Marketing Consulting Blog

By Chris Roush on Wired Magazine

March saw an increase almost across the board for mainstream business magazines in terms of ad revenue and ad pages, but decreases for the personal finance glossy titles, according to data from the Magazine Publishers of America.

Leading the way was Inc. magazine, which saw a 39.3 percent increase in ad revenue to $7.5 million and a 34.5 percent jump in ad pages. Right behind it were Barron’s and The Economist, which saw increases in ad revenue of 29.7 percent and 25.4 percent, respectively. Barron’s ad revenue jumped to nearly $6 million, while the Economist was at $10.9 million. Barron’s ad pages rose 19 percent, while the Economist’s ad pages rose 12 percent.

Among other business magazines:

– BusinessWeek saw a 2.3 percent increase in ad revenue to $24.9 million for March, but a 4.5 percent decrease in ad pages;

– Fast Company saw a 6.7 percent increase in ad revenue and a 2.7 percent increase in ad pages;

– Forbes saw an 18.3 percent increase in ad revenue to $31.7 million, but only a 1.7 percent rise in ad pages;

– Fortune saw a 2.5 percent increase in ad revenue to $24.3 million, but a 5.3 percent decline in ad pages.

In addition, Wired was up 3.1 percent in ad revenue but down 6.4 percent in ad pages. Business 2.0 was down 1.5 percent in ad revenue and off 7.5 percent in ad pages compared to March 2006.

The personal finance magazines fared the worst. Kiplinger’s saw an 18.2 percent drop in ad revenue and a 19.8 percent drop in ad pages compared to March 2006, while Money magazine was down 14.1 percent in ad revenue and 22.8 percent in ad pages. Smart Money was off 17.2 percent in ad revenue and 20.8 percent in ad pages.

All of these numbers take on greater significance starting Monday with the first issue of new business magazine Conde Nast Portfolio hitting New York newsstands. How it fares in the market — and who it takes ad revenue away from — will be closely watched in the business of business magazines.

See the numbers here.

There are several poorly written articles circling the bowl on a daily basis, and this may end up being yet another one, but it's alarming to me that professional journalists consistently botch spelling and grammar. It used to be newspapers, magazines, and books served as an example of the proper use of punctuation, word groupings, grammar, and synonyms. Not anymore.

On any given day, I challenge you to count the number of typos or grammatical miscues in your local fish wrap. In the past, you'd be lucky to find one per month. Nowadays, you'd be lucky NOT to find one per section. Online versions are even worse, but that is likely due to the push to get more and more content live and the desire to make the online versions more "free flowing."

That said, is it too much to ask of someone paid to write for a living to pay attention to the squiggly lines in the word processor? Those lines are trying to tell you something! At least pay them some lip service, and double check your work before you submit it to an editor. Speaking of an editor, what are these people responsible for now? In the old days, they served as quality control, but today they seem to be more interested in cranking out material to meet or beat a deadline. Quality doesn't seem to matter anymore and we, the public, don't seem to care because we still read the stuff even if it is sub par without complaining loud enough for anyone to hear us.

Another reason sub par material may have become acceptable is the big business management approach of the major literary outlets. When larger companies attempt to manage numerous resources by stretching everyone thin in the interest of "productivity," things naturally slip through the cracks. I run a small business so if a larger firm came to me and offered to buy me out for a nice chunk of change, I'd have to listen. It would be nice if there weren't so many mergers and spin-offs of media companies, but that is the world we live in today.

You regularly hear phrases such as instant gratification, microwave society, what have you done for me lately, etc. when describing the order of the day. They all apply, but are we in such a hurry that we can't take a little more pride in the work we produce? I would hope the majority of people would be embarrassed by producing a widely viewed article or literary piece peppered with poor grammar and/or spelling errors. The good old days of looking to print media as an example to follow are long gone, but I wish they'd return at least in this aspect. Am I asking for too much?

By GuyKawasaki

Avenue A Razorfish recently published the 2007 Digital Outlook Report (6230.6K). This report examines trends in the way consumers, publishers, and advertisers employ digital media to have a conversation with each other. Specifically, it covers the following areas:

1. Digital Buzz

2. Digital Media (R)evolution

3. Search

4. Consumer Dialogues: The Digital Class

5. Measurement

6. Op-Ed: What’s on Our Minds?

   • Creative Considerations for 2007 by Jim Gibson

   • Why Authority Matters in Web 2.0 by Laura Porto

   • The Death of the Page View: How AJAX, RSS, and Widgets Will Force Us to Define a New Metric for User Engagement by Garrick Schmitt

   • “We”conomics: Monetization of the Evolving Digital Economy by Greg Pomaro

   • The New (Media) World Order by Bruce Woolsey

7. Five Questions

   • Nathan Levi on Search Marketing

   • Iain McDonald on Viral Markting

   • Ray Velez on Windows Vista

   • David Baker on E-Mail Marketing

   • Olaf Czeschner on the Evolution of Digital Creative

   • Grace Ho on Mobile Marketing

   • Margie Chiu on Digital Strategy and Analytics

8. Five Things Every Executive Should Know About Digital in 2007

It’s very useful reading for anyone involved with digital media, so check it out.

By Michael Arrington on USATODAY

USATODAY relaunched its website yesterday with a parade of new features that will add a significant social layer to the site that wasn’t there before. The website is no longer a simple hose spouting news at readers. It has become a full on social network, integrating user generated content in intelligent and interesting ways.

The list is sort of ho-hum at first - bigger pictures, better tabs, etc. But then there are a whole bevy of social feature as well. A few of the features are below. A full list is here. They’ve also integrated various Ajax components to the site - nothing over the top, but enough to make the interface a lot more pleasant to navigate.

New Features:

• User Comments: Every article now has user comments.
• Most Popular: Read articles based on popularity rather than in the order assigned by USATODAY editors. Articles are ranked by Most Read, Most Commented, Most Recommended (see below) and Most Emailed.
• Digg-Like Article Voting: Click “recommend” on an article and the vote tally increases by 1. Highly recommended articles appear under the “Most Popular” tab.
• Profile Pages: Registered users have their own page that aggregates their comments, recommended articles and other content.

Unlike some of the tepid experiments tried by other major publications, these show an intelligent commitment to building community at the site. Steve Rubel says they haven’t gone far enough, and suggest additional features. I don’t disagree, but this is a big commitment already by one of the largest mainstream media publications in the world. Let’s hope the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and others follow soon.

Update: Allen Stern has a good video overview of the new features.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

By Media Guerrilla

Reading about DoTheRightThing reminds me of a conversation I had a while back with a friend where we jokingly talked about how ridiculously easy yet powerful it would be to slap a community-driven "trustiness meter" on every company's website.

Think about it...an amazing amount of agony, energy, expense, and burden goes into crafting, shaping and analyzing a brand image and even then, in the end (at best), you really only have a loose interpretation of a brand's perceived reputation, equity and trust.

For the public, it'd be a hellofa lot easier to just glance at the trustiness meter, like you do at the star ratings for a hotel or your gas gauge, to determine if a company deserves your time, money or attention. And for the PR and marketing folks, it'd be a hellofa lot easier to just glance at the trustiness meter to determine whether or not you're gonn'a get out of bed....

NOTE: The trustiness meter should not be confused with the trust barometer. While both are fictional measures of trust, one was created by a real company, the other over beers.

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Copied from Media Guerrilla

By Brian White on Youtube

Filed under: Rumors, Products and services, Management, Consumer experience, Internet, Google (GOOG)

It was bound to happen -- Big Media wants to know who is uploading copyrighted material to YouTube, now owned by Google, Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG). Short of raking out lawsuits in expedient fashion, 20th Century Fox has served YouTube a subpoena as of yesterday. It wants to find out who uploaded copies of entire recent episodes of "24" and "The Simpsons." Those are two of the largest-audience shows for Fox -- so understandably, the company is a tad miffed.

I have news for them -- although YouTube's presence has expanded into the limelight in the last year -- capped by extensive media coverage when Google bought the company in exchange for some of its stock -- there have been entire episodes of all kinds of copyrighted television shows on YouTube since its inception. There are constant "we are policing our site" comments from YouTube and now from Google, but freeloaders of content and violators of copyrights will *always* find a way to make tons o' content available to anyone with a 'net connection. Say it with me here -- BitTorrent.

Will media companies that produce mostly video content start barking like wild dogs in a similar fashion to the music industry (RIAA) that has sued its own customers and has taken down file-sharing networks due to massive copyright abuse? If so, the first few fertile steps are being laid now, since YouTube requires just a web browser (no file-sharing software or network knowledge needed).

The MPAA has been following in the RIAA's footsteps in trying to crack down on users posting copyrighted content online for all to see (and hear). In this Fox example, the damage "could be" worse. Why? Well, the "24" episodes in question actually appeared on YouTube before their prime time premiere on January 14. When copyright material starts making it to YouTube before it officially airs, we have issues -- and some network execs have tissues.

Some good advice in Robb's column over at Media 2.0:

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By Robb

Trends for 2007 - the "Starbucking" of the business world continues along at a strong pace. Revisiting Marian Salzman, we find in her new book "NextNow" she predicts that Coffee bars will be more populated by workers because they are among the "in-between spaces" where telecommuters can work and hold meetings away from home. Matter of fact, I'm having one of these Starbucks meeting myself tonight at 6 PM in Union Square. It's a meeting space I rent for about $3.42 (Cafe Mocha) for an hour. Small Business/Startup Advice: with instant messaging, Skype, laptops, Vonage and Basecamp, maybe it's time to ask your angel investor/venture capital folks to buy you a Starbucks gift card instead of a desk in the office park. (No one goes public anymore - God Save the IPO - it's about private equity.)

Big Brands Lack Key Ingredients on MySpace- Says Netconcepts founder Stephan Spencer, "Within the MySpace ecosystem exist marketers. But most are clueless. One would expect sophisticated MySpace presences from big brand marketers. However, that is usually not the case. And generally those that are present, like Blockbuster UK, 7Eleven, and Meijer, lack key ingredients for MySpace success—like an impressive number of "Friends." Marketing Advice to Big Brand Marketers on MySpace: Like gaining earned media offline via public relations endorsements, best for brand marketers online to move away from mere sponsorships of content areas and gain the "earned" endorsement of MySpace users - yes, gaining friends retail one by one like a politician knocking on doors. How to do this? Brand blogging. What's that? It's giving individual consumers the opportunity to talk back, an individual voice in the contruction of your business and your brand. Ask users to be a part of your marketing. This is not a difficult idea, it's just that famed marketers since the Positioning Era have been engraining us with controlling the message. Now as the new era of "co-control marketing" dawns it's not that the old folks (like me) can't "co-control" market, it's that the young folks already "get it" - but the young folks aren't typically at the dashboard of the big brand marketing budget. Yet!