Tag Archives: advertising

“Local” means something entirely different now

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Roger Gardner offers a good example of the idea in headline.

“Jefferson Bank, in Jefferson City, Missouri, has the banner on the business section of NYT. Of course, they don’t buy it everywhere, NYT knows where I am, so it inserts the local ad. Interesting to me is who sold it to Jeff Bank and how?”

Let’s say you sell yoga supplies and would like to advertise locally. But the newspaper, radio and TV stations don’t offer any programming or content relevant to your customers. The local media can’t afford to produce that programming for the few hundred people into yoga.

If you have a great database of readers (as the NYT certainly does) … and an ad network that can pull from yoga shops all over the country… you can serve up ads like the one above.

I think a more practical approach might be for the yoga shop owner to create his own content and community. We’re seeing that happen every day. Or, if they just don’t have the time… others will create that branded content for them. But the result is more and more business becoming “media” creators.

Poll: 2 in 5 Americans read paper daily

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One of the findings of an Adweek Media/Harris Poll taken in December 2009. Only 43% of US adults say they read a daily newspaper – either online or in print – almost every day, while 72% read one at least once a week and 81% read one at least once a month. The study found that one in ten adults say they never read a daily newspaper.

“Daily newspaper readership skews heavily toward the older age groups. Almost two-thirds of those ages 55+ (64%) say they still read a daily newspaper almost every day. Younger Americans read newspapers less often. Just more than two in five of those ages 45-54 (44%) read a paper almost every day as do 36% of those ages 35-44. However, less than one-fourth of those ages 18-34 (23%) say they read a newspaper almost every day and 17% in this age group say they never read a daily newspaper.

Though many newspapers are exploring the possibility of charging a monthly fee to read a daily newspaper’s content online, the poll results suggest this tactic is unlikely to work. Three-fourths of online adults (77%) say they would not be willing to pay anything to read a newspaper’s content online. Among the minority willing to pay, one in five online adults (19%) would only pay between $1 and $10 a month for this online content and only 5% would pay more than $10 a month.

The average monthly amount consumers are prepared to pay ranges from $3 in the US and Australia to $7 in Italy.

I want to be depressed by these findings but must confess that I do not read a hold-it-in-your-hands newspaper and I’ve never been better informed. I spend the first two hours of every days gobbling up news from dozens of sources. And much (most?) of the real news comes from newspapers that are bleeding red ink.

What will I be reading if/when those traditional sources are no long? I have no idea.

Is this the future of advertising?

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First, I am assuming this was a paid commercial. And I’m assuming Domino’s Pizza paid a premium. The ultimate “live read.” As I watched, I realized I was paying very close attention, trying to figure out what I was seeing.

Whose idea was this? The show’s writers? You damn well better have good writers if you’re going to try this. Was it Domino’s idea? Their ad agency?

My next thought was, this is a one trick pony. You can’t do this every night. Or even every week. But then it hit me, you wouldn’t need to. This segment had 100% of my attention. I clearly got the message that Domino’s Pizza was trying to make their product a lot better. I don’t need to see some mindless 30 second spot over and over.

This… whatever it is… didn’t insult my intelligence. It played to it in a tongue-in-cheek manner ideally suited to those who watch The Colbert Report. I have no trouble imagining an advertiser paying big bucks for this.

Mel Karmazin interview: “Fucking with the magic”

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Mel Karmazin is the CEO of Sirius Satellite Radio. Before that he was head of CBS Radio. For most of his career he has been known as a “Wall Street darling” for his ability to drive up the price of his various companies’ stock. Don Imus frequently referred to him as the Zen Master. Let’s just say he knows a lot about radio and advertising. I was struck by his description of advertising and frank assessment that Google was “fucking with the magic.”

“I loved the model that I had then. At that point I had… I was the CEO of  CBS and I had a model where you buy a commercial… if you’re an advertiser you buy a commercial in the Super Bowl and, at that time, you paid two-and-a-half million dollars for a spot and had no idea if it worked. I mean, you had no idea if it sold product… did any good… I loved that model! That was a great model! And why …if I can get away with that model… if I’m in the business where I can sell advertising that way, why wouldn’t I want to do it?

No return on investment. And you know how everybody looks for return on investment? We had a a business model that didn’t worry about return on investment and then here comes Google. They screwed it up. They went to all these advertisers and said, we’ll let you know exactly what it is.”

Oooh. Reminds me of the old saw, “I know that only half of my advertising works, I just don’t know which half.” The full interview is worth a watch and confirmed my feeling that a real sea change (in advertising) is taking place.

Monsanto Twitter silence on AP story

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I just spotted (in Google Reader) an Associated Press story about Monsanto with the headline: Monsanto seed business role revealed. Here’s the first graph:

ST. LOUIS — Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.’s business practices reveal how the world’s biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.

I was curious what the twitterverse was saying about the story and found an endless stream of links and comments. No surprise there.

I’ve been following one of Monsanto’s Twitter feeds (@monsantoco) for a while and dropped into see how they were responding to the story and the Twitter buzz.

monsanto-twitter

Nothing since Friday morning at 9:10. Hard to draw any conclusions without know more but with almost 3,000 followers, why wouldn’t you use Twitter to “engage in the conversation.” If not now, when? If not Twitter, how? If you’re going to use social media to tell your story, you gotta be there if/when the story gets unpleasant or be conspicuous by your absence.

Depending on the serious of the AP investigation, there are probably lots of emails and phone calls and maybe even a few meetings, to decide if/how/where to respond to the story.

If anyone on Learfield’s senior management team are reading this, take a few minutes at your next meeting to talk about how you would respond to a big, negative story about our company.  I really think we could engage quickly without making our lawyers all jittery and nauseous.

Disclosure: Monsanto is an advertiser on at least one of the radio networks owned by the company I work for.

UPDATE: Monsanto did get a response up last night. And linked to it from Twitter. Probably hard for a company that large to move any faster.