Lifestyle Brands Appeal to Vimeo’s Creative Community

One hundred million Internet users watch online video each day. So, how can a brand possibly be heard and seen above the din?

According to Venture Beat, Vimeo has launched a new marketing product called Brand Creative Fund to connect brands and filmmakers, and provide consulting services to brands on how best to create content for Vimeo loyalists.

The first brand taking part in the Fund is Lincoln Motor Co. The first short film funded by Lincoln will become available next Tuesday, April 30. Each following Tuesday, another short film and behind-the-scenes video will launch. Today, four introductory clips about the short films are available online.

“This is a new ad offering that brings brands into the Vimeo experience,” Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor told VentureBeat. “We’ve always had ads on the site, but we don’t want to do anything disruptive.”

Thankfully, he refrains from calling this initiative Native Advertising.

“We call it Brand Creative Fund because it’s a little different than a media buy in that a brand comes to the table with funding to distribute and create media,” Trainor said.

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Twitter’s Real-Time Data Is Money

Twitter is finding its rhythm, a.k.a. business model.

Teressa Iezzi reports that the Tweet factory just inked a multiyear agreement worth hundreds of millions of dollars with Publicis-owned media giant Starcom MediaVest Group.

What does Starcom want with Twitter? Sweet data, baby!

According to Iezzi the deal has three-parts: a social TV lab; an in-tweet mobile survey; and the ability to leverage Twitter’s API for planning.

The idea is to provide the firm’s clients with “unprecedented real-time data on how consumers are watching (TV), buying and the conversations that amplify brand messages,” says Starcom CEO Laura Desmond.

In other words, Twitter will now do the job that TV and Nielsen can not, by offering marketers real-time analysis of who is watching which programs, and what the temperature of the room is.

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Boston Suspects Caught, Media Still Searching For Clues

Last week’s events in Boston were horrific, and while the criminals are now dead and caught, our nerves are frayed. People are upset and frightened. People want answers and justice.

Naturally, the media — traditional and social — is at the center of this storm. When I did watch CNN last week, it was a train wreck. When I looked at Twitter, the frenzy was palpable and the virtual posse in full force.

Over the weekend, I read several articles about the Boston bombings, gun control and media failures in the wake of important breaking news. I also participated in Facebook threads where emotions mixed uncomfortably with reason.

Unlike this Seattle Times headline writer, I do not agree that we are all journalists now. That’s like saying we are all chefs now (just because the tools exist to make great food).

Journalists go to great lengths to explain things in detail and to provide context and meaning. By this standard, very few journalists were working the story in Boston last week. A talking head on CNN checking his cell phone for updates is crap TV and bad journalism. People Tweeting out every word they hear on the Boston police scanner is not journalism, nor is it smart.

What I saw on Twitter last week was mostly a genuine effort to spread information that would lead to a capture. But the line between doing a good deed and wanting to help, and being a pawn in someone else’s game, is a thin line indeed.

In days gone by, journalists had time to think, to process the events unfolding in front of them. Now, that window is closed. It’s post first and ask questions later in a race to what end?

Mark Little, CEO at Storyful, believes the race to break a story is missing the point today.

Social journalism celebrates the notion of authenticity over speed, collaboration over competition. The news reporter’s primary rival today is not another reporter but the searing intimacy of online testimony and imagery. We must make our peace with that.

‘True Journalism’ has never been so valuable. We still need the Ernie Pyles on the scene, taking their time to find the defining detail. But we also need a new category of reporter, responsible for finding the hidden signal in the noise. We desperately need skilled professionals who can turn isolated units of social content into compelling stories, who can shape the narrative emerging out of the cacophony of conversation flowing through the social web.

“Authenticity over speed, collaboration over competition.” There’s a mantra for a new age.

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Marketers Are Brand Architects And Building Brands Takes More Than Math

Fact: When it comes to marketing spending, analog still outstrips digital by a factor of three to one.

Jake Sorofman, an analyst with Gartner, supplied the cold hard fact above in a Harvard Business Review article.

It’s the kind of fact that my friend Bob Hoffman likes, and likes to use to convince CMOs and other innocents, that digital is a good place to experiment but to move metal or sell cheeseburgers, stick to broadcast.

Oddly, TV isn’t all that easy to measure, whereas digital initiatives are all about measurement. From Sorofman’s article:

…with digital techniques, everything is measurable. Feedback loops tighten, segmentation becomes microtargeting, and optimizations can happen on the fly or even in real time. The relationship between investment and impact becomes correlated and causal — and the CMO becomes accountable down to the dime and moment by moment. Light dawns on the marketing spend! This transparency is powerful when quarters are turning into dollars for the business — but potentially perilous when the opposite is the case.

Knowledge is power. Let’s not deny a core principle. But can we entertain that not everything in advertising or the universe is knowable? Can we allow for magic to happen? Is there a line item for magic? There needs to be, because a brand is so much more than a series of A-B tests, performed ad infinitum. A brand is the grand sum of experiences people have with a company. A brand is customer service, product and look and feel.

Sorofman reflects on imagined days gone by. “Like Mad Men’s Don Draper, the CMO became the master of the soft-shoe performance.”

brandarchitect

I don’t argue that there are charlatans in every line of work, but I do contest that knowing what works is an act of some kind. Knowing where to put a word, where to place a support beam in a house, or where to make an incision during surgery, are all practical skills that also require intuition and a deft touch.

I have no issue with Quants storming the CMO’s office, or my own office for that matter, but let’s keep some perspective and our eyes on the prize. Brand building is a human enterprise, and humans are observed from every angle, yet continue to surprise.

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Like A Zen Master, Tom Asacker Explains The Business of Belief

When we change our actions, we also change our beliefs. And what we believe compels further action. It is a virtuous cycle, and understanding its elemental framework can help you to connect with and motivate people.

“People are drawn across the bridge of belief by their anticipation of a better experience and a better life. Effective leaders ignite people’s imaginations by painting vivid, compelling, and personally relevant pictures—ones that move them.

The business of belief, and how our beliefs inform us and move us to do the things we do, is the topic of my friend Tom Asacker’s aptly named sixth book, The Business of Belief: How the World’s Best Marketers, Designers, Salespeople, Coaches, Fundraisers, Educators, Entrepreneurs and Other Leaders Get Us to Believe.

I read the book yesterday, and Tom and I discussed it today.

Please give the 15-minute audio segment a listen.

Tom’s friend Tom Peters says, “This is a short book. But I hope it takes you, like me, a long time to read it. Every sentence should be savored.”

That is high praise and I agree. There is an economy of language in this book that unfolds like a Zen koan. When you write like this, your ideas are flowers that bloom when the reader waters them with their attention.

Personally, I feel a renewed sense of purpose after reading the book, and the need to adjust or “redesign” some of my actions, which will hopefully create more success for more people. Somehow, Asacker gets me to believe it’s all possible, and even likely, provided I have an action plan to strengthen my own core beliefs.

Previously on AdPulp: How’s Your How?

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Content Overload Warning: Don’t Make Me Read This

Remember a few years ago when Guerilla was a big deal? Then Buzz and Word-of-Mouth were all the rage. Then Social Media. Now, it’s Content’s day in the sun.

Problem is, the sun is a blistering force that withers all memes and movements alike.

Mike Reeder, VP of Account Planning at Possible in Seattle has read, heard and seen enough already. Which is understandable when you see the enormity of the problem.

According to IBM:

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data.

Ergo, Reeder’s request to stop (the presses).

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Glamour Makes Good Use of Google+ Hangouts

I don’t know how they did it, but Glamour magazine has gathered a massive audience on Google+. With 1.5 million readers on this platform, the door is now wide open to sponsored content opportunities.

Glamour Magazine - YouTube

According to Mashable, the fashion title is using the Goggle+ Hangout feature in new ways:

Glamour magazine is launching a month-long series of Hangouts featuring staffers, online personalities — and products. Eight of the nine Hangouts are sponsored by a company, whose products are featured centrally in the content. In a Hangout for Unilever-owned Suave, for example, DIY blogger Erica Domesek will show how to make hair accessories for hair styled by Suave stylists. A L’Oreal-sponsored Hangout with Glamour stylist Annabel Tollman will show viewers how to wear ombré hair, as colored by Loreal’s Féria Wild Ombré product.

Some of the Hangouts will invite viewers to converse; others will be closed sessions, during which users will be asked to comment on social media networks using hashtags.

In other Sponsored Content news, The New York Times unveiled some interesting tidbits about Mashable’s successful use of sponsored posts. For one, Mashable sees its sponsored posts as something other than advertorial.

“These are not advertorials,” said Lance Ulanoff, the editor in chief at Mashable. “I know what an advertorial is. These are pure editorial.”

Semantic argument, or no, the price for a sponsored series on Mashable can run close to six figures. A sponsored series of posts on AdPulp, however, is considerably more affordable. So, I ask you — yes YOU — what topic do you want to “own” and consistently present to AdPulp’s sophisticated MarCom readership?

If you run a search firm, we can run a weekly series on SEO. If you’re a headhunter, we can run a weekly series on job hunting. If you’re an editing house, we can run a series on working with directors and editors. And so on.

Unlike banner ads on the site, a sponsored post on AdPulp.com reaches our 6500 RSS subscribers. Inquire within.

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Hold The Presses: The Gecko Has A Book To Share

Digital content is wonderful in many ways. It’s fast, data-rich and easy to store. But it is not tactile, and that hurts. It hurts because we are people, and we like to hold things.

In fact, JWT studied our longing for content-rich physical objects and found that the more we embrace digital, the more we miss the emotional qualities it has a hard time replicating.

Two-thirds of the respondents in JWT’s new trend report, Embracing Analog: Why Physical Is Hot, said they sometimes feel nostalgic for things from the past, like vinyl records and photo albums, and 61 percent said they have a greater appreciation for things that aren’t used as much as they used to be, like record players and film cameras.

Gecko_Guide_To_Life

79% of respondents noted that they “sometimes miss having some memories in a physical form, like photos, letters or books with inscriptions.”

Next to me on my desk I have the new book, You’re Only Human: A Guide To Life by The Gecko. The book is printed on heavy paper stock with a gloss coat. Which tells my fingers and then my brain that this is not cheap.

Of course, the story found inside these varnished pages has to compel, or it’s just another comercial.

From what I can tell at first glance, the book is whimsical and on brand, after all the text is actually composed by talented Martin Agency copywriters speaking through a lizard.

Here’s a sample bit of common sense advice (pertaining to social media etiquette) dispensed by The Gecko:

On Unfriending.

Well, I’d never unfriend anyone. Except maybe a hawk. Only becuase I think he may have other intentions.

Ultimately, the vast majority of the value is in the story, not the container. Yet, packaging and presentation can, and often do, make a big difference. For instance, a coffee table book of Ansel Adams photos has greater impact in print. And a feature film has much greater impact at a theater than it does on a small home screen.

Previously on AdPulp: The Gecko Lands Book Deal, Readers Eagerly Await His Prose

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MarketMixNW 2013 Offers Up A Valuable Mix Of Marketing Information

There weren’t any Grumpy Cats like at SxSW or half-naked Argentine Creative Directors like at Cannes, but the MarketMix 2013 Conference sponsored by the Puget Sound American Marketing Association did prove worthwhile, at least from this copywriter’s perspective.

The key to these types of conferences is to pick some sessions on topics you don’t know much about. Although many speakers seem to be pimping their own companies or books, others can be really insightful. And this conference, which is geared more towards client-side marketers than creatives, turned out to be more valuable for me than some social media or awards show-related wankfest.

I’ll hit some highlights:

In one session, the partnership of the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center and Seattle ad agency GreenRubino was spotlighted. A major fundraiser was launched with the theme “Be Breakthrough” and highlighting some of the Fred Hutch researchers. Here’s a sample spot:

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center – Jim from GreenRubino on Vimeo.

But the campaign (see one spot below), with its vanity URL and message “When you give to science, science gives back,” wasn’t as successful in raising money and awareness as a subsequent, more direct message featuring local TV personalities and the idea that donating money saves lives. I suppose when the desired response is “give money,” the appeal needs to be more straightforward. It was also quite interesting to see agency and client make a serious pivot mid-way through the year-long campaign, although the agency’s reaction to switching things up wasn’t discussed.

I also saw a great presentation on crowdsourcing from POSSIBLE’s Mike Reeder and local food & travel blogger Jennifer Chiu, who leveraged the audience of her “Roll With Jen” blog by turning to Kickstarter to launch her web TV series:

While the crowdsourcing of ideas and creative work has been discussed at length in the ad business, crowdfunding is an exciting possibility for fledgling brands and entrepreneurs. Mike and Jen brought that notion to life for the attendees. Jen also noted that positioning herself as a “Female Anthony Bourdain” helped boost traffic and donations to her Kickstarter.

Another interesting presentation was from AllRecipes, which has worked its way to become one of the world’s most heavily trafficked sites. They’ve been at it for 16 years, so it didn’t happen overnight. Having a mobile-optimized site is key for them, but they demoed their Video Cookbook app, which highlights recipe directions while we watch the food being prepared.

Clearly, they’ve got a devoted following: According to Allrecipes’ surveys of their users, 50% use the site on a mobile device. And of that 50%, half use it while they’re at the grocery store. While the presenters were a little cagey about trying to partner with advertisers to reach people right at the point of purchase (I’d say they’re not quite there yet), I’m sure some marketers, somewhere, are salivating over the idea of using NFC technology to hit consumers right in the aisles.

Of course, what the conferences do well (if you’re willing to chat with strangers) is allow me to meet folks I’d never meet otherwise, which can also be insightful. I have one good example.

In a casual chat, I met one marketing director for a local Seattle utility. They have 1.7 million customers. So how many of them use Online Bill Pay? Only 20%. I would never have guessed a figure that low. And it’s why she still values ways to reach customers through (gasp) bill stuffers. Try using that statistic the next time someone in your agency says, “no one pays their bills through the mail anymore.”

There were also some presenter shout-outs to Uber, the car-for-hire service that’s caused a splash in many cities. It’s quickly becoming the case study/example du jour of digital marketing disruption among marketing conference speakers. Does this mean fewer people using Zappos as an example? We’ll see.

You can get a sense of all the chatter at the conference by looking at #marketmix on Twitter.

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Can Brands Dance? Sir Martin Says Yes

Music moves people. Live music moves people deeply. The experience lingers for days, weeks, sometimes for years.

Naturally, brand marketers would love to gain some of this attention for their own purposes, and increasingly they’re turning to experiential marketing to deliver. Which is why it is not surprising to learn that WPP has ponied up $10 million for a share of SFX Entertainment, media mogul Robert F.X. Sillerman’s recently revived company (he sold the company to Clear Channel for $4.4 billion in 2000).

In January, SFX Entertainment purchased the North American division of Holland-based ID&T Entertainment, the world’s largest dance music concert promoter.

Here is footage from 2012′s Tommorowland event in Belgium:

SFX also owns nightclubs and music download store, Beatport.

WPP “recognizes the power of dance music to coalesce and address an increasingly difficult-to-reach audience,” Mr. Sillerman said.

Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, compared the move to WPP’s investments in Vice, the Weinstein Company and others.

“Sillerman’s been extremely successful in consolidating fragmented industries which have untapped growth potential that generally have excellent marketing opportunities attached to them,” said Mike Principe, a former SFX attorney who is now CEO of The Legacy Agency. “He goes in, acquires en masse, and enjoys a leading position.”

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“Be Indispensable,” Make Money — Simple As That Says The Oracle of Omaha

Paid content is one of my favorite topics, as our regular reader know. It’s a favorite topic because it’s my life. I get paid to create content (by brands, not newspapers), and I want to help my friends and colleagues get paid for their work too.

That’s one reason I like media companies entering in the marketing services business. Meredith has been in the game for decades, but a lot of newspapers are just now getting up to speed on the idea that they can help local businesses develop strategies and the communications for today’s rapidly shifting mediascape.

Raju Narisetti, vice president and deputy head of strategy for The Wall Street Journal believes, “news companies have to take the lead on reinventing advertising.” I don’t disagree, although I would suggest approaching the problem from all sides.

tulsa

Warren Buffett, for one, is holding down the capital investment side, and the “I love newspapers” cheerleading side of the deal. To flourish in this era, Buffett says, a newspaper “has got to be indispensable to a significant proportion of the community.”

Berkshire-Hathaway recently added Tulsa World to its media holdings, which now includes 28 dailies like The Buffalo News, Omaha World Herald, Richmond Times-Dispatch and Winston-Salem Journal. Berkshire-Hathaway also owns a significant share of The Washington Post.

The Oracle also shared an interesting point of view on paywalls in his recent letter to stockholders. “I’m not interested in the Internet for money. I’m interested in preventing the erosion of print.” He adds, “I could kick myself for not figuring this out earlier.”

Buffett’s point of view is old school, and it’s not shared by a lot of new media experts. What are your thoughts?


My thought is The Oracle of Omaha does not throw money at sinking ships. He also details how newspapers in small- to medium-sized markets can accomplish indispensability. He says a successful newspaper must provide material that is important to its readers and that they can’t find elsewhere. “You can define that better in a smaller city than in a sprawling metro area.”

Buffett is a champion investor the likes of which Wall Street has never seen. And he loves newspapers, not as exceptional advertising vehicles, but as the best and only source of critical, local news, sports, opinion, etc.

Meanwhile, it seems that even the most accomplished freelance journalists struggle to make a paycheck.

Previously on AdPulp: Buffett Buys What He Believes In And Well Understands

Previously on DavidBurn.com: Information Is Not News, And News Is Not A Commodity | Ink Stains May Wash Off, But They Don’t Wear Off

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Clean Is The New Black

Here is some exceptionally good news. According to Digiday, The Banner Industrial Complex Under Threat.

“From a publisher’s standpoint, there really is no choice but to go this way,” said David Payne, Gannett’s chief digital officer, of the move away from the banner. “I think we’ve all proven over the last 12 years that the strategy we’ve been following — to create a lot of inventory and then sell it at 95 percent off to these middlemen every day — is not a long term strategy.”

USA TODAY_ Latest World and US News - USATODAY.com-2

Digiday points out that the newly redesigned USA Today dramatically reduced its inventory volume. Instead of fitting as many ads as possible around an article, it decided to place a single ad unit next to each of the site’s articles and package the content and ad together in a pop-out lightbox. Naturally, this makes the ad more visible to readers and thus more valuable to both the marketer and media company.

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Eyeballs Yes, But Publishers Need The Rest of You Too

In the old days, editors assigned stories to reporters, then made suggestions for improvement as the copy came in. Today, it’s a bit more complicated. Today, an editor needs to have the capacity to run the presses.

Paul Smalera, tech editor at Reuters, warns on Medium that editors need to know some code and possess a working knowledge of design, or risk forfeiting maximum exposure for their stories.

…Readers are being trained to expect simple yet elegant complexity in their online experiences. Woe to the media company that is not scrambling to deliver both.

Smalera points to a few examples, including “Snowfall,” a brilliantly executed multimedia story from The New York Times.

eyeballs

I’m also fascinated by this additional bit of insight from Smalera: “Cultivating reader relationships on an editorial level can unlock all sorts of value, understanding, and yes, even revenue. But only an editor who understands how to demand that data, from a team willing to provide it, will ever get it. Then she has to figure out how to use it.”

As editor and partner in this micro media property, I’d love to “unlock all sorts of value” right here, right now. Speaking of that, I listened to an interesting audiocast last night where USA Today Columnist Steve Strauss interviews Brian Clark, the CEO and Founder of Copyblogger Media.

“You have to demonstrate that you’re valuable enough to pay attention to,” Clark advises. Of course you do. But being interesting, and consistently providing interesting content is no guarantee of a pay day. To get paid, you have to sell something people are buying. You might be super interesting in a topic that doesn’t monetize.


AdPulp has always made “some money” from advertising and sponsored content, but I’ve never been an A-list blogger and I’ve never seen the cash windfalls that can come from it. Clark mentions on Strauss’ show that his 20-person company now brings in $5 mil a year in revenue. I’m as impressed as anyone that a great business can spring from a blog’s fertile soils. Just know the type of success that Clark, Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott and others have found is the exception, not the rule. To make it big online or off, you also need talent, timing, luck, connections and the drive to work and never give up, plus several other intangibles.

While Shawn and I haven’t yet found the money-tree in the digital forest that we keep hearing about, unlike Sasquatch, it is there to be found. Sometimes, we say to ourselves it’s the topic — Advertising — that’s the problem, but I’m resistant to this because Advertising is huge, and we provide a valuable service to the practitioners, students of and professors of Advertising, plus many others with an interest in the business and ads.

As long as you’re here, there is market value here. I’m convinced AdPulp can get bigger, do more, and serve you in new and exciting ways, but first I have to get busy and become an editor who “understands data and cultivates reader relationships.” Doesn’t sound too difficult. But please, send me any advice you might have.

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Can Journalism As A Civic Good And Native Advertising Live Side-by-Side?

Do you recognize a so-called native ad when you see one? It’s not as easy it sounds. Back in the day we used to plaster an ADVERTORIAL sign on top of any editorial that was supplied by a marketer. But marketers today want their ads, excuse me, their content, to blend in and fit seamlessly with the rest of the media product.

11 Things You Didn_t Know About PlayStation

Buzzfeed, “the leading social news organization,” is advancing the native advertising ball as aggressively as possible. Which has some traditionalist’s panties in a wad. Last night in New York, as part of a Social Media Week panel, a debate on editorial ethics erupted between journalist/blogger Andrew Sullivan and BuzzFeed’s Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith.

Today, Sullivan reflects:

I am accusing those (media) institutions of pushing as far up to the line between advertorial and editorial as can be even remotely ethically justified. I am accusing them of now hiring writers for two different purposes: writing journalism and writing ad copy. Before things got this desperate/opportunistic, the idea of a magazine hiring writers to craft their clients’ ads rather than, you know, do journalism, would have been unimaginable. A magazine was not an ad agency. But the Buzzfeed/Atlantic model is to be both a journalism site and an ad agency. You can see the reason for the excitement. We can now write purely for corporate clients and that will pay for us to do the rest. And so a CEO at Chevron gets a by-line at the magazine that once gave us Twain and Thoreau.

Again, the need for greater media literacy states its case. Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum argues, “that people who don’t inhale news simply don’t notice bylines. They’re practically invisible.” Too true. Yet, I wonder if the distinction between media company-generated content and marketer-generated content is truly significant outside of the media/marcom bubble. Journalists sometimes forget that they too work for media companies, with strong business agendas, like making payroll. The concept that journalists write purely unadulterated and unbiased copy, while copywriters write crap is so tired at this point. Copy is copy, and it is meant to sell — an idea or a product. May the best writer win.

Adweek’s Charlie Warzel is taking the judicious approach. He believes “for native advertising to succeed, its practitioners need to be mindful that it’s not yet universally accepted, and traditionalists need to unmoor themselves from the idea that native is a corrosive practice that undermines great journalism and see that it could even be its savior.”

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You Are Not The Price People Will Pay For You

We work in advertising, but are we able to fully realize the seismic shifts taking place in media? I don’t think so. It’s too hard to measure the rate of change, or keep up with how far the mighty have fallen.

BostonGlobe

Thankfully, we can turn to media critic Ken Doctor. He reports that The New York Times Company plans to sell The Boston Globe.

We can figure the Globe group will go for $100-$150 million, assuming its pension obligations aren’t part of the deal. That’s 4-5x those annual profits. The price also fits another sad metric: Metro newspaper properties are today worth about a tenth of what they were worth at their height. Newsrooms may have suffered a 30-50 percent decline in numbers, but the newspapers themselves itself have lost 90 percent of market value.

The Times Company paid $1.1 billion for the Globe in 1993.

If you’re a fan of Dowtown Abbey, you know how fickle fortunes can be. But seriously, one tenth of its previous value is quite a slide. Media fortunes are shifting and the careers of tens of thousands of “thought workers” with them. It makes me wonder about the psychological toll. Professionals are people too and people don’t like change. So this has to hurt.

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Money Is A Print Medium

span class=”mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image” style=”display: inline;”img alt=”TriCityNews.jpg” src=”http://www.adpulp.com/archives/2008/12/24/TriCityNews.jpg” width=”475″ height=”329″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”” //span

A href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/business/media/22carr.html”David Carr/a of The New York Times shares a quaint story about a small newspaper making its way in the world with no help whatsoever from the web.

blockquotea href=”http://trinews.com/”TriCityNews/a of Monmouth County, N.J., is prospering precisely because it aggressively ignores the Web.

“Why would I put anything on the Web?” asked Dan Jacobson, the publisher and owner of the newspaper. “I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper. Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads?”

Mr. Jacobson is more than happy to be known as the Fred Flintstone of the publishing world. “There may come a time when the Web is all there is, and we will try to adapt,” he said, “and if we don’t, well, hey, we had a great run. But right now, the Web makes no business sense for us.”/blockquote

To quote Bartle Bogle Hegarty, “When the world zigs, zag.”
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paidContent Gets Paid

Kara Swisher of All Things Digital is reporting that Rafat Ali of paidContent is about to come into to some serious coinage.

Britain’s Guardian Media Group is set to announce this morning that it will buy the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

The paidContent site is owned by ContentNext and was founded by Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali in 2002.

ContentNext has offices in Santa Monica, Ca. and Manhattan and operates several other sites, and also runs several conferences.

Ali and paidContent was one of the inspirations for our own micromedia startup. So, it’s great to see them succeed.

Bubbles Within Bubbles Within Bubbles

Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times is in Sun Valley, Idaho for Allen & Company’s annual confab.

Yesterday, Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen, who now runs the social networking site Ning, sounded his alarm.

In a morning panel session titled “Looking Around the Corner to the Future” – which, like all meetings here are closed to the press – Mr. Andreessen told the audience, which included many executives from the so-called “old media” world (including Rupe), that non-digital businesses are toast.

“He said, ‘If you have old media, you should sell,’” according to one attendee, who spoke anonymously because the sessions are off-the-record. “If you own newspapers, sell. If you own TV stations, sell. If you own a movie studio, sell.”

I’m probably not as smart as Andreessen, and nowhere near a rich, but his words of doom sound absurd to me.

Allen & Company is a boutique investment bank based in New York was founded in 1922. The firm has quietly become the premier investment house in the media and entertainment sector.

Can A Netflix-Style Service Save Magazines?

I gotta admit, I love me some magazines. Lots of ’em. And I really dig this idea:

Magazine buying may get an Internet-era makeover in September when Time Inc. launches Maghound, a service that promises to blend the convenience of subscriptions with the flexibility of newsstand sales.

Customers will pay a monthly fee for home delivery of the publications they want. But unlike with subscriptions, which typically run for fixed terms, users can go online and swap one title for another whenever they want.

Users will pay about $5 a month for three magazines, $8 for five, $10 for seven and $1 for each additional. About 10% of titles, including some weeklies, will cost more.

I’m not sure it saves money in the long run considering that many magazine subscriptions are pretty cheap, but still, this could juice up the magazine biz.

A broad range of titles will likely be available. Would you sign up for this?

What Is The Most Influential Media?

In the UK, France, and Germany, the Internet is significantly more influential than any other media, according to a study (PDF) by Fleishman-Hillard and Harris Interactive. In fact, online experiences, at least in these European countries, are nearly twice as influential as TV and eight times more influential than traditional print media. Matt Dickman, a VP at Fleishman-Hillard in Cleveland, gives a nice overview on his blog:

The study looks to really dig in to the role that the internet plays in the lives of consumers. It answers the following questions:

What is the influence of the internet compared to other media? What online behaviors are consumers adopting? What is the impact of the internet on specific consumer decisions? What are consumer attitudes towards the internet? What are the differences by country?

Most of us who work in the digital space already have answers handy for these foundational questions, but it never hurts to have charts and graphs from a reputable, third party source come client meeting time.