Now that we’re wrapping up 2009, we can see the full scope of the damage. MediaFinder has tallied up more than 370 magazine titles that have folded over the course of the year. And the number is closer to 450 if you also include magazines that ceased to publish in print form and went to an all-digital format.
Interestingly, magazine closure stats for 2009 were actually a bit lower than in 2008 and 2007. But this year saw the demise of some pretty important titles. Among the more noteworthy casualties were:
Country Home
Editor & Publisher
Gourmet Magazine
Hallmark Magazine
Modern Bride
Nickelodeon
Portfolio
Teen
The Advocate
Vibe
As we move into 2010, will these trends continue, or will magazine closures level off? It’s too soon to say, but some prognosticators are forecasting a slight uptick in print magazine advertising revenues, so perhaps the worst is behind us.
But coming off of a disastrous 18-month period when print advertising revenues have tanked 25%, 30% or more, it’s hard to see how some magazines can continue to survive at the new, depressed revenue levels which will likely be a fact of life going forward.
And what about newspapers? For them, 2009 was even more depressing, with a record number of bankruptcies filed including the companies that own the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Sun-Times, Minneapolis Star/Tribune and a number of other iconic newspaper brands. At the end of the year, though, some firms had managed to resolve their bankruptcy proceedings thanks to cash infusions, labor concessions, or selling out to new owners.
It took three or four decades, but the PBS network has finally signed up for full Nielsen demographic ratings for its TV programs. Now, for the first time, marketers will be able to access and review full demo data on who’s watching what on the Public Broadcasting System – information that has been crucial in making decisions on where best to promote products on broadcast TV.
And it’s about time. For far too long, advertisers could rely only on educated guesswork to weigh the effectiveness of promoting their products and services on PBS’s leading programming fare.
Of course, PBS doesn’t present advertising the same way as do other networks, because it’s ostensibly commercial-free programming. But even though PBS is a commercial-free broadcasting service, in recent years it has offered sponsorship deals with major advertisers in the form of comprehensive messaging that is broadcast before and after the shows air.
Indeed, veteran watchers of PBS programming have noticed more extensive promo messages that have gotten awfully close to out-and-out commercials – even though they aren’t ads in the “traditional” sense.
And up until now, PBS has not officially released any extensive form of demographic data, making promotional efforts more of “crap shoot” for advertisers than anything else.
But now PBS has signed up with Nielsen for full demos. The new rating service began on PBS with the Ken Burns series on national parks earlier in the year. According to Nielsen, that documentary scored an overall household average audience rating of 3.5, with an average of 5.5 million viewers tuned in per episode. And the internals provided some interesting clues as to the age, income and educational characteristics of viewers — older, more affluent, and better educated.
Which programs are on tap for Nielsen demo ratings going forward? PBS staples, of course – Masterpiece Theater, Antiques Roadshow, NOVA, Nature and Frontline. They’ll all have weekly demographic rating information, along with several of PBS’s famed kids programs including Sesame Street and Sid The Science Kid.
What’s a little ironic about the latest news is that, after all these years, PBS has finally gotten on the Nielsen bandwagon … just at a time when when broadcast TV audience stats are mattering less and less. The ever-growing non-TV alternatives provided by the Internet have seen to that. And coupled with that, the overall audience for PBS programming has been shrinking.
Four-year-old Otto von Habsburg, flanked by his parents, at the time of his father’s coronation as Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary (1916).
This past month, Otto von Habsburg celebrated his 97th birthday. As the eldest son of the last emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he is a link with history – the heir apparent to one of Europe’s most powerful dynasties that ruled Central Europe for more than 650 years.
Otto’s life was borne amid conflict. He was just a small boy of four when his father Karl ascended the throne of Europe’s third largest country, right in the middle of the First World War – a conflict which was to bring about the collapse of the monarchy in 1918. Emperor Karl died just a few short years later, making Otto the titular head of the impoverished family, which was forced to live “on the run” in Switzerland and Spain.
Throughout his years of schooling, Otto was tutored in the fiendishly difficult Hungarian language. This was deemed important because Otto’s father had never relinquished his claim to the throne of Hungary — and because Hungary was still technically a monarchy, ruled as regent by Admiral Miklós Horthy, once supreme commander of the Austro-Hungarian navy.
But soon thereafter came the destruction of Second World War and the spread of communism throughout most of the lands of the old empire. At this point, it seemed almost inevitable that Otto would be destined to become “just another” ex-royal personage, whiling away his days in carefree locations like Monte-Carlo, St. Tropez or the Aegean Isles.
But here is where Otto played his hand differently – and in the process became an important player on the international stage and an advocate for a new European political order. Renouncing any claims to the throne, he became instead an indefatigable champion of European unity. An ardent anticommunist, Otto believed the key to Europe’s future was to strive for common interests and common ground. He stood for election to the European Parliament and was an early member of that body, eventually serving for 20 years.
He also became an important historian and lecturer, traveling the world and speaking with audiences everywhere. I remember hearing Otto von Habsburg give a speech at St. Catherine’s College in St. Paul, MN in 1972, when I was a student in high school. The predictions Otto made in that speech were uncanny in their accuracy. He forecast almost to the exact year the fall of communism (1990), and he also warned about Europe’s smoldering powder-keg (the breakup of Yugoslavia into squabbling mini-states).
And when the Iron Curtain finally did come down in the early 1990s, Otto offered up his services to the new post-communist governments in the land of his forefathers. Subsequently, he played a significant role as a kind of unofficial cultural and social ambassador for several countries, most notably Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary. The prestige of the Habsburg name and its ties to a proud history provided added “cachet” to the early efforts of the post-communist governments to establish meaningful economic and business ties with the West. (Otto’s fluency in the Hungarian language, thanks to all the many hours of tutoring when he was a boy, turned out to be quite handy in a wholly unexpected yet very welcome way.)
Today, at age 97, Otto von Habsburg is still very much with us. He has slowed down a bit, but still shuttles regularly between his home in Bavaria and “his” cities of Budapest, Vienna and Zagreb. From the vantage point of history – where we can now see how the “brave new world” of the 20th Century brought forth more than its share of human misery along with all of the political innovation – the virtues of the “old order” have become easier to recognize.
Certainly, that is the case in the lands of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Otto, “the man who would be king,” has not only been declared an official citizen of several countries, but is also respected by people all across the political spectrum. In the end, not a bad legacy at all.
So here’s a hearty toast to Otto von Habsburg: 97 years young and a true citizen of the world.
What are the attitudes of young Americans toward pursuing manufacturing as a career? A recent field research project gives us some clues – and the results don’t paint a very pretty picture.
The national survey was sponsored by the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association, International and was administered to ~500 teenage respondents. The poll found that a majority of teenagers (~52%) have little or no interest in a manufacturing career and another 21% are ambivalent, leaving only around one quarter showing any interest at all in considering manufacturing as a career path.
When asked why a career in manufacturing is not attractive to them, the top four reasons cited by respondents were:
Prefer to have a professional career: 61%
Prefer a job with better pay: 17%
Wish to have better career growth than manufacturing would provide: 15%
Don’t want to do the physical work: 14%
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by these results, because manufacturing has never had quite the cachet of a professional career. But with the number of people graduating from college these days with no meaningful job prospects, it’s a bit ironic that teens still consider the traditional college degree/professional career launch pad as the better way to go.
Indeed, there are a good many misconceptions about “dirty” manufacturing work activities that are completely at odds with the reality. In fact, many manufacturing personnel work with the most advanced, sophisticated equipment and systems that require the kind of high-tech computer skills young people love to apply! And advanced technologies like robotics are to be found in manufacturing more than in any other industry.
Here are several other sobering findings from the FMAI survey:
Six in ten teens have never toured a factory – or even stepped inside any kind of manufacturing facility – in their life.
Only about one-quarter of teens have ever enrolled in an industrial arts or shop class.
~85% of teens spend two hours or less in any given week “working with their hands” on projects such as models or woodworking (30% spend no time at all on such pursuits during the week).
Here’s a thought: Could kids’ ambivalence about manufacturing be influenced by what’s perceived as “cool” in the career world?
TV programs, when they deal with the working world at all, aggrandize the careers of lawyers, doctors and law enforcement officers … or big business tycoons à la Donald Trump. Many school administrators tend to focus on only one “honorable” education trajectory for students – the traditional university degree.
Certainly in today’s economy, manufacturing jobs are being hammered just as much as employment is in many other industries. But despite the current situation, I think it’s possible more parents would support the idea of their children pursuing a manufacturing career – or a career in trades like welding or electrical – if the pursuit these types of careers received a little more moral support from the wider society.
What’s happening with clickthrough behaviors on online ads these days? According to comScore, Inc., a digital market intelligence and measurement firm, activity today versus 2007 reveals that ~50% fewer people are clicking on Internet ads now compared to then. In fact, fewer than 10% of all Internet users accounts for ~85% of all ad clicks.
This may call to mind the old adage: “When a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound … and does anybody know?”
On the other hand, it’s good to remember that banner advertising can have branding value. In fact, comScore research also shows that one in five users who click on an ad go on to conduct a search about the advertiser … and one in three visit the brand’s own web site.
Unfortunately, determining just how effective online advertising is can be a challenge to measure – reflective to some degree of the “bad old days” of print advertising. One reason for the difficulty is because of evolving consumer behaviors regarding “cookies.” When consumers delete tracking cookies from their computer, they’re counted as a “new customer” when returning to the site. Interestingly, comScore’s latest data find that nearly one-third of web users delete cookies – many as often as five times per month. And with the steady stream of news items warning of “Big Brother”-type information harvesting, it’s hardly a surprise that cookie deletion has grown by ~20% since 2007.
What’s the implication? Not accounting for cookie deletion can lead to an overstatement of unique visitors, reach and frequency – by about 2.5 times. (Relying on IP addresses doesn’t solve the issue either, because the typical computer in the U.S. has a multiple number of IP addresses.)
Of course, these hurdles don’t mean that an attempt to measure the effectiveness of online advertising is an exercise in futility. Just as in print advertising, there are clues marketers can hone in on that point to whether an online advertising campaign is a success. And prudent companies will discount web traffic statistics by a certain degree in order to paint a more realistic picture … not to mention incorporating conversion tracking triggered by specific actions on the web site such as a purchase, a customer query, or registering to download an informational document.
Just when you thought there were no new breakthroughs to be had in search marketing … along comes Google Goggles. It’s a new “visual search” application focusing on computer vision for mobile phones, currently in development and testing at Google Labs. An early version has already been unveiled by the Goggles product development team and been released to Android mobile users.
What does Google Goggles do? It allows anyone to search on a cell phone simply by snapping a picture of an object. Once the picture has been taken, it is “read” by Google’s cloud, algorithms search for the information, the matches are ranked and detailed search results appear on your phone – just as if you had typed in a search command.
Because this is far easier to show than to explain, Google has issued a short video clip that features several members of the development team demonstrating how Goggles works. Currently, the app works well with inanimate objects such as DVDs, books, and physical landmarks. You can even point your phone to a store building while using the geo-targeting feature, and search results pertaining to the store and its merchandise will appear on your phone.
What doesn’t work so well are items like food, plants, animals and people … yet. Give it a few more years, and no doubt the brains at Google will have figured out those challenges as well.
While at present Goggles is available only to Android phone users, it is Google’s intention to develop and offer the program to other popular mobile platforms. So iPhone and BlackBerry users needn’t worry.
Incidentally, Goggles isn’t the only new development in search that’s happening right now. Google is also working on creating real-time translation in multiple languages by speaking a query into a search engine app. (The audio is translated into a digital request before being processed and returning results.) And developers at Ball State University are working on devices that can “read” search commands simply by the flick of a finger or by waving in front of the screen.
What’s next? Search results appearing after someone merely thinks about making a query?
A few months ago, I blogged about “Wikipedians” – the hordes of people around the world who write and edit for the online encyclopedia sensation. In the “free information” world of the Internet, in just a few short years Wikipedia has effectively knocked the more traditional encyclopedias like World Book and Britannica off of their perch as the denizens and purveyors of broad knowledge.
With its self-described goal to be “the sum of all human knowledge,” Wikipedia has become the world’s fifth most popular web site, attracting more than 325 million visits per month – a 20% increase in traffic from a year ago. All this success, even as there have been well-publicized incidences of “rogue” information incorporated into Wikipedia article entries, either through honest error or deliberate insertions of false material; the report on Ted Kennedy’s Wikipedia entry of the senator’s death months before its actual occurrence is but one recent example.
Indeed, among the strengths of Wikipedia’s information model has been the idea of crowd-sourcing, with its legions of editors who have kept an eagle eye on Wikipedia entries to police them and aggressively remove incorrect, non-cited or otherwise suspect information.
But just last week, The Wall Street Journal published a front-page story reporting that Wikipedia is losing its volunteer force at a much steeper rate than ever before. Writers and editors have been departing Wikipedia faster than new ones joining – and the net decline has become particularly pronounced in 2009, to the tune of a net loss ~25,000 editor volunteers every month.
What’s causing this? A few reasons that have been suggested are:
As Wikipedia has grown, the number of topics not yet covered has diminished, making for fewer opportunities for new writers and editors to come on board with entries or to improve on existing articles.
Well-publicized problems with the veracity of some articles have caused Wikipedia to tighten its editorial and submission guidelines. The not-for-profit Wikipedia Foundation has adopted a plethora of rules (spelled out over dozens of web pages) that make it much harder for editors who are less familiar with the software to successfully post new stories – causing some articles to be removed within mere hours of being posted. It’s no secret that the burnout rate for writers is going to be higher when they have to continually debate and defend the content and format of their articles.
A reduction in the “passion” factor – Wikipedians are a bit of a different breed, driven as much by altruism as a generous dose of ego (“I’m better than the rest of you”) when it comes to information knowledge. They’ve even created their own special social world, with the Wikipedia Foundation hosting annual get-togethers of volunteers in such exotic locales as Buenos Aires where they can collectively bask in the aura of their shared “specialness.” But, people being people, over time the thrill abates except for the most passionate contributors.
The downturn in the economy probably doesn’t help, either. More free time might be available to devote to Wikipedia for those newly out of work … but in such times, more attention and effort is understandably going to be placed elsewhere.
Recognizing the need to reverse recent trends, the Wikipedia Foundation is working on creating streamlined instructions to help novice editors contribute articles that adhere to the proper submission guidelines more successfully. It is also working to actively recruit writers and editors from the scientific community, a historically soft spot in terms of Wikipedia’s information coverage.
Whether these steps will be enough to make a difference is an open question. Encouraging more volunteers from the world of science for what is essentially a volunteer mission with little or no peer recognition has been (and likely will continue to be) a tall order. And the jury is still out on the potential effectiveness of the new streamlined submission guidelines, because they haven’t been put into practice yet.
Still, there’s no denying that Wikipedia has had a major impact on the way people research information … and it has accomplished this over the span of only a few short years.
What’s happening in the world of direct marketing these days, and where is the best ROI to be found?
Certainly, a lot of inboxes are positively groaning under the sheer quantity of e-mail volume, and many people have responded by beefing up their spam filtering. But the most recent economic impact study conducted by research firm Global Insight for the Direct Marketing Association reports that commercial e-mail marketing delivers the best bang for the promotional buck – more than $43 for every dollar spent on it.
By comparison, ROI from Google AdWords and other paid search advertising activities generates about $22 for every dollar spent.
According to the analysis, postal direct mail initiatives deliver lower returns on investment — with catalogs returning just a little over $7 per dollar spent and other forms of postal direct mail around $15.
Depite its stellar ROI numbers, it is true that e-mail marketing is actually showing a slight drop in ROI. And that is forecast to continue to decline in the upcoming years, at least partially because of the reasons noted above. Even so, e-mail is forecast to deliver an ROI of ~$38 for every dollar invested in 2013.
Of course, it’s important to recognize that search marketing is where much of the heavy action is these days. Internet search drives ~$244 billion in sales as compared against a related cost of ~$11 billion.
Commercial e-mail? It drives just ~$26 billion in sales … although the cost to drive those sales is a relative pittance at ~$600 million.
And over on the postal side of the ledger, no one should be surprised to learn that direct mail expenditures, while still large at ~$44 billion, are down ~16% in just the past year alone.
[But you can look on the bright side: Your promo piece is going to be noticed a lot easier among the smaller stack of daily snail mail that’s being delivered!]
The first toll-free phone lines, called WATS lines (for Wide Area Telephone Service), were introduced in the United States nearly 50 years ago. For years thereafter, all toll-free numbers used the prefix “800,” so that many consumers came to refer to toll-free lines as “800 numbers.” And they were very popular with consumers because of the then-relatively high cost of long-distance calling.
But just as the rise of cell phone popularity caused a proliferation of new area codes, the growing popularity of toll-free phone numbers meant a dwindling supply of lines within the “800” prefix. Hence, the introduction of “888,” “877” and “866” toll-free prefixes have been made over the past 13 years to expand the supply of available lines.
But old habits die hard. Even today, many consumers reflexively refer to all toll-free lines as “800 numbers.” And indeed, a study conducted earlier this year by Engine Ready, a California-based search marketing software and service firm, finds that “800” lines actually outperform the other prefixes when it comes to phone conversions.
For the study, Engine Ready sampled ~18,000 visits to a single lead-generation web site. The visits were driven by a Google AdWords search engine marketing campaign, producing ~2,600 call-in and online conversions. Visits were split evenly among four web landing pages that were identical save for the call-in response action that contained distinct phone numbers featuring the four different toll-free prefixes.
While little difference was observed between the four prefixes in online conversion behavior (form fills), the “800” prefix clearly performed best of the four toll-free lines for call-in responses. Its conversion performance ranged from 20% to 60% better than the three other phone lines — that despite the fact that there was no practical difference at all between the phone numbers except for the different prefixes.
Moral of the story: Even in today’s “the only thing that’s constant is change” environment, sticking with the “tried-and-true” when it’s possible to do so can be a pretty smart move. And if it’s inbound telephone sales you’re doing, make sure you insist on getting one of those old-fashioned “800 numbers.”
The latest financial results for the U.S. Postal Service are in, and they’re a continuation of the same old story line: Tons of red ink and fingers pointing in every direction.
The USPS posted a net loss of $3.9 billion for FY 2009, “only” $1.1 billion worse than the previous year. And that’s even after receiving a $4 billion deferment on paying an annual $5.4 million obligation to pre-fund healthcare premiums for its retirees.
Not surprisingly, total postal revenues were down about 10% to ~$68 billion, not only because of the economic downturn but also because of the continuing shift to digital communications. Total physical mail volume declined ~13% to around 177 billion pieces.
Given the sorry financial stats, one would assume that the USPS would be moving forward in all haste with its plans to shutter as many as 10% of its post offices and branches around the country.
But if you thought that … you would be wrong. What started out as a potential closure listing of ~3,200 stations (the impressively named Station & Branch Optimization Initiative) quickly became ~700 stations and branches that were actually slated to close. Then that figure was trimmed to just over 400. And now we have word that the closure figure is down to ~370.
Given more time, the number of closures may well slip even further … and at some point the whole exercise becomes completely meaningless as cost-cutting endeavor.
And then there are the persistent rumors that mail delivery will be cut back to five days from six. But that never seems to be anything more than just an idle threat.
Welcome to the wonderful world of government agencies: Stultifying bureaucratic procedures that are near-Byzantine in their complexity, coupled with reacting to every conceivable interest group while being too timid to make any hard choices at all when it comes to managing their operations like any business in private industry must do.
Nones Notes 