Tag Archives: Advertising and Marketing

December 8, 2015 · 11:22 am

Another Nail

Those of us who were fortunate to work in TV used to have a pretty good business, way back when.  You’d find a peach basket, open the window, and watch the basket fill up with money.  OK, it was a little harder than that, but TV has always been a business that grows exponentially in good times and shrinks only a little in bad times.  Growth was as reliable as the US Dollar.  So when I read the piece I’m about to show you, a quote from “The In-Laws” (one of my all-time favorite movies) jumps to mind: 

What do you think will happen when they run off this dough… and there’s trillions of extra dollars, francs, and marks floating around? You’ve got a collapse of confidence in the currency. People are gonna panic. There’s gonna be gold riots, atonal music… political chaos, mass suicide. Right? It’s Germany before Hitler. You can see that. Jesus, I don’t know what people are gonna do… when a six-pack of Budweisers costs $1,200. That’ll be awful.

In other words, when the basic currency of a business has changed substantially, chaos ensues.  It’s my belief that we’ve reached that point in media, as this report states:

For the first time outside of a recession, linear TV ad spend has stopped growing, according to global ad revenue updates by MAGNA Global and ZenithOptimedia, both released Monday. While national TV ad sales grew .3% to $42 billion in 2015, MAGNA predicted it will decrease by .3% in 2016. ZenithOptimedia’s Advertising Expenditures Forecast also found TV’s share of global ad spend will decrease from 38% in 2015 to 34.8% in 2018.

The basic currency – the TV CPM which is tied to the TV rating point – has lost its stability.  There are trillions (OK, billions, anyway) of extra GRPs available.  Pricing pressure has always been downward, but now there are options available that seem to be making that stick. I think we’re in a brief period where live events will hold pricing stable, but when only about a quarter of viewers are watching TV “live”, how long can that last?

This was the most ominous sentence in the piece: A shift in viewer attention and changing advertiser investments may therefore contribute to a decrease in both supply and demand for linear TV impressions.  The shift has happened.  The pretty good business is rethinking itself.  There will be political money and Olympics revenue in 2016 to serve as a band-aid as it does so.  But by 2017, the times could be, in the words of the Chinese curse, interesting.

Thoughts?

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December 2, 2015 · 11:43 am

The Checklist

Do you make lists?  I do, and as a manager I used to insist that there be protocols – checklists – for most of the departmental activities.  I always found them to be an excellent was to assure a repeatable, high-quality product.  They also make it relatively easy to work new hires into a routine with minimal disruption.  Checklists have a big problem, however, and that’s our topic today.

The problem is tunnel vision.  Think of a pilot landing a plane.  Every pilot, no matter how many hundreds of hours of flying they have, uses checklists as they go through landing.  It prevents little problems like forgetting to put the landing gear down.  The thing that they do as well, which is not on the checklist, is to look out the window as they near the ground.

Now think of the marketing team that is going through its protocol.  Part of it may be to work on the brand’s social media. In many cases, the brand continues to schedule a post every 3 hours on one platform, and every 2 hours on another.  They’ll drop posts into a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite, feeling good that they’ve checked something off the list.  The problem is that they don’t look out the window.  They’re not paying attention to what is actually happening on their social presence.  Comments go unanswered.  Spam comments aren’t deleted.  There is no engagement.  Social media?  It doesn’t sound so social to me.

More importantly, I’m always surprised that the nature of many brands’ posts continues to be “Me! Me! Me!”.  That sort of antisocial, broadcast thinking has been dead for some time now and yet, zombie-like, it walks the social media earth.  What we need to be doing is measuring how often our social fans are engaging via likes, comments, and amplification (how often they share), and we need to ascertain the nature of those interactions (spam comments don’t count).

The checklist is a valuable thing.  A checklist that is enhanced by looking at the world beyond the things on the list is more valuable.  A staff trained to use the checklist as a guide of the minimum requirements, and that is encouraged (strongly) to enhance those minimums with their best work is invaluable.  Which do you have?

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December 1, 2015 · 12:22 pm

Unlimited Thinking

I’m not a fan of limited thinking. I much prefer the intellectual exercise of accepting the challenge of a difficult supposition and then figuring out a way to expand the set of answers. I often think of President Kennedy‘s challenge to put a man on the moon in 10 years when manned spaceflight had not really happened yet. Had everyone just said “no way” rather than “ok, so IF we were going to do that, how would we?”, we’d never have made it (nor had great films like Apollo 13!).

The Thinking Man sculpture at Musée Rodin in Paris

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thought of that this morning when I read the quote below. It’s from a piece about the need for advertising to support content and a rant on how ad blockers are killing off content:

And so it really is a simple math problem. If there isn’t any money to pay the people who create content or buy and maintain the servers that host that content, there will not be any content. No one’s really coming at the story from that angle. And those who have lived almost their entire lives consuming content for free might need a good slap upside the head. In fact, everyone could use that slap. Because there are only two choices: ad-supported content or subscription-based content. And we all know most will take free if they can get it.

So there is our difficult challenge.  I disagree that there are only two choices, however.  I’ve also come to realize that it’s really only a problem for a select group of content providers.  First, the “two choice” thinking.  What about a freemium model?  Some very large publishers have successfully adopted it, and if the quality of what you produce is there, people will want more and pay.  What about a donation model?  PBS has used it successfully for years.  So does Wikipedia.  I know of several digital entities – podcasts and otherwise – that use Patreon to fund their content production.  It’s possible to use the appeal of great content to support an affiliate sales model too – buying products from links on a review site, for example.  Frankly, it’s not hard to argue that the ad-supported model is one of the worst options. Besides requiring a large audience to make it work, I think it encourages publishers to grab and abuse consumer data or to inflate page counts (and ad counts) with endless slide shows, etc.  Limited thinking means limited choices.

The realization is this.  Most “publishers” link to a limited set of high-quality content producers.  How many stories that you read, even on big sites, link back to the original work done in the NY Times or Wall St. Journal?  It might be a fun exercise to see how many of the people complaining about no money to support content creation are actually creating content or adding value to someone else’s content. Maybe another business model is a little pass-through of payments to the real content creators from those who are using that work to generate revenue?  There was such thinking back in the early days of the web.  What happened?

As I said upfront, I don’t like limited thinking.  Hopefully today you understand why that is.  Was I clear?

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