About half-way through. This book is funny, smart and scary/exciting. I’ll post some excerpts tomorrow. If you’re counting on media and advertising (as we now know them) to be around in five years, do NOT read this book. (Amazon)
I don’t think I’ve ever met a newspaper advertising salesperson. Given that (until recently?) newspapers are jammed with ads, doesn’t that seem odd? During my Radio Years, I wrote countless commericals and it was common to start from an ad torn from the local newspaper.
My sense back then was that businesses “bought” newspaper ads rather than having to be “sold.” A grocery store HAD to have the weekly specials in the local paper.
I suspect far more time an effort went into the layout of the ad than the selling.
If we have any current or former newspaper sales people reading this, leave us a comment. I’d love to know more about the sales process and how it has changed or is changing.
We completed a make-over of one of Learfield’s websites yesterday. Like most companies, we’re watching our expenses, so I was pleased to bring it in for the $59 I paid for the theme (not counting my time and some IT help with site prep).
Since the beginning of the year, we’ve converted a dozen websites to WordPress and the process has gone very smoothly. With 50 users working in half a dozen offices, we needed a very friendly content management system and WordPress has delivered. Both for the people working in our newsrooms and for me.
There are literally thousands of plug-ins for every conceivable task. And they’re all free (or donor supported).
I’m not a designer but the variety of affordable WordPress themes is staggering. After a good bit of looking, I found myself coming back again and again to two providers:
StudioPress has great-looking themes that cost about $60 each. Use as-is or have one customized for a couple of hundred bucks.
Thesis is the theme I chose for our news networks. Out of the box, it’s a clean, minimalist design. We can add a coat of Candy Apple Glitter Flake paint later, but for now, I wanted something that was easy to manage under the hood.
Both of these developers have great support forums and documentation.
I’ve spent less than $2,000 on the refresh of ALL of our websites. Aside from some great help by our IT folks, and the day-to-day content posting by our news and sports staff, I support all of these by myself.
If quick turn-around is a requirement, StudioPress/Thesis + WordPress is a winning combination. If the content has been assembled, I can get a site up and running in a matter of a few hours.
Fast, inexpensive and fun. For the win.
Nobody talks about getting into a land war with China anymore but back during the Cold War, it was generally understood to be a bad idea. And someone would point out that if every Chinese man, woman and child started marching into the ocean, they’d never run out of people because of the birth rate. Which I gather is less of a problem these days.
I only bring this up in the context of more troops for Afghanistan. I don’t know if the Chinese have troops there, but they could if they wanted to. And that’s my point.
Want to find Bin Ladden? Squash the Taliban? No problem. We’ll just line up a a few million of our soldiers, about two feet apart, and walk from one end of (fill in the name of country) to the other. When one of our guys gets shot or falls in a hole, we’ll send a replacement.
Yes, it’s a dumb strategy. But not much dumber than what we’re doing. And since the Chinese leaders don’t have to worry about mid-term elections, they can skip a lot of stupid stuff. But maybe they’d do this, just to clean up our mess.
“You go home. We’ll take care of these rock piles and the whackos who live there. Fix your economy, do something about your schools, and clean up the corruption in your financial and political institutions. When you get your shit together, call us.”
This post from a year ago is still getting comments. The latest from “Will”:
“Just canceled. Used the corporate customer relations number. XM had my account all screwed up. They deactivated my account and would not waive the $14 reactivation fee. I asked if they could not or would not. They said they could do it, however, go %^&$ yourself. (not quite in those terms) I’ve been with them since inception and had up to 5 radios at one time. Kept canceling a radio every time they raised the family plan prices. Very short sited company. At least I saved a few hours on hold finding this number on this blog.”
My little post is 4th result of almost 98,000 search results. And all of the comments are in this vein. Doesn’t this scream that the company knows they won’t make it and have adopted a scorched earth strategy?
I’ve recently noticed most popular brands of bar soap are sold in boxes, instead of just the paper wrapper. You don’t have to be a genius to figure this out. It makes it a little less obvious –in the store– to see that they’re giving you less soap for the same prices.
The bar on the top is Dial (4.0 oz). The bar on the bottom is Ivory (4.5 oz). It appears to my untrained eye that they’ve shaved more than half an ounce but Ivory is probably less dense (it floats!).
One of the marketing shills would undoubtedly try to convince me the big dip and rounded corners make it easier to hold some horse shit.
It is my sincere hope –long shot, I know– than in a couple of months I can search Dial Soap and find this post on the first page of Google results.
Could this mean I don’t have to every see a flowmax ad again? I had no idea YouTube had organized news in this manner.
We’ve been fiddling around with the Internet for about 15 years and tried lots of different ideas. Streaming audio of debate from the state legislature; oral arguments from the state supreme court; online database of accident reports format he state highway patrol; and –as the say– the list goes on. One idea could never get off the ground was Obits Online. This was back in the late ’90’s as I recall. Funeral homes would log in to our online database and post funeral announcements. The public could search by name, date, city, etc etc. We pitched the funeral home associations in Missouri and Iowa (maybe some other states, I don’t recall). The idea never got off the ground because most funeral homes were still trying to figure out their fax machines and were convinced the people in their communities were not using computers and were unlikely to do so any time soon. I bring up this stillborn digital baby after spotting this story (AdAge.com) about a TV station in Michigan that’s running on-air and online obituary ads after three of the region’s four daily newspapers reduced publication to three days a week. The station’s owner, Meredith Corp., expects to roll the concept out to its other stations and says it is also in licensing discussions with other station groups. At $100 an obituary, it’s not clear that WNEM or Meredith has really tapped a massive vein of cash. Revenue from obituaries “is a teeny subset” of overall newspaper-classified revenue, said Mort Goldstrom, VP-advertising at the Newspaper Association of America. Fees charged by papers can range from as high as $1,000 for a major metro to a few hundred dollars for a midmarket paper. And many small community and weekly newspapers still run obituaries for free. WNEM started running obituaries in August at no charge, to get people familiar with the service and to work out any software bugs. Since launching as a paid service in early September, executives said, the station has over 700 obituaries in its system. The new obituaries are also prompting a change in the way people go about their daily routine, he said. “The biggest issue that we have is the elderly people that don’t have the ability to pay for internet access or don’t have a computer. Now they see it flash on TV and those that don’t have a computer can call the funeral home and ask for information,” Mr. Luczak said.” Having the TV station to promote and leverage the idea is an important component. I hope they make some money and provide a useful service. Clyde found this blogging success story in the St. Louis Business Journal. It’s about HOK a global architectural firm with headquarters in St. Louis (I assume). It’s a biggie, with $752 million in revenue in 2008. A year ago they launched a blog (HOKLife.com) to put a more human face on the firm, which has 2,000+ employees, and to communicate with potential hires, clients and competitors. It’s a group blog with three dozen contributors from their offices around the world, whose posts, by the way, are not edited. Senior writer John Gilmore: “Young readers are very savvy, and they know when something’s not authentic. If hour’s not authentic, it’s the kiss of death for a corporate blog.” True that. The Business Journal article included some findings of a 2009 survey (of companies with more than 1,000 employees). Among the findings, companies with blogs reported higher levels of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, greenness, revenue and market share. The companies with blogs reported revenue per employee of $336,792, compared to $263,333 for those without blogs. Despite success stories like this one, there remains –even in our company– pockets of resistance to blogging as a communications tool. And I’m convinced it comes down to control. Like HOK’s Gilmore said above, it’s got to be authentic and that means unfiltered and unedited. And that’s really difficult for managers who are centralized, command-and-control guys in their DNA. If you have a subscription to the StL Biz Journal, you can read the full article here. Interesting post at AdAge.com on hyperlocal media and how one big media company –in this case NBC– is attempting to play “at the intersection of advertising, marketing and programming, potentially creating new kinds of content in the burgeoning local arena.” “We’ll explore what the best solutions are to connect across all platforms. Maybe it’s finding a great blogger who lives in that community who becomes an on-air personality. It’s creating things for people to feel more connected to their community.” “Local media is going to be the intersection of utility and entertainment and everyday life. As things are globalizing, local becomes even more vital. You have the same brands, the same food, etc., wherever you go now. Local is what makes things different; it gets to what people love about their neighborhood, why they decided to live there.” “You start with an event or something that happens in a small community in one locale and you’re looking at it to amplify out from that. NBC Local is well-placed to help big marketers to put those new kinds of programs in place. You’ll still have people buying local 30-second spots, but more and more also putting together programs that make an impact on a very local level and have that radiate out in significant ways.” Uh, isn’t this what local broadcasters and newspapers are doing? Or should be doing? Or used to do? Are the Big Guys planning on doing “local” better than local media? Stay tuned.Obits on TV
“For $100, the station will run the deceased’s name and photo on-air and publish a full-length obituary on ObitMichigan.com. Full-screen graphics listing names of people who have passed away are broadcast during the local station’s morning and noon shows Monday through Friday, as well as on weekend morning shows. Viewers are pushed to the website for more information about the deceased as well as funeral-services information.Big St. Louis architectural firm getting their blog on
“Mass Roots Marketing”