Marketers measure impact in terms of impressions and frequency and blah, blah, blah. I ask you, fair reader, approximately how many impressions is this worth?
This kid flips—seriously—over his Christmas gift: a shiny new Wii. At first, he goes nearly catatonic. And then, he geeks like a LAN party.
Call me crazy, but I think he has that “I know that I’m going to end up on YouTube” gleem in his eye, does he not?
If you are a brander, PRAY that your brand makes people this go-nuts.
Maybe it’s the double shot of wheat grass I just sucked down. Maybe it’s the day-old gnocchi with shrimp that I ate just prior. Or maybe it’s these sweaters.
Whatever the case, my tummy is flippin’ about right now.
And this absolutely takes the cake. Or pie. Or piecake. Ew.
What the what?!
And while we have you here, check out “Holly Jolly Christmas” from the throwback classic, 1998’s “The Magic of Christmas” by Joy Electric. He is the only artist on the planet whose genre is best classified as Nintendo Pop. Dig it.
Everybody but who’s anybody is talking about it: every baggy-panted tween and every power tie/power suit CEO. I have a Facebook page. I have a Twitter account (which is underutilized, I must admit). I even belong to a few Ning networks. What’s a marketer to make of all this noise? Where are the hard numbers and ROI stats?
Ick.
Gen Ys aren’t moved by hard numbers and data. And only God can save your brand if you approach your marketing as such
The beauty of social marketing is that it’s completely customizable. Pick one or two or twenty. And go. Give your fans content. Make contests. Give them the down-low. Tease them with videos. Start conversations with them. Ask questions. Answer questions.
A great example of a strong social media usage are the efforts of NBC’s “Late Night” with Jimmy Fallon campaign. In prepping for Fallon’s takeover of “Late Night,” they have been building hype primarily via a vlog (video blog). He announced his house band, The Roots—a severe, welcome, departure from the norm—on the site only days ago.
At the bottom of his vlog are 18 (count ‘em—18!) different social media outlets, ranging from the usual suspects (MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube) to several niche entities, like MyYearbook, imeem, and Last.fm.
NBC is simply giving fans a chance to connect and share the NEW “Late Night” brand. It’s not astrophysics, it’s common sense.
Twitter, the foremost microblogging site, has an incidentally famous “system error” screen. When too many people tweet (post), which causes an overload, an inconspicuous illustration of a whale, being hoisted from the water by birds, appears. This terms has organically been branded the “Fail Whale.” It has become synonymous with failing—at anything.
So don’t be a Fail Whale. Get in. Get gritty. Try something. Tweet. Blog. Post videos. Write down your thoughts. It doesn’t have to be sharply refined, it just has to BE.
Be honest and transparent and authentic, and you will be a major part of your consumers’ lives. And that is certainly no Fail Whale.
Atmosphere, the hip-hop duo from Minneapolis, MN, recently played Letterman. Blind Society and Atmosphere’s label, Rhymesayers, have joined forces like the Justice League. The newest update to the Blind Society website will feature music from Rhymesayers recording artists, such as Atmosphere, Grayskul, MF Doom, and the legendary Jake One (producer for hip-hop icons such as 50 Cent and Freeway).
Aside from making phenomenal music, Rhymesayers encapsulates the Blind Society belief quite nicely: create a conversation with your best customer, and give them the tools to share your brand.
An example: to promote Atmosphere’s latest album, “When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Sh*t Gold,” Rhymesayers used several nontraditional/alternative tactics to separate the band from the heaps and heaps of other artists vying for everybody’s limited attention span and iPod space.
They aired a series on YouTube called “Paint It Gold.” Each week, Slug and Ant (the members of Atmospere) would sit in Slug’s basement, answering questions from fans. The show is not glitzy and glammy—it is shot with two handheld camcorders on tripods. The low-budget feel, however, speaks to Atmosphere’s positioning; it strengthens their brand.
In one webisode, they received two questions that, from a brander’s standpoint, are rather intriguing. The first question inquired about Atmosphere’s feelings on illegal downloading. Here is a transcript of their response:
Slug: I can’t really say I’m mad at it; I can see how it’s f*ckin’ up the industry. You know—
Ant: It’s not the worst thing in the world, though, huh?
Slug: There you have it. I know for a fact that there are lots of people, in the beginning of our career, who would’ve never heard of us had it not been for file sharing and things of that nature, you know? And people like us, we’ll adapt. We’ll figure it out. You can’t download a t-shirt, you know, right? We’ll figure it out, man, you know, like, whatever—we’re like cockroaches! Arrrrgh! Swashbucklin’!
The second question asked how the new revolution of social media and Web2.0 affects the underground culture. After joking around for a moment, Slug again fields the question with surprising insight.
As a national music magazine, we receive approximately 1.4 quillion promotional CDs each year in the office. For the most part, the dozens of bubble mailers that arrive every day keep it short and sweet. Inside, we find a CD, a one-sheet band bio, and very little else. It’s true that after hundreds, these mostly start to appear the same…
It was a Thursday. We were sifting through our bins of unopened mail, and I spotted an oddly-shaped package at the top of one heap. Intrigued, I ripped it open, and as always, stuck my hand in. Forgive the reference, but as they say in Titanic, at this point, all my experience was working against me. Months of bubble mailer opening had taught me that it’s safe to just reach in and pull out whatever is inside—and moreover, that whatever is inside will be clean and safe and dry. My mistake. My fingers found not the run-of-the-mill CD and random attention-getting object I had learned to expect from an unusually-proportioned press kit. Instead, an unfamiliar half-rancid, half-zesty odor assaulted my nostrils and I reflexively pulled my hand back out again. It was wet. There were flecks of gold on my fingers.
We were bewildered and without conclusion as we crowded around and peered inside the offending envelope. None of the sensory clues added up to anything any of us could identify. It’s a strange feeling when you think you should have enough input to at least hazard a guess at the situation, and yet you’re still completely dumbfounded. There was no visual to be had from the open end except for the shadowy side of something mottled and bulbous that intermittently caught the light.
After I vigorously washed my hands, we sprang into action. A pair of scissors was procured, which we used to cut open the envelope and to handle the contents inside. When aforementioned contents were first revealed to us, however, we still couldn’t say what we were looking at. It was round-ish. And squished-ish. And green-ish. And there were gold flakes everywhere. Below nestled a very damp and forlorn slimline CD case and an absolutely soaked one-sheet. Extracting the CD, we turned it over.
The unlucky album was by a hip-hop group called Atmosphere, and boasted the optimistic title, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold (out April 22 on Rhymesayers). We stared at it. The front cover sported a picture of Slug (Atmosphere’s MC and primary creative driving force) holding stacks and stacks of lemons.
Suddenly, it all came together in the same way all the facts add up at the end of a murder mystery. The citrus-cleaner smell. The juice. The fuzzy green substance. The gold flakes.
Now wait a second before you berate us for having taken so long to work through this particular puzzle. It seems simple enough to an outsider, I imagine (especially as it revealed itself to be so literal in the end), but take into account the fact that in no way would we ever expect to receive spoiled produce in a press kit. In a perfect world, in fact, no one would ever mail gold-coated citrus fruit in an unprotected, non-refrigerated package from so far away that it would have the time and opportunity to crush, soak everything, and then completely mold. These weren’t eventualities we knew to expect. Our collective jaws were on the floor.
They say any publicity is good publicity. I guess the jury’s still out on this one.
Here’s the music video for “You.” Who doesn’t love finger skateboards?!!
And here’s the music video for “Guarantees.” The whole song was recorded in one take—as was the video. Unique, me thinks…
And, thusly, Rhymesayers’ mentality lines up with that of Blind Society’s oh so nicely. What a fit.
Thinking outside of the box is not thinking out side the box. It’s a cliché—a tired, dusty LP in an iPod world. Alas, it’s the war cry from boardrooms a nation across.
“We need to think outside of the box!” screams an all-too-tired-of-this-friggen-economy marketer. What ensues? Fire an agency. Hire an agency.
“Surely,” said marketer reasons, “this time we got it right.”
Another six months passes, and little to nothing changes—for the positive.
That’s because the message sound like a broken record: BUY ME! BUY ME NOW! HOW ‘BOUT NOW?
Ugh. Kill me. Kill me now. How ‘bout now?
Traditional campaigns can look a lot like Neanderthals on a rampage, do they not?
As the notorious saying goes, “I know that half of my marketing budget is wasted. The problem is, I don’t know which half.”
The problem is deeper rooted than better creative or greater saturation. If someone wants to ignore your message, they’ll ignore it—no matter whether they see it once (no big deal) or two hundred times (and now you’re starting to upset them).
I have actually sworn off many a brand due to poor advertising. Bad commercials and poorly conceived print ads really make me mad. If you, Mr. Brand, don’t value me enough to make a quality advert, then you don’t mind wasting my time. And if you don’t mind wasting my time, I will be certain not to waste any of yours with, say, orders or online reviews (well, positive ones, anyroad) or by joining your Facebook group page. Believe it or not, Ripley, I am actually insulted by those types of ads.
A while back, a few friends suggested eating at a local restaurant. I protested quite stubbornly, “I will not support (edit this portion; they don’t merit the promotion), they wasted my time with that silly commercial. You know, the one they must have shot for $15 on a 1986-issue VHS stadium-sized camcorder. No. We can eat at Fate, though.
We @ Blind Society would sooner be caught jobless than hypocritical. So what did we do when Arizona State University came aknockin’?
What resulted was a 20-year record in season ticket sales: 50,000+.
What resulted was a nomination for the 2009 National Sports Forum Best Alternative Campaign award.
What resulted was, well, results.
So, the question is: do you want to be a broken record or a record breaker?
Click below to download the full portfolio from the Arizona State University 2008 football campaign.
Our boys @ Google have done it again: analytics for Flash! According to Mashable, “The explosion of Flash content like widgets has created several complex problems, like how to index it in search engines, how to make it work on mobile, and how to track it.”
The second problem, mobile, is being addressed. Adobe has already demonstrated its latest release, Flash Player 10, “running on Nokia’s Symbian operating system, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and Google’s Android. Real Flash, not Flash Lite. That leaves the Blackberry and iPhone platforms as the major holdouts in the Flash-free zone.” (ZDNet)
The first problem, now has an answer. And what does this mean for marketers? More authenticity, honest, and accountibility! “Advertisers can now (in theory) pay for actual engagement, because it can be accurately measured.” (Mashable)
Sprout Builder is an interesting tool for developers. Now, users who publish widgets and other Flash apps using Sprout can track metrics such as time spent, what links and objects users click within an app, and goal tracking – all from within the same Google Analytics account as their website.
Yes. Ma’am. Yes.
If we can answer the third problem, indexing for search engines, then the creative world as we know it will change instantly. And who better than Adobe to change the game?
We facebook on Facebook. (And sometimes, we still myspace on MySpace.)
We don’t like commercials. We don’t like billboards. We don’t want you, Mr. or Mrs. Big Brand, invading our lives, unless we say it’s okay. Then, and only then, may you engage us. And don’t talk to us ONLY when you want to sell us something. We have but precious little money, and we’ll spend it how WE see fit (on 007 tickets and the new Kaiser Chiefs album).
So if you want to earn the right to engage us, be relevant, be witty, and be self-effacing. We know that you’re not the greatest thing since sliced bread.*
(*That statement does not apply to Mini Coopers. Or the Puma Speed Cat. Or pre-LA Galaxy David Beckham.)
Speak to me when I want to be spoken to. If your timing is serendipitous enough, we’ll do the heavy lifting for you. We’ll write blogs and post videos. We’ll make our friends your friends.
Example: Apple on Vista. (This ad actually landed right on cnet.com’s Vista page. Whoever landed Apple this media buy gets a gold star.)
The message is humorous, and placement is impeccable. The result? It got blogged about and passed along countless times. The viral nature of the ad far outweighs the media spend.
Don’t be a dolt. Be innovative. Don’t talk at me, talk with me.
George Carlin may have passed away (and have been severely far removed from the ultra-connected genNEXT consumers), but he had it right:
We all have to tools to let you in or shut you out. We are the new gatekeepers. Play nice, or we won’t play at all.
(The preceding was just some random musings, morphed into a manifesto, on a quiet Thursday afternoon.)
How’s this for a nontraditional spin on traditional media: tell people the opposite of what you want them to do. People are going to do the opposite of what they’re told to do, anyroad.
Think of it like this:
You say: Buy now! Supplies are limited! First 30 callers get a bonus!
They hear: I desperately need your business! We have too many of these fangled things! Our product sucks so bad that we need to give you free stuff just to swindle you into buying it!
In 2004, P. Diddy decided to tell everyone to “Vote or Die.” And yet, no one died. He took himself too seriously. And we didn’t.
For this election, a cast of Hollywood’s finest and brightest (and Borat) tell us, refreshingly, “don’t vote.” The obvious sarcascm is that voting is important—that, at their very core, these celebs believe in the power of a vote.
I love Borat saying, “Don’t vote! Not!”
It’s only a few days before the election. And for the sake of everything holy, get informed; VOTE!
And speaking of not taking themselves too seriously, here is a fantastic snapshot from the latest Coyotes shoot:
Check our Pierre on Pierre08.com. He is running for president. He may not be able to beat John McCain or Barack Obama, but he does have a sweet slap shot… (Stay tuned.)
You love the people that love you! (Thanks, Atmosphere.)
True. And we love the brands that love our alternative-tactic plight.
lululemon, a high-end yoga fashion brand out of Vancouver, invests solely in nontraditional marketing. Instead of flooding magazine pages and television airwaves, they invest in brand evangelists going to yoga classes, getting to know the yoga community, and talking about lululemon.
None of this is executed under the radar, or in stealth mode, mind you. Evangelists proudly identify themselves as part of the lululemon brand.
For our recent shoot with Ape Index, we dressed the female model head-to-toe in lululemon, which gave her a very aspirational/desirable look, and followed the lululemon brand mantra to a T.
Here’s a sneaky sneak peek of the poster:
Click it to see a larger version. We’ll unveil the campaign in due course.
As so the love goes ’round. We love the people that love us. If you’re in Scottsdale, Arizona, stop by lululemon and ask for Emily; she’s good people.
(The nod to Atmosphere is called foreshadowing. Have I said too much? I certainly hope so.)
The economy sucks, okay? Okay. When life gives you lemons…you paint those bad boys gold! Instead of complaining and refusing to adapt (I’m talking to you, RIAA), innovative companies are turning vacant storefronts into unholy amounts of prime time advertising space. And this is turning into a megavictory for both advertisers and mall-owners.
Writes the Wall Street Journal: Vacant storefronts are one of the fastest-growing ad venues. Vacancy rates at malls and shopping centers this year have hit their highest levels in at least seven years, and vacancies likely will increase next year.
Ok, maybe that’s a little over the top – but the new open source mobile platform ‘Android’ is going to be pimp!
The first consumer phone powered by Android is the T-Mobile G1 to be released on Oct 22nd. You can see it in action here
To jump start the open source development community, Google put up $10 Million bucks in prize money challenging software developers to think outside the box and develop applications that have never been seen before.
The NY Times Hockey section picked up Pierre, our snide, gap-tooth smile, immigrant hockey snowman.
In case you are among the uninformed, Pierre is the biggest Coyotes hockey fan on the planet. And that, he feels, is justification to run for president. Currently, he has deployed a double-fisted smear campaign against John McCain and Barack Obama. He claims that McCain is a figure skater, and that Obama has a weak slap shot. (The validity of either claim is up for debate.)
Click below for the video that the NY Times featured:
When brands engage consumers uniquely, and in an appropriate setting, everybody wins. The amount of visual spam that graces billboards and magazines and television is overstimulating, and almost as unwelcome. When brands connect in meaningful ways, the results are exactly the opposite.
For years, in-game advertising was frowned upon. The demographic, marketers argued, was full of “lost boys.” Ever so slowly, brands have become integrally interwoven into game plots and environments.
The most highly-recalled brands included Coke, Nike, Burger King, and Axe. Among these brands, Burger King showed sublime amounts of innovation, including the King in several video games, NFL Street and Need for Speed foremost among the hottest titles.
Whereas most direct response ads tout a 1% buy rate, Nielsen found that 11% of gamers purchased a brand featured in-game; 19% talked about it after seeing an ad; 10 percent recommended the product.
Said Brian Gries, vp-marketing at Burger King, “Burger King’s goal is always to engage gamers in the BK brand through a medium they love. Throughout, it’s been about knowing the target audience [young adult males] and finding relevant ways to reach them through great consumer experiences.”
So what’s the takeaway? Seeing as over 1/3 of all users Engage consumers where they’re at, with what they love, and they’ll show you the love back.
Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs the scene or object in a 3-D environment.
National Geographic did an a great synth of Stonehenge. Normally you are not allowed inside the center ring of Stonehenge, but their photographers got special permission so you can experience it here.
Once this technology is adopted by the mainstream – this is going to be amazing!
If you’re not yet using LinkedIn, I highly recommend that you sign up and give it a try. It’s completely free and it’s interested to see how far your network of friends, colleagues and clients stretch around the world.
We’ve been using LinkedIn for a couple years now simply to stay in touch with clients and vendors who we don’t speak to on a regular basis. We’ve talked many times about the idea of using Linkedin to leverage our existing relationships to help make new ones.
I came across this case study today on how Dave Smith CEO of MediaSmith got his two largest accounts from using LinkedIn.
It’s nothing magical – just another touch point with the contacts you already have and a wakeup call that we can all get better at this.
If you aren’t leveraging your existing relationships, what are you leaving on the table?
Since energy prices are rising through the roof, and there doesn’t appear to be any slow down in sight… it’s time to consider what we can do about it. One man has taken it upon himself to create an auto concept that is using a hybrid of existing battery and electric motor technologies. The dream car has 80 batteries and can travel 280 miles on a single charge. Oh, and by the way it costs $1,000 to make.
AdAge.com — Carbonated soft drinks may be flagging, but there’s no stopping ready-to-drink teas.
The market for teas, of which ready-to-drink varieties account for 75%, was valued at $7.4 billion at retail in 2007, according to research firm Packaged Facts, and is expected to reach nearly $15 billion by 2012. Just four years ago, sales were $4.6 billion.
“Tea is one of the most underdeveloped beverages in the U.S.,” wrote Packaged Facts Publisher Tatjana Meerman in a recent report. “The potential is enormous, as tea barely compares in market size to beverage categories such as carbonated soft drinks, coffee and water.”
As brands big and small acknowledge those opportunities for growth, they’re stepping up their marketing and fine-tuning their public-relations efforts. This summer will see an influx of tea marketing, with Coca-Cola doubling its media spending, PepsiCo homing in on target customers, and up-and-coming labels such as Honest Tea and Sweet Leaf Tea blanketing the country with field-marketing teams.
Doubled spending
“We are doing significantly more this year with Nestea and Gold Peak,” said Penny McIntyre, senior VP-general manager of coffee and tea at Coca-Cola North America. “In addition to sampling, we are spending well over double in media vs. [the] recent past.”
Even so, teas are a relatively small portion of Coca-Cola’s overall budget; the company spent just $5.9 million on measured media for the Gold Peak and Nestea brands in 2006 and 2007 combined, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
Nestea is introducing new graphics and packaging, as well as two new green-tea products this month. That will be supported by a digital campaign and sampling at sporting events and concerts this summer. Gold Peak, meanwhile, is focusing on chef endorsements and will have a presence at food and wine festivals in the coming months.
Sampling is also a key focus at the 10-year-old Honest Tea label, as the brand hopes to rack up 2 million tastings this year. Founder Seth Goldman said Coca-Cola’s recent 40% acquisition of the brand has fueled an increase in spending on marketing, which is handled in-house. Similarly, Sweet Leaf Tea will use much of its recent $18 million infusion from a private-equity firm to drive tasting in its emerging markets of Boston, New York, Atlanta and Chicago.
‘Cup-to-mouth’ sampling
Getting beverages into consumers’ hands, according to marketers, is even more key today, given the increasing number of competitors in the category. Between July 2006 and June 2007 alone, 957 new tea products were introduced in the U.S., according to Packaged Facts. “How many messages are people hit with every day? It’s the quality of impressions [that are important], if you were to look at conversions to consumers,” Mr. Goldman said. “I would trade 100 media impressions for one person-to-person, cup-to-mouth sampling impression.”
As more consumers are converted, Christiane Paul, director-marketing for the Pepsi-Lipton partnership, said eventually tea could step up to compete with the big boys. “It’s been growing at a healthy clip over the last few years, and we think that there’s actually even more upside to be had,” she said. “You talk about carbonated soft drinks and the like; they’re pretty ubiquitous. But when you look at tea globally, it’s actually the second-most-consumed beverage in the world.”
Lipton is marketing accordingly. It spent $43 million on measured media in 2007, according to TNS Media Intelligence. Although Ms. Paul said the company’s marketing levels are “healthy” and will remain about the same, she did say the company is beginning to more carefully target its media.
In preparation for the busy summer season, Lipton Green Tea with Citrus, the most mainstream of the labels, launched a TV campaign May 5. Lipton White Tea, which Ms. Paul said has a “more youthful attitude,” is being promoted with an online-video contest.
This awesome article by Peter Merholz describes how the founder of Kodak revolutionized photography by simplifying the process, and looking at the Kodak camera as a service rather than a product.
This is a consumer centric experiential approach, and one that is seemingly being ignored by many of today’s “leading” brands.
Why is it that what Eastman figured out over 100 years ago seems forgotten today? Why do so few products seem concerned with how they fit into the lives of their customers? (Been to a consumer electronics event recently?) Why is it that people still approach products as isolated entities, unconnected with the world around them?
A comment that sheds additional light on this comes from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple:
When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it’s really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop….
But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem—and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.
That’s what we wanted to do with Mac. —from Insanely Great, written by Steven Levy
Until the last sentence, you might have thought he was taking about the iPod or even the iPhone. But the quote came from 1984, and demonstrates that transcendent product design is a matter of philosophy and approach. The reason product development has gone wrong is that people stop at the worst time—when the solutions are most convoluted.
What Eastman knew, what Jobs knows, is that you have to go beyond; you have to think about the experience people are having.
The much anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV is out today. I’m not going to lie… Like a little boy on Christmas, I am rushing out today after work to snag a copy before they all fly off the shelves. The anticipation since the December release date push-back has been unbearable at times but I am sure it will prove worth the wait.
Despite the fact that there aren’t any Burger King tie-ins, special flavors of Mountain Dew, commercials directed by Peter Jackson, or even an action figure. Consumer reports are already stating that first weeks game sales will exceed 9 million copies. At $60 a game that is $ 540 Million in it’s first week. Last year’s record breaking release of Halo 3 hit a measly $300 Million in first week sales.
The months leading up to the game’s release has been considerably less mass marketed than last year’s over-the-top “Halo 3” debut. Yet “GTA IV” is expected to be the most lucrative launch in entertainment history. The success is accredited to Rockstar Games keeping their marketing initiatives on the down-low. By Rockstar maintaining their dedication to controlling the message at all times they were able to be seen and perceived exactly the way they set out to be. That is why, outside of the official trailers they released — people haven’t seen any gameplay footage in advance of ’GTA IV’ shipping. That successfully built a ton of hype and online buzz in the gaming community.
Rockstar vice president Dan Houser told The Associated Press that the infamous game developer was being overly protective for one very important reason… “We want people to be really excited and not know everything by the time they play the game,” said Houser. “Of course, we want them to understand what they’re buying, but we want there to be surprises along the way.”
Unless you’ve been living under a large rock for the last few years you are very familiar with the popular Google owned site - YouTube. StartYourTube.com is a new player that has just emerged online. Just like Ning enables users to build their own custom social networking sites for free - StartYourTube allows users to create their own custom video sharing sites totally free and it takes just 2 minutes.
The site is currently promoting monthly cash giveaways of $500 to the Top Tubers.
As communicators we tend to believe that we can communicate over e-mail more effectively than we actually do. The studies conducted suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. In short, we know what we are trying to say and do not always put ourselves in the shoes of the recipient to make sure we explain ourselves in a way they will easily understand.
Be honest, how many times have you crafted an email that from your perspective was clear and concise but was misinterpreted by the receiver? Email is a sensitive form of communication as it is not difficult for the other party to either misunderstand what is being stated, or to pick up on some unintentedl tones or emotions.
I think we can all take something away from this read.
The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.
According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.
The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.
Total advertising revenue in 2007 — including online revenue — decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.
There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion.
As newspaper Web sites generate more advertising revenue, the growth rate naturally slows.
The NAA reported that online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.
That growth could not stave off the losses in the print however. National print advertising revenue dropped 6.7% to $7 billion last year. Retail slipped 5% to $21 billion. Classified plunged 16.5% to $14.1 billion.
“Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms,” John Sturm, president and CEO of the NAA, said in a statement.
