1,000 $100 advertisers

“Newspapers are losing their own core market because they didn’t understand the scale of the internet. They still thought mass when they should have realized that small is the new big. That is, online, newspapers still threw their lot in with the big advertisers who had been the only ones who could afford their mass products. They didn’t see the mass of potential spending in a new population of small, local advertisers who never could afford to advertise in newspapers but who now could afford to buy targeted, efficient, inexpensive ads online.”

“Even the online sales teams at newspaper companies didn’t how now to sell small; they were — as I once put it in a meeting — putting all their effort into saving the old $100,000 advertiser and saw getting 1,000 $100 advertisers as a distraction. The new-media divisions had already become big and old.” — Buzz Machine

Jeff Jarvis goes on to offer suggestions on how newspapers can generate new, local dollars online:

“Start a new company that makes small, local advertising its sole focus. That means they need to set up automated systems to accept and place highly targeted local ads and directories. That means they need to come up with new means of selling without on-the-street sales staffs: outbound phone sales, direct response, even local sales network (instead of citizen journalists, citizen sales people), making aggressive use of the promotional power of the newspaper while you still have it. That means they need to have lots of targeted local content without large editorial staffs.”

Most sales organizations with which I am familiar are just not wired for this. The math just doesn’t work. It will be interesting to see which traditional media companies are able to make their sales machine work in a New Online World.

Mass media advertising moving toward “mass personalization”

One of our news directors forwarded a very interesting article by Graeme Newell, a “web marketing and revenue specialist” for 602 Communications. The article (“Hiding – The Latest Challenge in News Marketing”) touches on how social networks (My Space,Facebook, etc) will change (are changing?) how mass media advertising works (or does not work).

Mr. Newell explains how difficult it will be for companies to advertise and market to those who choose to communicate with only those on their “friends” list. That’s a gross oversimplification of one of the articles key points. Here’ are a few of my take-aways:

“Spam” will grow to include any message that does not come from a trusted source.
As consumers get more and more overwhelmed by the amount of communication in their lives, smart technology will help them prioritize and eliminate all the time wasters in their daily routine. These systems will filter TV ads, email, text messages, web interaction, phone messages and all other forms of personal communication. The trend will be that if I don’t know you, then I don’t want to talk to you.

Technology will seek to eliminate “interruption” advertising
There is an adage on the internet that if you obstruct the flow of information in any way, the community will not fight you, but simply go around you. You will quickly find yourself irrelevant. As technology gets better and better, tools will continue to arise that simply eliminate unwanted interruptions like mass advertising and promotion. Holding people hostage and forcing them to watch a non-targeted ad is not going to be tolerated in the future. The audience will demand that the ads they let in be customized to their individual tastes and desires.

Mass media advertising will move towards a system of “mass personalization.”
People want products in their lives that share their priorities, interests and values. As mass markets continue to splinter into ever more fragmented and specialized groups, consumers will expect advertisers to follow their lead. Technology will allow truly personalized ad communication with millions of people – all of it customized to the emotional and intellectual needs of the buyer.

Now that everyone (online) can –theoretically– reach everyone else, we realize we really only care about hearing from our friends (or select acquaintances). Social networks –augmented by technologies like text messaging– make it possible to do so.

If I ignore most of my email and rarely turn on a radio or TV (without the Tivo filter)… how will advertisers and marketers reach me?

I’m sorry I can’t link tot he full article. I can’t find it online but will keep searching.

IBM Report: “The End of Advertising as We Know It”

Podcasting News points to a report compiled by IBM with the scary title: “The End of Advertising as We Know It.” I’m not sure what IBM knows about the state of advertising but they surveyed more than 2,400 consumers and 89 ad execs globally.

The report from Big Blue forecasts “greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50.”

When I read stuff like this, I ask the men and women in our company (who sell a LOT of advertising) if they get a similar read and the answer is always, “Nope, everything is A-OK.” No changes on the horizon. Everything is hunky-dory.

Well, five years isn’t that long. We shall see what we shall see.

PS: Here’s one more graph from the report summary:

More than half of ad professionals polled by IBM expect that in the next five years open advertising exchanges (currently led by companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL) will take 30 percent of current revenues now commanded by traditional broadcasters and media. Nearly half of the advertising survey respondents anticipate a significant (greater than 10%) revenue shift away from the 30-second spot within the next five years, and almost 10 percent of respondents thought there would be a dramatic (greater than 25 percent) shift. Two-thirds of advertising experts surveyed by IBM expect 20 percent of advertising revenue to move from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years.

More ads flowing to blogs?

The Society for New Communications Research is a think tank on new media. They recently asked a couple of hundred advertising agencies about their plans to advertise and market in “conversational media” (blogs and podcasts and such). Among the findings:

“In the next five years, a majority of advertising and marketing professionals expect to spend more money on so-called conversational media–or online media that encompasses things like blogs and podcasts–than on advertising through traditional media such as newspapers or magazines.

Today, a majority of these agencies said that they spend about 2.5 percent of their total budgets on conversational media, but by 2012, they plan to tip that percentage to more than they spend on traditional media.”

From a post by Stefanie Olsen over at the C|Net Blog (Thanks to Kevin O’Keefe at LexBlog for the pointer.)

As one who has made his living from “radio spots” for 30+ years, this is hard to imagine. But five years isn’t that long. I guess we’ll see.

Blogs most trusted form of web advertising

“Consumer-generated content is by far a more trusted form of advertising worldwide than search engine ads, banner ads, or text ads, according to Nielsen, and is trusted almost as much as physical word-of-mouth. 66 percent of North Americans trust consumer-generated media, such as blogs. Only higher trust ranking was ‘other consumer recommendations,’ which earned 78 percent of respondents’ trust.” [WebProNews via LexBlog]

Recent example: George’s review of the new Sony HRD-CX7 digital video camera. I happen to know that George knows a LOT about cameras, hardware and software. If he likes this camera enough to buy and recommend it, that’s all I need to know.

Buy $1,000 in radio spots, get $2,000 back

TechCrunch wonders if Google’s radio ad network –Google Audio– is in trouble:

“Google is offering $2,000 to any advertiser who spends $1,000 on a Google Audio ad campaign. The $2,000 comes in the form of a credit on future ad campaigns, but part of it still comes out of Google’s pocket since it needs to pay the radio stations who will run the ads. It amounts to a “buy one, get two free” offer and is good through the end of the year.

If (Google) truly has a better way of buying and selling radio ads, advertisers and radio stations will quickly figure that out on their own. It is not a good sign when Google has to resort to paying customers to try out a new product.”

Update 10/15/07: This from a reader (who prefers to remain anonymous) who works at a radio station that runs Google Audio ads:

“This week we ran on average 18 :60’s a day for Google. They just fill in avails that are on our schedule, so many of them are in the evening between 6p-11p. Some hours may have a Google Ad in each stop set.

I don’t see the checks but I’ve heard they range from $500-$2,000 a month. We do have the ability to block out any hours or programming we don’t want their stuff in.

To me it would just seem to be up to the station owner/company is the money worth tying up the time with these filler type ads.  I’ve yet to hear an ad I thought specifically targets to our region or even state… and no real big name company’s like Ford, GM, McDonald’s, JC Penney, Target or anything.”

Sunglasses with hidden video camera

Too pricey by a long shot but I confess I’d love have a pair of these.

“A very stylish pair of sunglasses with a colour camera brilliantly hidden within the frame to give colour pictures and exceptionally clear audio, all recorded on to a personal video recorder. This is a wired, but very discreet system, and the beauty of it is that you know that whatever you look at is what is being filmed. The personal video recorder includes a built-in colour monitor and speaker, 32MB internal memory, which can be expanded by inserting a more powerful SD/MMC card and the ability to time and date stamp all video recordings. This really is “state of the art” equipment which is ideal for investigative journalists, private investigators and “mystery” shoppers.

Blinks ad adlets

“Miniature radio ads, spanning just a few seconds in length, are a hit in Hollywood, says market leader Clear Channel Communications Inc., which launched the spots known as blinks and adlets last year.

Homer Simpson’s unmistakable “D’oh!” or “Woohoo!” followed by the familiar tagline “Tonight on Fox!” for example, has been a popular two-second ad — known as a blink — for Fox Broadcasting.

Unlike longer ads, which run during minutes-long commercial breaks, the blinks and adlets are slipped in between songs.

Clear Channel declined to disclose pricing, but one ad executive said five-second adlets typically fetch as much as 20% of 60-second ads, which cost about $800 in major markets, and two-second blinks cost 10%.”  

— From latimes.com

Banner Blindness

Jakob Nielsen shares results of new eyetracking studies which confirm –"for the umpteenth time"– that banner blindness is real:

"Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad. On hundreds of pages, users didn’t fixate on ads. Scanning is more common than reading, but users will sometimes dig into an article if they really care about it."