“Your industry has been completely and permanently altered by the connections offered by the internet. Your non-profit, your political campaign, your service business. Not a little different, not just email enabled or website marketed, but overhauled.
Unfortunately, that’s hard to embrace. But it’s still true. What are you going to do about it? If you were starting your business today, knowing what you know now, how would you do things (very) differently?” — Seth Godin
Category Archives: Business & Marketing
Bomb shelters or spaceships
If you were recruiting for someone to manage a news organization in 2009, what skills or experience should you be looking for? What would the job description look like? (Since I know nothing about print, I’ll limit my questions to broadcast)
In my experience, most people who make it to “the top,” come from the sales side of the business. The men and women who made their bones in the newsroom occasionally wind up running the show but they are the exceptions. So we’re looking for sales and marketing experience, yes?
Someone who can figure out how to sell the advertising that funds company. Someone who can recruit and train people to sell 30 second radio and TV commercials?
What about this Internet thing? Do our sellers need to know how to sell banner ads (or whatever), too? Or does our manager have to manage two distinct type of sales departments? “Traditional” and online?
Strategically, do we manage the business we have today and hope it lasts a long time? Or, do we try to anticipate what our business will become in three, or five, or ten years? No easy task.
Clay Shirky says the advertising model that has defined and driven news organizations worked because advertisers didn’t have alternatives. Now they do.
But I’m getting away from my original question. Do we need a manager that is real good at “where we’ve been?” Someone with a good handle on where we’re headed? (if such a person exists) Or both? (tall order)
What if advertising –as we have come to know it– plays little or no part in funding news organizations in the future? Uh, let’s not go there. Too murky and scary.
As you can see, I have no answers… just questions. And I’m not sure they’re even the right ones.
Maybe it comes down to finding someone who knows how to build a spaceship, verses someone who knows how to build a bomb shelter. The spaceship has to get us to a very different place. The bomb shelter will protect us for as long as our food and water hold out.
“Advertising Agencies and Social Media: A Culture Clash”
For some years I have sensed a fundamental shift in how we –the consuming public– feel about advertising. The following is from a post by Jason Falls. [Alas, the original post is gone.] I was tempted to just repost the piece in its entirety. He begins with the philosophical differences between advertising and social media:
“Social media is, in many ways, the antithesis of advertising. Advertising is one-way communications aimed at large groups of consumers. Social media is two-way communications that requires listening as well as speaking. It can also be said that social media is a multiple-way communications method as brands can speak and listen, but also watch other consumers talk to each other. An agency’s creatives and strategic planners suddenly having to factor in listening and observing to their communications process after decades of just shouting from the roof tops presents a seismic culture shift.
Social media is also about building relationships. Advertising is about driving people to a buying decision. In fact, I would propose that in most cases, advertising has nothing to do with a relationship. It’s all about persuading someone to take action, not discussing the decision-making process and becoming a trusted resource for the person choosing. As Chris Heuer says, good marketing today doesn’t try to sell the customer on something. It tries to help them buy it.
Similarly, it can be said that the essence of social media, in many ways, is good customer service. I would propose that, with exceptions certainly, advertising agencies have never cared about serving the customer. They care about making the sale. Advertising is most often used to drive customers to purchase, not care for them after the fact.
So, philosophically, advertising and social media are very different. Creatives, client services folks, account planners and the like are being asked to undertake a new method of communications that runs counter to everything they’ve ever been taught.”
A small shop within our company has been providing social media services to clients for a couple of years and it immediately became clear to us why advertising agencies weren’t keen on producing social media content for their clients. Again, Mr. Falls:
“Content creation also doesn’t scale well and is problematic for billing. Let’s say you have 20 brands producing social media content and you hire two people to produce that content. Depending upon the brand, audience and strategy, if they’re doing a good job, they’re producing an average of a blog post, Facebook content, several Tweets and perhaps video, images or some other type of content for each client every day. Can you write 10 blog posts in a day?
And how about this billing scenario: Let’s say a full-time agency employee producing content for a client is working 10 hours per week on that client’s social media efforts. They’re billed out at roughly $75 per hour. At that rate, which is conservative in price and volume, you’re billing $36,000 per year for their services as an agency. At the same time, you can go out and pay free-lance bloggers $25 per post (and that’s on the high end in most circumstances) and produce a similar volume of content for $6,500 per year (a blog post per day, five days per week, which is an aggressive clip for many agencies). How will you answer your client when they call you with a big, “WTF?”
If you are remotely involved in “old media” and/or advertising, I encourage you to read Mr. Fall’s complete post.
One never has enough clever people
I don’t think of myself as clever but it is something to which one might aspire. This article at FinancialPost.com identifies the attributes of clever and why organizations need such folk:
“The truth is that organizations need a particular kind of clever employees — people with a propensity for innovation and even iconoclasm. People who happily tread on organizational sacred ground while seeking new ways to produce sustained economic growth.
Clever people are highly talented individuals who have the potential to create disproportionate amounts of value from the resources that an organization makes available to them.”
And how does one spot a clever boy or girl?
- They know their worth (their skills are not easily replicated).
- They ask difficult questions.
- They are organizationally savvy.
- They are not impressed by corporate hierarchy.
- They expect instant access to decision makers.
- They are well connected outside of their organizations.
- Their passion is for what they do, not for who they work for.
- Even if you lead them well, they won’t thank you.
Dollars moving from old radio to new radio?
“Internet Radio Makes Waves,” a new eMarketer report, predicts the radio industry will see double-digit losses in ad spending this year alone, with terrestrial radio bringing in $14.5 billion in ad revenues in 2009, a drop of 18% from 2008 levels.
ZenithOptimedia reports that in 2009, advertisers will spend $260 million on Internet radio and another $28 million on podcasting for a combined total of $288 million, up 28% from 2008. By 2011, that combined figure will reach nearly $394 million.
Jeff Jarvis on “the Nielsen Revolt”
“The presumption of old media was that everyone in the audience saw every advertisement and that’s why ads were bought on the basis of the size of the audience. Size mattered. But today, what advertisers really want is verification that their ads reached the audience they were sold – not just in size but in relevance.”
Who’s watching the news?
I’m not really sure, but they must be a bunch of old fuckers, based on the sponsors of tonight’s NBC (first group) and ABC (second group) network newscasts.
- Ford Taurus
- Omnaris Nasal Spray
- Olay Body Wash
- Total Cereal
- Toviaz – for over-active bladders
- Imodium – for diarrhea
- Dr. Scholls – for tired old feet
- Advair – asthma and emphysema
- Spiriva – asthma and emphysema
- Lanacane – itch cream
- Olay Pro X – wrinkle cream
- Miralax – laxative
- Zyrtec – allergy medicine
- Ford Taurus
- Crestor – cholesterol
- Ford Taurus
- Toviaz – over-active bladder
- Friskies Cat Food
- ThermaCare – heat wraps
- One-A-Day 50+ for men
- Omnaris – nasal spray
- Levitra – erectile dysfunction
- Dove Moisturizer
- Plavix – poor leg circulation
Is that the most depressing list you have ever seen? Could there be one living soul under the age of 60 watching these newscasts? Is network news in trouble? May-be.
“If you’re not responding, you’re not seen as an authentic brand”
“If you’re not responding, you’re not seen as an authentic brand”
The eye rolling and derisive snorting I used to get by mentioning Twitter have been replaced by a thin-lipped, folded arm silence. Due in some part, I’m sure, to stories like the one in today’s Wall Street Journal:
“Ford Motor Co., PepsiCo Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co., among others, are deploying software and assigning employees to monitor Internet postings and blogs. They’re also assigning senior leaders to craft corporate strategies for social media.”
“Some companies are training staffers to broaden their social-media efforts. At Ford, Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, plans to soon begin teaching employees how to use sites like Twitter to represent the company and interact with consumers.
Coca-Cola Co. is preparing a similar effort, which initially will be limited to marketing, public affairs and legal staffers. Participants will be authorized to post to social media on Coke’s behalf without checking with the company’s PR staff, says Adam Brown, named Coke’s first head of social media in March.”
If you want my business, you’ll listen to what I have to say, and respond. Or suffer a PR shit storm.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124925830240300343.html
The eye rolling and derisive snorting I used to get by mentioning Twitter have been replaced by a thin-lipped, folded-arm silence. Due in some part, I’m sure, to stories like the one in today’s Wall Street Journal:
“Ford Motor Co., PepsiCo Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co., among others, are deploying software and assigning employees to monitor Internet postings and blogs. They’re also assigning senior leaders to craft corporate strategies for social media.”
“Some companies are training staffers to broaden their social-media efforts. At Ford, Scott Monty, Ford’s head of social media, plans to soon begin teaching employees how to use sites like Twitter to represent the company and interact with consumers.
“Coca-Cola Co. is preparing a similar effort, which initially will be limited to marketing, public affairs and legal staffers. Participants will be authorized to post to social media on Coke’s behalf without checking with the company’s PR staff, says Adam Brown, named Coke’s first head of social media in March.”
If you want my business, you’ll listen to what I have to say, and respond. Or suffer a PR shit storm.
“I just work here”
During my affiliate relations days, it wasn’t uncommon to run into a radio station manger who had a beef with one part of our company and took it out on the division I worked for. And I’m certain it went the other way, too.
In my desperation to save an affiliation, I’m sure I said, “But that’s not me. That’s a completely different part of our company. You can’t punish me for what they did.”
Wrong. He can and he did. It was all Learfield as far as he was concerned. Seth Godin reminds us of this in today’s post:
“If you’re not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else. You don’t get the benefit of the brand when it’s hot without accepting the blame of the brand when it’s wrong.”