Month: February 2007

Attention Gone Amuck? Time for a Wakeup Call!

Attention Gone Amuck? Time for a Wakeup Call!

Pete Blackshaw at Buzzmetrics in ClickZ — on the aftermath of the Boston Lite Brite Incident and the continuing destruction of the old advertising model. Taken in the context of Jaffe’s Life After the 30-Second Spot, I’d say the public is mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore. On the other hand, the new Chevy “take off all your clothes” ad and the Dorito winner are two examples of winning “consumer” submitted ads that are actually worth watching. I don’t. I Tivo and skip. I am on the Do Not Call list and I toss all junk mail. I also can’t remember a banner ad worth clicking on.

So what to spend our money on?

“We need more parameters in advertising. We need clarity regarding what’s reasonable and what’s not. We need more disclosure. We need to keep the chatterbacking in check.

Most important, we need to trust our own guts as consumers. Admit it, you hate advertising intrusion. It drives you crazy. We rarely answer the phone at home, and we relish the thrill of zapping ads.

Once we acknowledge that reality, we’ll find the right ad model that works for consumers and business alike. In the meantime, we must explain ourselves to an increasingly critical court of public opinion.”

Lights out

About 9 o’clock last night the world went dark. Click. Total darkness except for the blue, tubercular glow of my notebook. The house went silent. No furnace, no television, no radio, no refrigerator — all the little motors and fans that fill a house with background noise went dead. A blackout — most likely some unfortunate soul drove into a utility pole — the kind that can last an hour or eight hours.
Outside, complete darkness. Street lights, neighborhood windows — all black.

So I threw some more logs in the woodstove, found my flashlight, lit a few candles and went outside to see how far down Main Street the darkness extended. The center of the village was lit up, so the power was out on the northern half of town.

Back inside, by the light of the candles and wood stove I mused about life in the same house 150 years ago, before electricity, when one room in the house was designated the “warming room” where people would dress and seek refuge from the winter. The rest of the place was basically unheated, so I imagine people slept in frigid rooms under a lot of blankets, used the chamber pots that are still in some of the rooms to spare themselves a trip to outhouse, and had a pretty miserable existence.

In the silence of the living room, huddled around the fire and wondering how long it would be before power was restored, I thought of opening a book and reading by candlelight, but the candles seemed too dim to make a difference.
So we sat, around the fire, in the silence, waiting for the lights to come back on. I began to think about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I finished two weeks ago and which still has a sad affect on me, with its post-apocalypse view of a dead world, a world without lights, a horrible tale of survival, and wondered what if the lights never came back?

Across the street, in the other half of the former Chatfield Compound, Cousin Pete had fired up his Honda Generator and was thumbing his nose at the darkness, filling the silence with internal combustion, and I wondered, what happens when the gas is gone? What do you do when it is 15 degrees and February and the gas runs out? Where will the warm room be?

Then, click, the house lit up again, filled with the sound of boilers and fans, radios and televisions, and we all said “Yay” and that was that.

Save Boston from the Evil Lite-Brites

Thanks to Marta D.

NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet – Haaretz – Israel News

NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet – Haaretz – Israel News

I haven’t seen this interesting interview with NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger reported anywhere but this Israeli publication. Notable in that it is a very strong statement that the paper model is very, very shaky:

“Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.

Sulzberger is focusing on how to best manage the transition from print to Internet.

“The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there,” he points out.

The Times, in fact, has doubled its online readership to 1.5 million a day to go along with its 1.1 million subscribers for the print edition.”

Jobs Takes Out a Full Page Ad

When Steve Jobs took out the equivalent of a full page ad in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal earlier this week to make his statement that Apple would drop DRM from iTunes when the Big Four in the music industry gave up the practice, news was made, but the more significant impact was how Jobs made the statement.

Heather Green at Businessweek’s blogs has an excellent post on the phenomenon of corporations taking their message direct on their own sites to the public and their customer base, eschewing the old practice of briefing select reporters and hoping the message made it through the reporters’ filters to the world as originally intended.

Green points to Dave Winer as the source of this insight, who wrote in a post entitled “Apple is now a media company”:

“Now the morning after it hits me how new this is, because Apple usually communicates through bigpub reporters like John Markoff at the NY Times and Steven Levy at Newsweek. This time he went direct, Markoff’s article appeared this morning, more than 12 hours after the essay was published, and makes clear how much better this system is than the old one.”

This all circles back to Sam Whitmore’s pronouncement to me a year ago when I declared I was leaving media for corporate life that everyone is media now and the traditional media’s role as a communicator for corporations is going away.

In the end, I appreciated the Fake Steve Jobs’ take on the “real” statement before Apple’s PR people edited it:

“It’s like the kids in college who lobby for making hemp legal and they say it’s because hemp makes such great clothing and strong rope. Riiiight. Just a coincidence that it’s always the stoners who are lobbying for this. No, come on. Let’s be honest. What this really is all about is that certain noisy scumbags are trying to decriminalize stealing. They want to make it legal to steal, as long as what’s being stolen is music. What comes next? Movies, probably. Then books. Then software. Who knows where it ends.”

You can’t make this stuff up: Astronaut accused of flighty behaviour

globeandmail.com: Astronaut accused of flighty behaviour

“Ms. Nowak raced from Houston to Orlando wearing diapers in the car so she wouldn’t have to stop to go to the bathroom, authorities said. Astronauts wear diapers during launch and re-entry.”

What I’m Reading — Life After the 30-Second Spot

Joseph Jaffe came onto my radar in December when he corrected me for terming his new venture crayon as a development firm in my now infamous screed asking why marketers should give a fig about SecondLife. crayon is not a dev firm, but a “new marketing company.”

Jaffe went back on my screen this morning as I was reading Lorne Hanley’s fascinating piece in this morning’s Sunday Times Magazine about Bud.tv. Jaffe was quoted there in the context of his authority earned by penning Life After the 30-Second Spot.

Jaffe, who co-founded crayon (emphasis on the lower-case “c”, ask me sometime about what happened when I tried to start a sentence in a Forbes story with the word “cisco”), is a former Madison Ave. exec (Ogilvy, TBWA/Chiat (what is the deal with the four-letter ad agency acronym fest?)) is the kind of change agent I’d love to drag into a interactive marketing meeting to knock some heads together.

The book came to me via a colleague, Gary Milner, who bought multiple copies to press into the hands of the marketing team. Last week I read it during the flights to and from RTP.

The first thing I did was look at the frontispiece to see what the publication date was. 2005. The problem with books about new media, or any trend pushed by technology is that books are inherently slow media and new media is inherently fast. Jaffe actually writes what I imagine in 2004 or early 2005 was a very strong and prescient polemic against business-as-usual marketing, mass media tactics, and a call to arms and revolution to Internet/Interactive marketing. A lot of what he predicts has come true, but I suspect for a more current state of the art perspective, you need to spend time on his blog, lifeafter30.com


 CMOs should read it, people like me who own the function should read it, but it’s not an operations manual by a long shot. It’s stuffed with great stats and quantitative data that should help some interactive marketing change-agent inside of a “Brown-Suit” company to make their point via some strong Powerpoint slides (I saw one of Jaffe’s points or frameworks appear in a presentation I saw just last week).

So, good book, not a cookbook like an O’Reilly Press manual with a lemur on the cover, but a good cribsheet for making the big plea to the CMO to get with the program and ditch all the old tactics that used to work, but don’t any more.

Whereabouts week of 2.5

2.5-2.6 NYC

2.7 Cotuit

2.8 Cotuit/Boston

2.9-2.11 Cotuit

All of this is conditional of my being able to walk upright after twanging my back yet again this morning while pushing a wheelbarrow full of firewood across the frozen yard. I am now out of it on cyclobenzaprine (muscle relaxant) and doing stretches on the floor inbetween calls to chiropractors looking for a Sunday “unlocking” before jumping on train tomorrow morn.

The Sponsorship Model for Bloggers

I have been advising a blogger on her negotiations with three publishers for the sponsorship of her blog which has, in a relatively short period of time, accrued about 250,000 page views a month. This blog has a lot of buzz and attention paid to it, and she finds herself in the enviable position of considering multiple offers.
She has not filtered her feeds through Feedburner yet, so she has no idea what her subscription stream looks like. All she has is a SiteMeter bug which gives her a rolling 30-day view of the traffic. Based on that traffic, the publishers are coming back with offers more suited to the existing page-view/CPM model, looking for fixed placement of their message, a subscribe-link for their print products, and promotions for their own RSS products.

She has tried AdSense and a CafePress store, but essentially isn’t making a dime from her efforts. The content of this blog is unique, and is not comparable to any other source. It also has a significant barrier to entry for a competitor to move in.

My theory on what places downward pressure on CPMs is the concept of “fungible” — a twenty-five cent word for anything that is easily replaced by something else. In media terms this could apply to stock quotes, wire news, anything that is commodity content which the consumer would be hard pressed to identify its origin based on its tone and substance. In other words, if I covered up the source of a story on Reuter’s website about Apple’s earnings and showed it to a reader next to a similarly disquised story from the Wall Street Journal on Apple’s earnings, would the reader be able to identify the source?

Assuming the answer to the rhetorical answer is “no,” then one can see how a CPM on such a site will always trend lower as more venues begin to produce and publish the content. In the end, the most unique content that a publisher can claim is probably the opinion side — hence the movement of the columnists behind a cost wall at the New York Times with the TimeSelect program.
The question is whether a page view of a blog should be treated on an apple-to-apples basis with a page view of a magazine’s website. One offer values my friend’s traffic at an $8 CPM — which translates to $2000 a month. Chump change in my opinion.

I believe she can, and should, do two things to get maximum value for her efforts. First, avoid any ad network like Federated Media like the plague. Federated acts as a rep for traffic, selling it and managing the insertion of ads based on a demographic algorithm, and then reporting the results on the back end to the advertiser. They take a significant chunk of the revenue in the process. Anyone who has participated in an online affiliate program — Amazon’s for instance — knows what thin beer such programs can be. Second, she may want to consider an auction system where she lets the potential sponsors bid for the placement. How she can accomplish this, well, it’s beyond me.
So, what’s the recommendation? I felt in 1995, and I still feel today, that some online content will have such high value, and be so unique, that their creators will be able to eschew the tyranny of metrics and pageview economics and offer their stuff on a flat sponsorship basis sold purely on the basis of time, selling a patronage model that essentially lets the sponsor bask in the glory of the content and perhaps receive some business on the side. This is the PBS Nova model. Is the General Motors sponsorship of a PBS show an ad or a statement of corporate social responsibility or both? Expecting a low-traffic, high value content site to incorporate the kind of metrics and accountability and ad ops that a traffic behemoth has is ridiculous.
The hard part for my blogger friend who is on the verge of making some serious money, is how to negotiate these deals. She has published several books and has a longstanding relationship with a great book agent … who hasn’t the faintest idea how to represent her online efforts. There must be some agents out there who are emerging as strong negotiators on the behalf of online artists and talent, the question I pose is who are they and what are their terms?

Am I being naive in believing some web content stars can and should expect a sponsorship model, and that their efforts and pageviews are vastly different than a standard site’s?