Newspapers: Canaries

Newspapers are currently the media bellwether or “canary in the coal mine,” as the accelerating recession takes their decline in advertising revenues due to digital competition and pushes it into free-fall. Josh Marshall had a post on this today.

Folks (including myself) are bemoaning this development, because they know that the digital competition felling newspapers actually depends in large part on the content resources—reporting bureaux, wire services, columnists, and research—newspapers provide. Talking Points Memo needs its AP feed, originated and supported by newspapers, for much of its own content generation.

So what’s going to happen? Will (most) newspapers wither and die, drastically lowering the value of the content we get in the digital media that are left, without most consumers of news realizing it? I think so, yes.

But eventually the digital media should step up and rebuild; because there is a need for high-value news content. One NALM thing that usually goes hand in glove with bemoaning the demise of newspapers is bemoaning the eternal dumbing down of John Q. Public. But just because most news consumers won’t notice the difference doesn’t mean that those who are left won’t, directly or indirectly, be able to pay for better news content. It may just take longer than I’d like for this market need to reassert itself. It had to assert itself to begin with in order for these great news content resources to be built in the first place.

This is worth noting, studying, and learning from. Because what’s happening with newspapers now will happen with magazines shortly, television later, and eventually, in its turn, the Internet as we know it today as well.

Dialing up and Down the Business Goals

In amongst a bunch of gobbledygook with a few decent points halfheartedly mixed in, Max Kalehoff at MediaPost’s Online Spin throws out a true nugget:

[A]dvertisers are garnering the power to dial up or down according to their business goals --- for no other reason.

This is put a little gobbledygookedly, but it really is what I’m writing this blog about.

1. Formulate a business goal
2. Work out the marketing model to address that business goal
3. Figure out how to track the model’s success (and not only with instant-gratification metrics, which will severely limit your tools, not to mention your ability to judge results)
4. Launch the model and tracking
5. Brutally cut or modify the model if your tracking shows that it isn’t addressing the original goal

Why else would you ever do any marketing at all?

Definitely Titillated, If Not A-Twitter

Lest I begin to irrelevantize myself (among my current audience of one) with a seeming dismissal of Twitter in my post from Wednesday, let me say that Twitter is a great, pretty well buttoned-up expression and extension of its communications medium, texting. As such every marketer should be looking at it. My objection was to a story that classified a kind of a “Twitter campaign” as a branding campaign, because on ROI grounds, it clearly failed miserably in that context.

No, Outsell reminds me today that for P.R. purposes, Twitter clearly shows high promise in the B2B space—which to my mind strongly validates its strengths in consumer marketing as well. But for what? Any marketing platform should be applied, particularly in today’s threatening environment, just to those areas where the ROI is clear (not directly measurable necessarily, but clear) and good.

What such areas are there for Twitter? As Kate Worlock at Outsell put it, The capacity of Twitter to reach a group of users with a guaranteed interest in what you have to say is the core appeal (emphasis mine). So, once you’ve got a group constituted in Twitter, your communications with its members will be highly effective, at least at first before they tire of the group, Twitter, or both.

And there’s the rub. How are you going to get ’em in that group to begin with, and how do you keep ’em there? Don’t bore me by thinking that once your incredible fantastic brand/‌product/‌idea is in Twitter, Lots of people will come—one of my least-favorite most-used statements ever in marketing. No, we still have to ditch utter reliance on viral marketing to make Twittering work. More on that later.

Marketing ROI Needed But Not Understood

The Conference Board: Pressure is increasing to show return on the marketing investment, but no one really knows how.

Money graf:

Many [marketing] executives say they lack the technological resources necessary to measure these programs. Others say they are facing strong cultural resistance.

This is the game. Winners will rise while most are falling.

The Media of Communications with the Consumer of the Future

MediaPost today: A firm selling something gross is doing cool viral marketing! Isn’t it great?

It’s not till the third-to-last graf that we find out that, actually, the pest-control firm in question has had no measurable results from its blogging, videoing, Twittering, etc.—and isn’t planning for any.

One certain measurable result is that the marketing community is now exposed to this company, Truly Nolen. (I’ve linked to the blog so you can see what some of the fuss is about.)

But anyway, the short version here is that Truly Nolen started a blog, created a Facebook page and YouTube videos, and joined Twitter (which happened Monday; maybe it’s Twitter pushing the story). Net result, as far as I can tell? 100 quasi-leads in three months; 400 video impressions (for one video, anyway) in two months; and 53 Tweets, many from media contacts.

Well, okay, as a public-relations effort, it has measurable value. But that’s it—it’s P.R.—it’s not brand marketing, which is the section of MarketingDaily (sub. req.) where it appeared. This example doesn’t show how these are the media of communications with the consumer of the future, as Truly Nolen’ P.R. head puts it in the article. Far from it.

Widgets

Are widgets good or bad investments in a time of marketing scarcity? Widgets—“bits of the Web” you can publish, and give people the means to put on their own sites—have those two seeming advantages usually attributed to viral marketing methods.

• They’re cheap to make.
• They’re cheap to promote.

But these actually should read:

• They might be cheap to make, especially if you don’t need them to be good.
• They’re cheap to promote, especially if you don’t care if they work.

My point is simple. After you get the idea of trying a widget, plan out the entire widget you want to create, cost it—including promotion—and estimate its effect (on traffic, leads, sales, or whatever). If you want to use it virally, make sure it’s cheap enough to make that you’re fine with it having no impact. And if it has to be too cheap to be good, scrap it.

Am I a Hack?

In my earlier post on why I created this blog, I said in part that it’s to counteract the likely shrinking of marketing during this downturn. But there are two ways to do this, and I want to explain which one I plan to follow.

One way would be the “squeaky wheel” method: By shouting loudly enough, my readers (if any) will either feel that I must be right or I wouldn’t dare be so loud, or will get tired enough to concede my point just to get me to shut up. This is fine in politics, but doesn’t really suit my personality. I am not a hack, much as I admire many of them.

So I plan to take the other way: I will make as many points in favor of my mission as I can find.

There’s a larger point here, by the way, one that may be obvious to some because it’s so often cited as a silver lining in times like these. In times of plenty, we get fat and lazy. It’s want that makes us work and innovate. This is a time of want. If anything, I hope this blog will help us innovate.

Factoring in Economies of Scale

In today’s SearchInsider at MediaPost, an SEMer by the name of Steve Baldwin says:

Outsource where possible. … In flush times, marketing staffs tend to grow organically—like barnacles on the hull of a ship—but at the cost of efficiency and flexibility. For the past two years, SEM has been increasingly insourced for a range of reasons that might have made sense when times were good. Today, this trend is impossible to justify, except for businesses that are merely dabbling in search (which is never a good idea).

Clearly overstating—the only time you shouldn’t outsource SEM is when you are merely dabbling?—Baldwin still fails to provide a reason to cut SEM staffing.

I assume flexibility refers to the ability of outsiders to bring a much wider range of experiences to bear on a problem, since they’re not limited to those experiences your own company has had. That’s fine. But efficiency is not ipso facto a good thing, if effectiveness suffers as a result. What I mean is that SEM might very well be better executed by those who know your industry through and through, rather than by SEM generalists (such as search-marketing firms). This can be a killer if you’re in a B2B market and you outsource to a firm that, while expert in SEM, doesn’t know sh*t about terms and jargon used in your industry.

This is so true of marketing as a whole that it’s worth generalizing and restating: Find efficiency through economies of scale, sure: but only up to the point where the cost that comes from less focused and effective marketing becomes too great.

Right now, of course, we’re Decoupling, so such niceties can go out the window. But understanding where economies of scale help and where they don’t will get you to the Opportunism phase as soon as possible.

Short- and Long-Term Shifts

In a generational occurrence like the present economic meltdown, we all want to figure out as soon as possible what the new models will look like: How we’ll invest, how we’ll finance our homes, how we’ll live our daily lives; what kind of jobs will be out there and how businesses will run themselves and prosper. For the purposes of this blog, we want to figure out what marketing is going to look like.

I think the first step in doing this is to know when we’re talking about. Then we can get to what is going to happen (during each “when”). The point here is that, rather than ask “How is marketing going to change in this new environment?” we need to first ask “How many times are we going to change?” The current changes are just initial reactions; short-term shifts. But our instinct is to see them as permanent long-term shifts.

Actually I think there are going to be four distinct time periods (or phases) to marketing in the downturn—each of which will have its own distinct marketing model.

Decoupling

Abandonment of previous marketing assumptions in reaction to the sudden change in expectations. This is going on right now, and hasn’t ended.

Austerity

Plans made in the expectation of little growth being possible.

Opportunism

Marketing techniques that seem to be successful under the new economic conditions become more widespread, and there are new winners and losers.

Hand-me-down

Economic times change, but the harsh lessons of the downturn continue to be applied.

Rebirth

Marketing techniques that seem to be successful during growth periods are rediscovered and become more widespread, and there are new winners and losers.

I’ve included #5 for completeness’ sake, but don’t consider it to be part of this discussion because it actually takes place after the downturn ends.

I think that the long-term shifts, what in the future we’ll call “marketing in the downturn,” as opposed to what we call that now, will start somewhere between #2 and #3, say a year from now.