Promotion Fatigue

There is an interesting bit in Ad Age about the diminishing impact of price promotion on sales among packaged goods companies the past year. It says:

“SymphonyIRI Group reports that even though the percentage of packaged goods sold on price promotion increased markedly for the second consecutive year, the average volume lift per promotion fell.”

There could be a couple of reasons for the decline, which the Ad Age story mentions. One is the recession. Another is the “drumbeat” of offers online, which will soon include Google Offers. Overall, in response to a super abundance of deals there is simply “a level of promotion fatigue,” according to Susan Viamari, the author of the SymphonyIRI report.

It is a reminder that price promotion is short-term. Long-term, Ad Age quotes Utpal Dholakia of Rice University saying, “it has very little effect.”

A Disturbance in the Force: Egypt Goes Offline

Startling images of an Internet gone cold in Egypt, this one courtesy of a report by Declan McCullagh at CNET.

Egypt: Cancelled Until Further Notice

At Buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis quotes John Perry Barlow who declared in 1996:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Egyptians have much more at stake than internet connectivity. But a free and open internet will be one thing – perhaps even the main thing – to say when they’ve got it, when it comes to pass.

Hulu, Hulu, Hulu.

Hulu is in trouble again, poor kid. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, picked-up by the SmartBrief people, his parents are at odds over how much TV is good for you. Hulu has become such a couch potato that the grown-ups are afraid it will start to take away from responsible programming behaviors like cable and satellite.

The Journal story says the child’s parents “are grappling with a dilemma facing all entertainment companies: how soon to release movies or shows online without destroying their value in other lucrative “windows” such as DVDS or reruns on cable TV—and at what price.”

Hulu, of course, seems to take the pressures on the family to make ends meet and raise a responsible citizen in stride. Reportedly, he has a modified refrigerator in his room that can hold a beer keg, presumably to take the edge off all the hand-wringing.  

It has the neighbors talking: “It remains unclear what the business model is” for Hulu, says Bruce Rosenblum in the Journal’s story, who lives up the street as the head of the television arm of Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. studio.

Kids will be kids. One day they’re going to strike out on their own, maybe even grow-up to be just like Mom or Dad. And, if the parents are lucky, take care of them when they’re old.

TechCrunch Columnist Paul Carr Writes About the Affect of Too Much “Fertilizer” Online

“The fact is, it’s almost impossible to find a single ‘content’ company on the web that maintains a horseshit:quality ratio better than 10:1,” notes TechCrunch columnist, Paul Carr, in a post (“NSFW: On the Internet Nobody Knows You’re a Journalist”) that Paid Content was alert enough to notice and link to in its Around the Web section.

Elaborating, Carr writes:

“Just look at the homepages of Yahoo! and MSN, boasting the respective top stories: “Why Clooney Won’t Marry” and “Five Things You Shouldn’t Do When You Propose”. For all its lofty ideals, even The Huffington Post has succumbed to the temptation of bolstering costly and time consuming think-pieces with an avalanche of linkbait crap and blatant cut-and-paste jobs from other blogs.”

And, further:

“Tina Brown’s Huffpo-rival, The Daily Beast, is at it too. Sure, today’s top stories include a piece on a possible Egyptian revolution, but what’s that right underneath? A slideshow of “Ashton Kutcher’s 10 Best Shirtless Moments”. Hell, even Salon – whose journalism I praised the other week – isn’t immune to the page-view boosting lure of the slideshow: today their front page boasts a pictorial guide to “Hotels with a dark past” (including the Bates Motel, which doesn’t even exist) while on Friday they bravely addressed the issue of the child sexualisation with a gallery of “shocking” but  “sexy” child images.

Paul Carr’s column could be a companion piece to the article by Nicholas Spangler in the Columbia Journalism Review about the 40 hours he spent as a Demand Media writer. As I described in this space back in November, Spangler is a journalist that worked for years for The Miami Herald, and wrote with open resignation, about the end of his journalistic world and the rise of the new one typified by Demand. It is a world of “commercial content,” driven by algorithms “without”, Spangler wrote (perhaps quoting Clay Shirky), “regard to civic value or subjective judgments about quality or any of the other sentimental trappings of the Murrow century.”

Paul Carr is more inclined to describe the absence of civic value and sentimental trappings in online content today as, simply, “horseshit.” But he is a realist: horseshit is what the people want and horseshit is what the people get.

He storms:

“AOL’s (and HuffPo’s and Yahoo’s) front pages are packed with celebrity-obsessed crap because that’s what people are searching for, and that’s what they click on. It’s a problem at TechCrunch too: in the past seven days, almost three times as many people clicked on our headline about famous people using Twitter as cared about Mike’s interview with Google’s three most senior executives.”

Last week I took note of the precipitous drop in American Idol’s TV ratings so far this season and, despite the fact it remained the highest rated show in its time slot, allowed myself to wonder if our long, (inter)national nightmare with reality TV was coming to an end. No more Real Housewives of Anywhere; The end of real horseshit.

Fat chance, because when media aspires to sustain bigger and bigger audiences in order to attract more and more advertising it winds-up looking half-naked, with a grease-painted stomach hanging over its belt, fist pumping in the air and yelling “More beeeer!” Big media slimes you.

This is true online and offline. But it is also true, online and off, that where media is not trying to be all things to all people it doesn’t need washing off. Case in point, the New Yorker, which Paul Carr turns to and hugs like an old friend in his TechCrunch piece:

“The joy I felt today flicking through the New Yorker – stumbling across Tad Friend’s wonderful piece about Lenny Bruce tribute actor, Steve Cuiffo and a short story by Woody Allen (Woody Allen!) before reaching the Armstrong profile – was easily the highlight of my day.”

(How ironic if new media sends us back into the waiting arms of old media, now leaner and more fit and more in touch with its true self.)

Every brand steward in the marketing business should give careful regard to Paul’s happy encounter with the New Yorker if they give any regard (or disregard) to the rub-off affect of media on their brand images. I know when I’ve been naughty or nice consuming media. I know when I’ve been slimed. And the truth is that the unquenchable desire for viewers, listeners, readers and users will slime you, every time.

Which was why it was such a good thing that the Internet came along to free audiences from the growing indignity and abuse of modern mass media, providing them with a nearly endless resource of content that seemed so incorruptible. It lacked production value, maybe was not always beautiful, but it was genuine, timely, real, likeable, in an across-the-fence-to-your neighbor kind of way. Now, even the inherent niche quality of the internet is being subjected to manipulation thanks to so-called content mills – not because they possess a vision for an agrarian new media economy with gardens in every yard, but because they, along with much of mainstream media, remain industrialists – old media wannabes – factory farmers spreading fertilizer from the sky.

So Far, Newspaper Pay Walls are a Nonevent

The New York Times had a story this week, which MediaBisto picked-up in its Morning Media Newsfeed, that the experience so far with pay walls among newspapers - certain kinds of newspapers and certain kinds of pay walls, at least - suggests publishers may not have too much to fear from charging for a certain amount of content. The key is how much content. As the Times reported “…the initial findings showed that newspapers found success with a pay model by setting a conservative limit for the number of articles visitors could read free each month, and by making clear that most readers would not be affected.”

Conservative seems to mean don’t swing for the pay wall fences; keep as much content as possible available for free. In which case, according to Steven Brill, co-founder of Journalism Online, which is the source of the data, pay walls are a “nonevent for 85, 90, 95 percent of the people who come” to the site.

We need to think about those numbers.

The newspapers in the study are reportedly local newspapers such as The Commercial Dispatch in Mississippi and The York Daily Record in Pennsylvania. Large newspapers, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal, have yet to implement their pay wall strategies. The New York Times is scheduled to do so sometime this year. Otherwise, the players in the Journalism Online program are local papers.

Well, yes, but local means 85, 90, 95 percent of all newspapers because there are only three non-local, ersatz large newspapers in the country today: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and USA Today. All other papers are local. Therefore, Journalism Online’s findings probably apply to 85, 90, 95 percent of all online newspaper readers, which says that you can’t make enough money from loyal, regular readers by charging them for content because they account for only 5, 10, 15 percent of the people who come to a newspaper web site.

Thus, it still comes down to the advertising, which appears to be the principal point of relief and discovery in the New York Times story:

“Steven Brill’s Journalism Online experiment, which developed a system that allows newspapers to charge their most regular online visitors, has analyzed its preliminary data and found on average that advertising revenue and overall traffic did not decline significantly despite predictions otherwise.”

The predictions must have assumed that the majority of online newspaper readers were also “most regular” readers. Now we know, not so. They may be regular newspaper readers, but chances are they high-top it from one newspaper to another, which is one of the gloriously liberating things about online. If you are an avid newspaper reader you don’t have to rely on just one anymore.

So why bother charging the 5, 10, 15 percent of people that frequent a newspaper site who are, without argument, its best customers? That is a very good question. It appears not to make a dent in the business model. It may make a dent in the fears of an anxious newspaper world by offering some validation of their core competency, which is content. And provided papers are supplying extra value to them in the form of news and information, regular readers may appreciate the clubby atmosphere. But in 85, 90, 95 percent of the cases the results say not much has changed. So far, newspaper pay walls are a nonevent.

MRM Worldwide’s Global Chief Creative Director Wishes Happy Birthday to the Intel 4004 CPU

MRM Worldwide’s Creative head, Oren Frank, offers Happy Birthday and remembrance in Ad Age to the Intel 4004 on the occasion, more-or-less, of its debut in 1971. The Intel 4004 was the world’s first commercially produced, commercial processing unit (CPU) and it boasted the fantastic number of 23,000 transistors on one chip the size of a fingernail. Today, Intel chips can host 800 million transistors, and the chips are everywhere, including cars, toasters, toys and washing machines, writes Oren. “Almost paradoxically,” he says, “with the growth of computing power in our lives, technology is disappearing from sight. Since computing power is now part of almost everything we do, we take it for granted, and pay attention to it only when it fails — similar to what happened with electrical power in the previous millennium.”

Technology that delivers on a promise becomes ubiquitous and, eventually, disappears from view. As a consequence it still makes me crazy whenever the Internet gets referred to as the “tech sector.” It misses the point, to the extent that if technology disappears from view – as it is poised to do in the living rooms of America – what will differentiate the Internet from television? Functionality? Maybe partly. Content? Most definitely. In any event, will the Internet join the media sector, or will TV join the tech sector?

TV technology disappeared from view a long time ago. That doesn’t change the fact that we depend on satellites in orbit to receive our programming. They, in turn, depend on lots of Intel chips. But the television industry is about the consumer at the point of contact with the programming and, ultimately, the advertising that feeds off those contact points. That’s media. The Internet, which depends on the same things is also, therefore, media.

A small point? Not really. If the value is in the programming then attention to the programming becomes the paramount consideration, and we’re not there yet online. Advertising is not yet, fundamentally, aligned with consumer value online, which it still tries to escape or ignore by separating consumers from content.

Perhaps not in the future, when Oren Frank envisions a marketing world that will use technology to wade deeply into the value of content, converting brands into media and clients into publishers. He writes:

“As 4004 and its offspring become ubiquitous and disappear from our line of sight, the importance of writing great lines will again be paramount for marketing and communications. They will not be copy or poetry lines, but lines of code. Our future lies in writing great software that delivers brands as media and services to consumers, and we still have a unique advantage in understanding what they (and we) will want.

“As Brands are becoming media our clients will become publishers, and will shift to annuities — currently called “owned media”.

Owned media, paid media or earned media. Print, broadcast or cable. Internet. Whichever. Happy Birthday, Intel 4004, from Media to You.

Clear-Cutting the Search Environment: the (Over)Commercialization of the Internet

It is an interesting lament by Gavin Dunaway at ADOTAS regarding changes to the fertile internet landscape that are becoming terribly obvious in places, notably Google. Indeed, with the arrival of content mills the industry has effectively turned to clear-cutting the search environment to make room for fabricated developments, adding to the impact of commercial new media land holders that have been paying for and burning search results as fuel for nearly ten years. No surprise, by now there are unfortunate signs of erosion and blight, and growing concerns for the atmosphere.

Gavin appears to have been pushed to this despair by Professor Vivek Wadhwa, who wrote a piece in Tech Crunch titled, Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. In it, Professor Wadhwa writes,

“Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers. Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money. There’s no way to do a meaningful chronological search.”

Yup. That’s pretty much true. Fortunately, the internet is a renewable resource and new shoots are starting to sprout, such as Blekko, which Gavin and Professor Wadhwa mention. A little balance in the eco-system going forward with attention to sustainable media practices would be a good idea now, for which a reliance on organic content is always the key component.

Jonathan Salem Baskin Puts the Cards on the Table: Brands Died with Mass Media

Please consider this statement:

Since 1980 the number of consumer products has grown and fragmented significantly. Today, for instance, there are in excess of 40,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) in the average supermarket, which is triple the number 30 years ago. Alongside, in response, the media business has grown equally fragmented in order to keep pace with the need of marketers to reach their many different target audiences within supportive media environments. In each case – consumer product and consumer media – the driver has been demand among consumers for personal value.

Hold that thought.

Now turn to the column by marketing consultant, Jonathan Salem Baskin, in Ad Age this week where he pointedly says:

“Brands and mass media are inexorably connected. Brands — the premise that ideas could be grafted onto (or over) businesses — came into existence hand-in-hand with the mass-media tools of the 20th century that created them. Brands haven’t survived multiple iterations of technology and cultural change; they were born in a particular moment in history, and that moment ended over a decade ago.”

And, he continues:

“Many brands are dead, only they don’t know it yet. They died when the mass media that delivered them fractured into endless outlets and communication became two-way, thereby making the ideas that differentiated one brand from the next harder to believe and nearly impossible to sustain. The problems that plague them aren’t just communications strategy but matters of substance.”

To be clear, brand substance is very much on Jonathan’s mind in his column. He writes:

“Nobody needs your brand because it is a cool or engaging idea. Nobody wakes up with any need or desire to spend more of their life with your marketing. Nobody needs your brand because you give money to charity, generate an incessant stream of online content, or because you’ve made up some special sauce factor that differentiates your product or service benefits from others through measurements such as an enhanced experience or a pervasive Twitter presence.

 “Brands are different only if they’re really different, and this year would be the perfect opportunity to come up with the substantive [emphasis added] reasons why consumers need yours vs. how you’re going to use neat new ways to tell them the same old things.”

This is good, earnest stuff. In all likelihood, we have a meeting with yet another brand consulting client of Jonathan’s to thank for having asked him once too many times, “Can you come back with a social media strategy?” after which Jonathan sped away thinking dark thoughts. Those thoughts turned into an Ad Age column that entreats the marketing world to, essentially, quit faking it.

Back to the beginning and the thought you are holding.

No one ever seems to want to make the connection between consumer product and media fragmentation as a thing that occurred jointly, organically, in response to consumer demand. In most cases, media fragmentation is regarded as a bad thing and product fragmentation is regarded as a necessary thing in response to an empowered consumer. They are never regarded together. Jonathan Baskin is no exception.

“Old media still drive the bus. Enough with the blather that CMOs are scared of new media; old media works, whether as the news context that drove awareness of Ford so its social-media entertainment got traction, or paid placements, as in the case of those hilarious commercials (and in-store price promos) that launched Old Spice’s viral video experiment.”

His column is remembering a time when brands issued brand promises and built consumer relationships by delivering on those promises. Now, he suspects, brand marketers are trying to issue relationships because someone said – lots of people said, actually – that the new marketing reality is about relationships. Of course, the reaction from consumers disputes this. Consumer groups, in fact, are seeking laws to restrain advertisers and force them to keep their distance.

“The reason old media work,” Jonathan says, “has everything to do with saying what you mean, and backing it up with tangibly real behaviors. These are the new currencies of successful and sustainable brands.”

Fine, except that old media has nothing to do with it. Any media will work for brands if buttressed by tangible behaviors that deliver on real brand promises, and no media will work if the substance of those promises is missing. These are not new currencies: It is an old saying that nothing kills a bad product faster than great advertising.

But, Jonathan Baskin has made a vitally important point – in effect, a challenge to the marketing world. Brands, he contends, are an invention of the mass media era and now that mass media is gone, brands – many of them, at least – are dead.

Yes to the first point. No to the second. For one thing, if old media still drives the bus, as Jonathan says, old media is not gone or useless. Old media lives on in support of brands and the data says so. But in a deeper sense the history of the past 30 years says that brands are not just “inexorably connected” to “mass media”, but to all media. Brands and media have been equally affected by the desire of consumers for choice, which has led to diversity and fragmentation in each case. Rather than being what separates them, fragmentation is what joins them together – and, ultimately, what offers brands a way forward in the new media age, bus or no bus.

Media, however, is the operative term, not users. Users, Jonathan Baskin rightly points out, do not wake up “with any need or desire to spend more of their life with your marketing.” Old media worked because marketers were unencumbered by the idea that they could have a one-to-one marketing relationship with consumers. They blissfully built their brands relying on old media as the conduit for those relationships. In that way, media helped build brands, but brand promises are what built the relationships.

So, concludes Jonathan Baskin:

“This is the challenge for 2011: thinking past the distractions of vague hopes and useless noise and understanding the products, services, activities and processes that distinguish your brand from all others; identifying why any of it matters.”

Which could easily be recognized as a challenge to the broader media community – new and old – and that’s no coincidence.