shorter subject lines may be difficult to do (well), going through that exercise is well worth the extra effort. The results from ~900 million e-mails prove it.
In my 20+ years in industrial, commercial and other non-consumer marketing communications, I’ve witnessed more than a few “big trends” affecting the nature of the selling process in the business realm.
One of the biggest of these is the approach that customers take when evaluating products and services they might be interested in purchasing. Recent research findings about these behaviors has been published that sheds more interesting light on where things are at the moment.
A survey of ~300 B-to-B managers was conducted in late 2009 by e-Research for Marketing (E-RM) for Colman Brohan Davis, a Chicago-based marketing organization. This survey, which was limited to respondents age 35 or younger, found that only a few of the 13 tools used to research products and services represented “traditional media” – print-based resources, trade shows, or consulting with industry colleagues by phone or in person.
Furthermore, the study found that even these four tactics are losing their importance compared to the use of online social networks, which were exploding in usage.
These survey results reminded me of a comment made by Adam Needles, director of B-to-B field marketing at Silverpop, an e-mail marketing company based in Atlanta. “Somewhere around age 30 to 35, you can draw a line in the sand between people who are used to calling around to get everything and [where it’s been] all about relationships face-to-face.”
In contrast, Needles has this to say about younger staffers who conduct a great deal of the buying cycle online: “You have people whose expectation is that companies should put everything on their web sites; they should be getting real-time feeds and information, and companies should be totally integrated into … the blogosphere.”
Younger staffers tend to be influencers more than decision-makers. But this is not to diminish their importance, as they are the ones charged with conducting the research and drafting investigative report summaries and preliminary recommendations. Ferreting out information through resources like webinars and social platforms such as Twitter and blog posts, while it may seem exotic and less consequential to older colleagues, is not at all foreign to these staffers.
And we shouldn’t forget that today’s “influencer” at a company is very likely tomorrow’s “decision-maker.”
Which gets us back to the ER-M study. One big takeaway from that research was that customers are looking into all the corners of offine and online communications to find the information they feel they need to make risk-averse and “CYA” decisions that are also the successful ones that pay off well – hence building their reputations inside their company.
Tactics like direct mail marketing may seem old-hat or even quaint, but they can still be quite effective, while e-mail marketing, while fast and cheap, elicits resistance from some because they feel inundated with marketing materials that are irrelevant to their needs.
I guess it’s yet more challenging news for already-fractured marketing communications program tactics that continue to be under tight budget constraints.
Nones Notes 