Hasta La Creative!

Spike Jones is on the box.

Ninety-two percent of word of mouth happens offline (so says Keller Fay Group). 92%! And that’s not going to change.

Working from that factual place, Spike’s premise is a brand has to have an offline, real world dimension to any community building efforts it undertakes.

Why is it the more I am connected online, the more alone I feel? Because I an missing the one thing that online can help facilitate, but never replace: the magic of a face-to-face encounter. Not webcam to webcam. But looking someone in the eye, shaking their hand and experiencing the presence of other people who share the same interests. And that, my friends, is the difference between yet another online social community and a successful, sustainable movement.

Sing it from the mountaintop, brother!

To me, this fundamental truth is one more reason to shoot interactive out of its silo.

Interactive–where these so-called online communities are curated–needs to be everyone’s job. No, everyone needn’t run out and learn PHP, ASP and Ruby on Rails. But all agency and client personnel need to fully grasp what the web can and can’t do for a brand.

Louis Hau, Media Reporter for Forbes, explores an undervalued resource in the newspaper business–the proper monetization of which could be a big help to a struggling industry.

Here’s one of the most perplexing aspects of the newspaper business: Readers love the sports section, but advertisers couldn’t care less.

As the industry struggles to staunch the bloodletting in advertising revenue, the time has come for a second look. The chronically underperforming sports section stands out as an underexploited opportunity to generate dollars.

The picture isn’t pretty at the moment. A quick survey of some major U.S. dailies finds sports an advertising wasteland, save for the occasional sneaker retailer or tire store. Thursday’s New York Times had no advertising at all in its sports section. Okay, there were a couple microscopic car ads on page two. But still.

I’d love to hear from any media buyers in the audience on this topic. The Forbes piece speculates about an all male audience, and laziness on the papers’ part. But I’m not sure about all that. Obviously sports is monetized to no end on TV and online. Why not in the dailies?

According to Adweek, Chrysler is intorducing a new customer-centric corporate tagline: “If you can dream it, we can build it.”

The campaign addresses topics, such as quality, fuel economy and safety. One print ad asks, “What exactly are the qualities of quality?” and features a lengthy essay on the topic that talks about “putting the customer back in charge.” The new tagline appears at the end.

“[The campaign] is part of Chrysler’s effort to listen to customers more than ever before,” said Deborah Meyer, Chrysler’s CMO. She said the carmaker’s new customer advisory board has already garnered 5,600 online responses from people who are willing to tell Chrysler which designs and features they want to see in future cars.

In a market dominated by women’s lifestyle titles, The Economist, with a circulation of 720,882 and 24% ad revenue growth in 2007, has the No.1 spot on AdweekMedia’s annual “Hot List.”

The Economist earns dual honors this year as publisher Paul Rossi and editor John Micklethwait take home the “Executive Team of the Year” award.

New York magazine earns the accolade “Design Team of the Year”.

People.com is the recipient of AdweekMedia’s first ever “Magazine Web Site of the Year” award. Despite considerable competition from the celeb-centric blogosphere and an array of newer players chasing celebrity triumphs and scandals, People.com is one of the most trafficked magazine generated sites, growing its audience by an eye-popping 48% in 2007 and totaling 6.3 million monthly unique users.

I can’t think of an online ad I like. Can you? Online content, sure. Brand supported online content even. But an ad? No. Generally speaking, online advertising is some weak shit. A fact which makes it all the harder to accept that valuable print vehicles are struggling to stay afloat because their lifeblood–print advertising–is migrating online.

Case in point: No Depression, one of the nation’s best music mags is going to stop putting out a print edition. This is a crime against music-loving humanity.

Here’s what’s happening:

The simple answer is that advertising revenue in this issue is 64% of what it was for our March- April issue just two years ago. We expect that number to continue to decline.

The longer answer involves not simply the well-documented and industrywide reduction in print advertising, but the precipitous fall of the music industry. As a niche publication, ND is well insulated from reductions in, say, GM’s print advertising budget; our size meant they weren’t going to buy space in our pages, regardless.

On the other hand, because we’re a niche title we are dependent upon advertisers who have a specific reason to reach our audience. That is: record labels. We, like many of our friends and competitors, are dependent upon advertising from the community we serve.

That community is, as they say, in transition. In this evolving downloadable world, what a record label is and does is all up to question. What is irrefutable is that their advertising budgets are drastically reduced, for reasons we well understand. It seems clear at this point that whatever businesses evolve to replace (or transform) record labels will have much less need to advertise in print.

Okay, if labels aren’t going to run print ads in No Depression, then who is? There’s bound to be a solution somewhere. Maybe some generous trustafarians can underwrite the book. Or some generous rock stars. Or maybe a giant corporation who needs to shower itself in cool juice could underwrite the effort. ND is a Seattle operation. Microsoft could step up and run a bunch of double truck Zune ads.

PR man and Ad Age columnist, Steve Rubel, envisions a world where agencies are disintermediated by media companies.

Today nearly every media company (91%) offers some kind of “agency-like” services. This includes former untouchables like idea generation (88%) and creative development (79%).

The image of media companies as lumbering dinosaurs lingering toward extinction in a world of infinite content is downright wrong. They are more in sync with consumers than any other contingency in the marketing ecosystem. Their entire DNA is digital.

…it’s clear that as they get smarter the risk to agencies has never been greater.

According to Ad Age, stand alone Business sections in daily newspapers are dropping like flies. Which sucks, because that’s my favorite section of any newspaper.

The Denver Post — which folded its business section into other sections on every day but Sunday — this month became at least the eighth daily to cut its stand-alone daily business section since early 2007. The Orange County Register made a similar move just a week earlier.

Some others that have cut their standalone sections include the Akron Beacon- Journal; Cincinnati Enquirer; Reno Gazette- Journal; and the Monterey Herald. In most cases, the sections continued to exist in smaller formats, consolidated into other sections.

Those moves would seem to be a boon to publishers of local business journals, who compete aggressively against dailies for breaking news, but publishers of those books say the sections had so little advertising in the first place that there’s not much to be gained by their absence.

The good news is most of the papers still maintain a business section online.

According to The New York Observer, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham speaking to an audience of about 100 graduate students at Columbia journalism school said, “Look, I need you. I’ve got people out there risking their lives right now.”

“It’s an incredible frustration that I’ve got some of the most decent, hard-working, honest, passionate, straight-shooting, non-ideological people who just want to tell the damn truth, and how to get this past this image that we’re just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get, or something, that’s the challenge. And I just don’t know how to do it, so if you’ve got any ideas, tell me.”

Advertisers are reaching a coveted demographic via lifestyle ‘zines with opt-in email newsletters, according to LA Times.

The median household income of Thrillist subscribers, for instance, is $107,000, dwarfing Sports Illustrated’s median of $63,605 and Maxim’s of $65,710.

“Magazines like Stuff and Cargo have been going under, and we’ve been taking their place in the market,” said Ben Lerer, a co-founder of Thrillist, which recently launched a Las Vegas edition. Lerer said its L.A. edition was projected to reach 45,000 recipients by next December, which would be an 86% jump from a year earlier.

The idea behind e-mail list services is simple. They bring order to the chaotic mass of information on the Web and elsewhere, seize on relevant information — or things that the services’ employees decide is relevant — and present it via e-mails to subscribers.

“We appeal to people who like to be on top of things but don’t have the time to do it,” said Gary Foodim, general manager of Very Short List.

Other media companies mentioned in the article with active email subscribers include Daily Candy, Flavorpill, Urban Daddy, Julib and Pocket Change. I’m on the Pocket Change list.

I once interviewed at an ad agency that had a manufacturer of corn syrup on its client roster. And while it didn’t make a difference in me getting the job or not, frankly, I was really turned off by that because I’ve read countless times how the abundance of corn and corn-related products in every step of the food chain has done a number on our health. And I’m a guy who’s done my share of casino marketing.

I’d forgotten all about that agency until I started leafing through The Fattening of America: How the Economy Makes Us Fat, If It Matters, and What to Do About It by Eric A. Finkelstein and Laurie Zuckerman.

I was sure that in this book, advertising and marketing would get the blame for America’s expanding waistlines, but the truth is more complicated than that. The authors examine every aspect of the way we live our lives these days, and how even today’s schools, jobs, and government policies have affected our collective health.

If you’re looking for a good examination of one major topic in our society, read The Fattening of America. There are lessons to be learned that relate to almost any client you have, or even your own lifestyle. And remember that we in advertising play a role in it all: we advertise the food, the grocery stores, the fast-food joints, the medications, the diet plans and the hospital services.

Special thanks to Anna at FSB Associates who provided me a copy for review.