Hasta La Creative!

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.

The post MarketMixNW 2013 Offers Up A Valuable Mix Of Marketing Information appeared first on AdPulp.

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.

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

The post “Be Indispensable,” Make Money — Simple As That Says The Oracle of Omaha appeared first on AdPulp.

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.

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.

The post Eyeballs Yes, But Publishers Need The Rest of You Too appeared first on AdPulp.

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.

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.

The post You Are Not The Price People Will Pay For You appeared first on AdPulp.

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.

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?

Rick Myers points to an interesting piece about how we read online by Slate’s Michael Agger.

Near the end of the piece, there’s a link to “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal” by William Powers.

Here’s a clip from Powers’ 74-page document:

Paper is the most successful communications innovation of the last 2000 years, the one that has lasted the longest and had the profoundest effect on civilization. One can easily make the case that
without the technology that is paper, there would be no civilization. Yet most of the time, we don’t even think of paper as a technology. And so we don’t ask the questions we routinely ask about other technologies: How does it work? What are its strengths and weaknesses? Is it easy and enjoyable to use?

All of which leads me to ask, do you pause to consider the medium you’re writing for? Do you write differently for paper? And who among us still puts pen to paper when forming ideas into coherent expressions?

Publicis on Wednesday unveiled a new digital-advertising system that links together technologies from Google Inc., AOL, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.

The system connects Publicis’s media-buying agencies with the ad space sold by the Web giants, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“We are putting the four competitors around the same table,” and “that will drive prices down so that we are using the money of our clients in the best possible way,” says Publicis Chief Executive Maurice Levy.

“We are not doing the deals only to do a deal,” Mr. Levy says. Digital revenue should represent more than 25% of the group’s total revenue by 2010 compared with 18% in the first quarter of this year, he says.

Ad Age has a more detailed account.

TBS isn’t afraid to interrupt your flow. Not at all.

According to Ad Age, TBS is using an “overlay” during episodes of “Family Guy” meant to promote “The Bill Engvall Show.”

Ad Age blames internet advertising for this development.

TBS’s chatty come-on offers yet another illustration of how consumers’ growing comfort with the way content is designed and displayed in digital venues is starting to affect the flow of advertising in more-traditional areas, particularly TV.

“I almost wonder if the ad overlays, which are becoming more and more ubiquitous on the digital video screen, are almost laying the groundwork for TV,” said John Moore, senior VP-director of ideas and innovation at Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Mullen.

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[via Neil Perkin]