Neil Thackray’s Business Media Blog

Just another WordPress.com weblog

Group Editor Vacancy

A great opportunity for a Group Editor at Ultima Media here

December 1, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | Uncategorized | | No Comments Yet

Is your business a Migrant or a Native?

Julian Turner, the CEO of Electric Word made the second Key note speech at the Sipa conference. He began by asking how many of the delegates thought their business was a “digital native” rather a digital migrant. Just two hands claimed to be native and the conclusion is that most media businesses are the same. No wonder media companies are struggling to understand what is happening to them.

Back in 1999 what we now call the SIPA conference was called “Newsletters 1999″ and since then the organisation has had three different names. The rate of change has been huge and the impact is that the markets we operate in are a mix of opportunity and fear. The dotcom bust in 2000 bought media companies some time and relief (but I wonder if most media companies wasted that time and are only now, in teh middle of a crisis, dealing with the issues).

One of the problems that digital migrants have is understanding and learning a new language and what it really means. We no longer talk about journalism, we talk about content. We talk about users not readers and thesse terms are not directly interchangeable.

Content is king, was the mantra of the early digital revolution. But content as a concept has changed its meaning. Content is no longer made by us. It is not distributed by us and it often isn’t words. No wonder the migrants struggle. Turner argues that content is a raw material not the end point of our endeavours. The question we have to answer is what to do with content and how to “productise” it.

There are three stages to content development.
1) Basic Content – making free and paid content available to users.
2) Digitally enhanced content – more niche, faster, updateable, UGC
3) Premium paid access – Tools, data, closed communities

Similarly there are three ad stages.
1) Basic – print ads onine, online display and simple classified
2) Digital Appropriate – Contextaul, affiliate deals, targetted ads
3) Monetising relationships – Surveys, sponsorship, databuilding, ecommerce

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

November 23, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | Uncategorized | , , , | 1 Comment

The future is the network

From The Sipa Online Publishing and Marketing Summit. I had meant to blog live, but the sound of my keyboard was distrubing the delegates! Anyway the first post from the event tries to summarise the excellent David Cushmans powerful insight into why media companies are struggling.

The opening keynote is from David Cushman of the ninety10group.com which specialises in social technologies. Grounded in consumer publishing as a senior exec at Bauer he should be well placed to see the world of the new with a good understanding of the world of the old. His premise is that long tail demand may have been a disaster for traditional broad based media companies, but it creates exciting opportunities for specialists.

This is a structural change. There may be a bounce back but lets not forget this is the biggest structural change in media since the invention of the press. In the early days of the press, control of the means of production was the key to the power of information.

The future if digital is what people do together and how they self organise themelves. What used to be in the control of the publishers but is now in the control of us all.

Framentation means you can,target all the niches. but although the impact of the long tail is a disaster for traditional mass media models it is a huge opportunity for specialists. In a world where no one wants to pay for content and no one clicks on ads we have to think about media as a “social object” and this can reveal where the roi might come from. Cushman goes on to argue that everyone is apublisher now as the media world moves from the one to the many. With over 300m blogs and 50m twitter users peer to peer interaction is the most important behaviour change you can imagine.

He claims that 70% of pruchase recommendations are peer recommended which undermines the power of mass media to be influential in the purchase process. The user is the destination, not the media company. There is no point in waiting for users to come to us.

Buuilding lots of hits for the sake of it is a pointless strategy. Cushman argues that the majority is now made of people who don’t want the thing that the largest single group want – the power of the long tail. In a world where there is only “broadcast” or mass media, the audience for the broadcast is the largest group. In a social media world, the largest group is the world of one to one communciations. The implications of this are important. In the broadcast world the value was where the hits were. In the narrow cast world all the tiny niches are collectively bigger and more important and valuable than the largest of the lowest common denominator single group. Therefore, if you want to be a business of scale you must pursue the niches.

There are three key disruptions for media companies. Whow creates content? Any and everyone. Who gets to distribute the content? Any and everyone. Who controls the user experience? The user.

Cushman users a theatre analogy to make his point. In the old media world we were on the stage, broadcasting our message and the audience was looking quietly up at us and hanging on our every word. A big audience gave us scale and influence. If an adveriser wanted to speak tot he audience they would have to join us on the stage. The audience would not talk to each other. In the networked world the message from the stage doesn’t reach the audience. They are not even looking at the stage they are looking at each other and building there own networks of interest in niches and communities of purpose. They share messages anongst their groups – ther groups that they decide to belong to.

Media companies have to understand that we don’t own or contril these groups. Communication is not done to them but by them.

So what should media companies do?
Make it easy for users to connect and interact.
Encourage users to act – people who care act so find the social objects that they care about.
The actions of users attract more people by amplyfying and sustaining the converstion,.
Whatever your pay model is (eg click to buy) it has to be portable so users can take it with them into their own networks.

So finding the right social object is key. Get this right and users will care enought about it to tell their friends about it.

Cushman says we are just at the beginning of the disruption. By implication he is saying that the old broadcast model can never work in the long tail social netwrokoed world. Users aren’t look at the stage. No wonder ad click thrus are low! He concludes by reminding us that if the world outside is changing faster than the world inside, something is going to tear – and it won’t be the world outside! Almost everything you try as a mass media broadcast solution – or possibly naything you try at all will be disrupted by the network. The future isn’t digital – it is the network.

In questions, Cushman was asked what about thought about the rush to put content behind paywalls. His reply? Its insanity. Its a strategy designed to make as much money as you can from teh old model while you can. It si not a building block for the future

You can see the presentation here

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
g

November 23, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | business media strategy | , , , | No Comments Yet

Last Chance to Register for SIPA Event.

There is still time to register for the SIPA Marketing Conference which takes place on Thursday. All of us are addressing the same issues and there is no better way to hone a view than by sharing some experiences. You can see the full programme here. I plan to be there will be blogging from the event (until the batteries run out).

November 15, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | Uncategorized | | No Comments Yet

Book Now For Sipa Conference 19th Nov

Another interesting looking event from SIPA.

Full programme

SIPA’s 3rd online conference will feature two keynote addresses – from David Cushman of 90:10 and Julian Turner, CEO at Electric Word – followed by six interactive round tables.

Each round table will be prefaced by two, 15-minute practical case studies on the topic, leading into a 45 minute discussion.

The breakout sessions include:

  • E-readers and mobile apps, and how they will affect the way you do business. (Dominic Jacquesson, Ink on Dead Trees; and Ed Coburn, Harvard Health Publishing)
  • Free versus paid content – how can you combine both into a profitable publishing model? (Craig Hanna, E-Consultancy)
    Plus, Subscribers or members? – hear how one leading publisher has turned all his customers into members, improving loyalty and retention  (Robin Crumby, Melcrum Publishing)
  • Using social media to build and strengthen your brand. Plus, how does it shape up against other forms of marketing, such as banner advertising? (Matt McGowan, ClickZ, Search Engine Watch & SES, Incisive Media; and Andrew Seel, Qube Media)
  • Why dedicated email marketing is more important (and profitable) than ever. How trigger emails and automated campaigns can boost your revenue, how to combine online and offline channels to create sales momentum, using the e-charm offensive to boost sales and renewals, plus the truth about Google Adwords (Riaz Kanani, Silverpop; and Nick Laight, Canonbury Publishing)
  • Interactive media and new product launches – Case studies from the winners of the SIPA UK Awards, why they won – and how you can harness their approach (Emma Rogers, Electric Word plc; and Andy Wiliams, Informa)
  • Transitioning your product from print to online – Case studies from two leading publishers on how they’ve taken products from individual print subscriptions to portal driven site licenses and membership models  (Louise White, Incisive Media; and Vicky Page, Emap Inform)

October 26, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | Uncategorized | | No Comments Yet

Wringing our Hands about paid content and advertising

I didn’t manage to get to the AOP Conference last week, but no surprise that it appears the discussion there was mostly much wringing of hands about how to make the paid content model work.  The Guardian reported;

“Digital consultant Bill Murray warned publishers that if they put a barrier in front of their users, it is likely that they will disappear. Instead he suggested, they need to rethink the concept of content. The most important factor in the success of iTunes success wasn’t the content, he argued, but the service”.

This seems to me to be the crux of the issue and is accidentally a key insight in to the reasons that publishers find the paid model challenging.  The natural instinct for a publisher is to put the content at the centre of the thinking.  Magazine publishers start their working day by thinking about how to make a better magazine and then work out wards from there.  When they ask what their readers want, the answer can only be something that can be squeezed into a magazine delivery format.

“Not me!” I hear the progressive publishers cry.  The honest truth is, it is almost all of us.  The paid content model requires a fundamental rewiring of how our media brains work.  Instead of putting the content at the centre of our strategy we need to put the user at the centre.

If I ran a chain of coffee shops I might consider that if I make the best coffee I can my business will thrive.  I invest in better beans, more reaosting technology, training my staff how to make the best coffee, serving the coffees in the finest china mugs money can buy.  I will fail every time until I realise I am not in the coffee business at all.  Not sure? Well think about this;

A famous case study of the demise of the Parker Pen company exposes the same mistake.  When Bic began eating into the share of the Parker Pen business by selling cheap biros the managment at Parker determined to compete.  They reworked their manufacturing process to produce cheaper pens.  They judged that to match the price of the new upstart they needed to cut their own price.  The result was disasterous and share conitnued to fall.  After a while the rate of decline accelerated to a faster rate than the growth of Bic.  What had gone wrong?  The inisght to fixing the problem was to recognise that Parker was not really in the pen business at all.  When a customer selected a Parker Pen it was most usually as a gift.  The substitues were not the Bic, but a rather a cigarette lighter or a letter opener.  A reduction in the quality of the Parker Pen had sidelined them in the gift market and continued to leave them at a competitive disadvantage to Bic on price.

What is there to learn from this for business media? The content we used to offer (mostly news) is now avaialable for free.  We have competed by offering our own news for free but have discovered that our users, instead of rewarding us with loyalty and praise, now simply take us for granted and use us as one of many sources of news on the Internet.

Other articles in this blog have said this before, and I make no apology for repeating it again.  Our business is not content.  Our business is helping users to make better decisions and helping vendors to sell more.  When David Gilbertson says that we over estimate the importance of business journalism he makes a fair point and if you read this blog and others you will find lots of clues about what to do about it.  But now for a heresy.  What would happen if we put the question differently?

Instead of

“Giving content away in an advertising supported model does not create enough user engagement (page views/session) or repeat visiting to justify a high CPM.  As a result we conclude that the ad model doesn’t work and we say, how can we create a paid content model?”

Lets try, “What would we need to do to persuade users to engage with our content in such a way that advertisers woudl agrees to pay a CPM sufficent to pay for the content creation costs and give us a profit?”

Let’s think about the scale of that task.  In the old model a typical B2B magazine with a 20000 circulation might have expected to sell ads at around £1500 a page.  That equates to a cost/000 of about £75.  Our current free content model is a long way short of that.  Our typical B2B companion website might get 100,000 page views a month. With a 70% bounce rate only 30% of that traffic is likely to be effctive for advertisers to reach.  Let us imagine that we can service three ad impressions on each page.  So if we sellout our usable inventory our total ad impressions will be 90000.  If you are selling your inventory at £30/000 cpm you are probably doing well.  So if we sell out, our monthly revenue will be not more than £2700 – less than two pages of advertsing in the old model.  My hypothesis could be wrong by a factor of ten and we still don’t have a great business!

We need to find a way to take this model and achieve at least £50000 revenue/month. Driving the number of user visits up is unlikely to work.  The universe of relevant people is limited by the scale of the niche.  In any event the task is daunting.

Consider this:

Where maximum monthly revenue = M

Monthly page impressions= T

Bounce rate (expressed as a decimal) =B

Number of Ad impressions/page =A

Average achieved CPM =C

Then M= T*(1-B)*A*C

Max Rev = 100*(1-0.7))*3*30= £2700

So. all other things being equal, by how much would any one variable have to move to achieve our £50k goal? The terrifying answer is we would need either 1.9m page impressions/month or 55 ad impressions on each page or a CPM of £555!

This seems to me to be so far removed from anything that could be remotely achievable that the drive to paid content is impossible to resist

Does this mean that we should give up on the ad model. If we could improve CPM by 50%, increase available traffic by 50% and halve the bounce rate would that help?  The answer is not much.  Our maximum revenue would still be just £13000 a month.

As with content strategy, using offline thinking in the online world is always going to disappoint.  If you think about it, the magazine ad model, where we could charge £70/ooo to perhapsps fifty advertiisers in the same issue is the equivalent of having 50 ad positions on every web page.  No wonder the offline ad model doesn’t work in the online world.

Is it possible to consrtuct an advertsing model for the b2b web that pays the bills? While I think about that keep cracking on with those hybrid strategies.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

October 11, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | Advertising Sales, Paid content, business media strategy | , | 2 Comments

Appointment of New PPA Chief Executive

The PPA is now engaged in the process of recruiting a new Chief Executive following the abrupt depature of Jonathan Shephard last month.  The PPA has a key opportunity to to raise the level of its game, to reinvent itself and become relevant again in the new media world.  My posts try and stay away from specific news events, but I make an exception in this case as I care about the PPA and I want it to be relevant to me in the future.

When I was at Nexus, for the first time in my professional life we were not members of the PPA.  I thought about joining but then wondered what would happen if I didn’t.  The answer was not much.  Perhaps most surprisingly nobody from the PPA ever called us to invite us to join.  This led to me think about what would persuade me to pick up the phone and join again on my own initiative.  Here are some of the things I thought;

1) Although periodical publishing remains part of what we do, I no longer feel defined by the concept of periodical publishing.  I would be much more likely to join an Association of Business Media Providers.

2) If the PPA, or whatever it becomes, is to survive it must get its membership marketing act together by giving all business media providers, large and small, print publishers and web only providers, good reasons to join the party.

3) Abandon the increasingly irrelevant PPA Awards and replace them with two events – one for consumer media and another for business media.  The categories have barely changed in twenty years (with the exception of adding a business website category).

4) Change the priorities for the PPA lobbying activity.  PPA did a great job over many years in negotiating and managing the relationship with the Royal Mail.  I have no doubt they still do.  In 2009 most of us we are as interested in the relationship with Google as as we are with the post office.

5) Decide defintively what the PPA is for and then pursue that goal with a passion. Lobbyist? Trainer? Networking faclilitator? Promoter of business media benefits to business media customers?  All of these?  None of these? One of these? Which are more important?  Here is the current list taken from the mission statement published by the PPA with my annotations in brackets

  • By engaging with Governments in the UK and Europe, to defend the legal, regulatory and commercial environment in which our members operate (Agree absolutely, but what are the key deliverables from this work?)
  • To help our members navigate the transition to the changing digital environment (What if I am in business media but don’t publish magazines.  Am I excluded? The goal assumes that transition is the right approach when it might not be.)
  • To provide up to the minute information, market knowledge, case studies, analysis and insight  (for whom? Publishers? Agencies?Readers?)
  • To promote magazines and their brands as the advertising medium of choice (But they are not.  . The emphasis on magazines implies that they are more important than other media deployed by media companies and increasingly they are not.  We know it, our readers know it, our advertisers know it, but our trade association appears not to)
  • To bring members together to share ideas, information and best practice (Nothing wrong with networking but apart from an annual conference what has actually been achieved here?)
  • To ensure that the industry continues to attract and develop talent. (Thats an impossible objective for the PPA but it can play a role in facilitating such an outcome. )
  • To deliver positive results for all parts of our diverse membership (meaningless)
  • To celebrate success and promote the health and image of our industry (our industry is in a crisis of strategy, profitability and confidence!)
  • In short too many goals, defined to widely.

    Sometimes the PPA appears to live in the same Village as Noddy.  The trees are lovely, the grass is green and we must never go into the dark wood.  Its time to face up to that fearand come and join the rest of us fighting  goblins.

    I am a believer in the PPA.  I want it to be relevant.  I hope the Board of the PPA use this opportunity to hire a CEO who has a clear and focussed plan for how to make to make it so.  To get that kind of vision and leadership it may need to pay more than it has ever done before.  If you think that person might be you, give Paul Farrer a call who is acting for the PPA in making the hire.

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

    October 5, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | Uncategorized | | 1 Comment

    Paid Content – A snack or a Meal?

    A lot of people are talking to me about the paid content problem. When Rupert Murdoch starts takiing the subject seriously suddenly everyone sits up and pays attention.  Just a few weeks ago Emap announced that the content from their paid mgazaines was no longer to be made available free and would be put behind a pay wall.  Every media company I know is thinking about how to sell content. Most will fail.

    The motivation for this is the difficulties many are having in building a sustainable advertising based digital solution.  Building strategy around the failure of its predescessor caries some risks, not least that the implementation will misunderstand how online paid content works.

    If readers have paid for magazines in the past, some argue, then there is no reason why they should not pay for that content online too.  For newspaper publishers and business media owners this is a fundamentally flawed understanding.  Consumption of newspaper printed material is a “lean back” extended disovery of content.  When I pay for my Saturday paper I know I will spend at least half an hour and probably more exploring it.  I am likely to read most of the UK news pages, a good chunk of the foreign news, at least one of the leaders, a rummage through the sports pages and an attempt at the crossword.  I am concentrating on the newspaper, and am fully engaged wth the taxonomy of its construction.  I am enjoying the atmosphere of the paper and its familiarity of structure.

    In business magazines the experience of readers is similar.  When print readers are researched they will tell publishers that, depending on the magazine they spend, between 20minutes and an hour on reading their trade title (leastways they used to before the Internet.)

    How different is this from consumption on the Web? It is completely different.  The traffic patterns on web sites are very different from print circulations. Most b2b sites will have characteristics similar to the following list;

    1) Most traffic comes from natural search (implication – answering the search enquiry is more important than the publishers brand)

    2) The bounce rate is between 60% and 70% (implication – if the purpose of a landing page is to get the user to consume another page the approach is failing for most users)

    3) The average page views/visit is between 2 and 3. (Implication -  A few users are consuming many more than the average but our levels of engagement with users, even when the information is free is too low to create a paid content model)

    4) The amount of time spent on a page averages at less than a minute. (Implication – an individual page or article does not matter that much)

    What can we conclude from this?  It appears that consuming web news is a lean forward short content consumption snack.  Readers who buy the Guardian every day and would never been seen dead with a copy of the Telegraph are much less loyal on the web.  If I want to read about the Grand Prix last weekend, I can make a search engine enquiry and discover muliple sources of information.  I will visit a site, perhaps not even note the publisher and then back out intothe search engine and move on.

    Snacking for information in this way is very different from the lean back engagement I once enjoyed with the printed media and cannot be monetised in the same way.

    There may be a very small number of users who can be persuaded that a subscription to online newspaper content is worthwhile, but it is highly unlikely to be a sustainable business model.

    Does this mean that paid content strategies are doomed?  Not at all and in business media the opportunity is huge, but the approach to content selling is not the same online as in print, any more than the marketing and pricing strategy  for Gordon Ramsay is the same as that for Spud u Like.

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

    October 5, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | Uncategorized | , , | No Comments Yet

    The End of B2B in Print or the Beginnning?

    Emaps decision to make a dramatic change to the editorial structureof Local Government Chronicle is very significant.  For some time I have been telling anyone who is prepared to listen that part of the problem with the b2b print model is that it has barely changed in twenty years.  This despite the impact of the Internet and the effect on media consumption habits.

    Many publishers are worrying that ad yields and volumes are under presssure but have not yet tackled the likely cause.  It is too simplistic to blame the recession.  The facts of the matter are that advertisers have sensed that business magazines are not read in the way they once were.  We should not be surprised.  Before the days fof the web every piece of research I conducted on magazine readership showed that readers wanted to know about news, jobs and products.  The problem in the internet age is all of this is readily avaialable from numerous sources on the web.

    What is the value of news pages in a print mag published weekly? Emap have made what I think is welcome decision to abandon the old News, bridge, features structure, replacing the old content with a series of long analytical articles.  I haven’t  managed to get hold of copy so I can’t express any view about the execution, but the priniple seems sound.

    Let’s look at some of the evidence.  Almost every paid title in b2b has seen copy sales and subscriptions fall. As this effect is universal we must conclude that something important is happening.  Readers don’t need mags in the way they used to.  They have been subsituted for the Web.

    Oddly most CC titles continue to pump out the same number of copies as they ever did.  For many, a good part of that distribution propped up recruitment advertising response.  But with recruitment now being almost entirley a web only play, what is the value of that circulation toda?  Worse, a key motive for picking up the magazine, a browse through the jobs, has vanished.

    As revenues have fallen, costs have been cut, impacting on the quality of features journalism.

    So, pick up a typical business mag, tear out the news pages, whats left of the jobs section and the “ad get” feature and what are you left with? Not much.  No wonder engagement with magazines is falling away and advertisers are voting with their feet.

    The answer is not to give up on print, but rather to create a new print model which offers the kind of content not readily available or easily consumed in a digital format.  I don’t know whether Emap have come up with the right answer, but on this issue at least, it appears they may be asking themselves the right question.

    My own view is that there is a future for print in b2b, and I have some thoughts on what that future might look like.  I might yet get to put it into practice!

    .

    September 24, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | B2B Journalism, business media strategy | | 3 Comments

    Can we make a value add model for online recruitment

    First, apologies to those who come her regularly for the lack of posts over the Summer.  I have spent most of the time honing a model for how b2b might look in the future and this blog has not been front of mind.  But the Summer is over and it is now business as usual.  There is still pain all around us.  Results from Centaur Media, where revenues have dropped by nearly a third in a year, will come as no surprise to anyone who works in this space.  More cost cutting has been announced at Emap and RBI.  The downturn in revenues is now affecting events as well as publishing and the online world remains challenging operationally commercially and strategically.

    Nowhere is this more  important than in recruitment.  I went sailing last week with a recruiter in the finance sector.  He was telling me how tired he was of job board offerings.  Where is the innovation he pondered?  For publishers the price point on job boards is very challenging.  With the market thinking that £150 a job is a lot of money, it is hard to see how small publishers can compete with the mainstream job boards.  The volumes that are needed to create a viable business are very large.  You need to sell more than 500 postings a month to create a £1m business.

    How can niche publishers add value both to compete with generic boards and to justify a higher price?  One answer comes from an interesting US business www.jobvite.com.  

    This solution offers employers an application which plumbs vacancies into its employees social networks.  Vacancies are posted on employees Linked In or facebook pages creating a viral access to audiences of potential job applicants who may not be actively searching for a post.  This tackles one of the main weaknesses of the job board solutions.  Their model requires potential applicants to be active.  In our old print model we could push recruiters messages at possible applicants who had not considered themselves active. Reruiters will pay a premium to access these potential applicants.

    Although I can see some real challenges for the jobvite model (getting employees to agree to using their personal networks for their employers interest is the obvious one), this represents a an innovative step forward.   So much of our old model profits came from recruitment, we ignore the challenge of innovating new solutions for the online world at our peril.  The question we should be asking ourselves is,  how can we add value to the recruitment offering?

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

    September 21, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | Advertising Sales, business media strategy | | 2 Comments

    The Tend to Zero Risk

    One of the reasons so many media companies are in trouble is the simultaneous crisis in all revenue streams.  It seems to many, that whatever strategy is deployed, the size of the potential revenue pot keeps falling. 

    Back in the sixities, almost all business to business titles were paid for.  News about your industry was valuable and that value could be measured with money.  Today nobody charges for news.  In print, yields have been under pressure for some years.  Online display advertising with it’s transparent measurability has given advertisers a legitimate stick with which to beat media owners.   Where there has been success in selling online display the achieved CPM has been falling.  Too much traffic, too little of it useful or enaged, consequent poor click through rates mean that much inventory remains unsold – a growing proportion for many – and what does get sold is at rates that are falling.  Where once the choice advertisers had was limited by the number of titles in a market, today they are confused by so much choice.

    We lost our way with recruitment.  Where we used to charge thousands of pounds for a page of advertising, the job board model now offers an ad £100.  In the recession prices here too are falling.

    However we solve the current strategic conundrum, it seems pretty clear that unless we can push back the tide of prices tending to zero we don’t have a business.    The truth is, whilst there are things we can do to make a difference the price of a transaction in the new world is unlikely to reach the heady heights of the old world.  There are  four steps that all media companies must take:

    1) Set the fixed cost base at a  level which is supportable by the new model.  This means attacking some sacred cows and stripping away layers of management costs.

    2) Improve the value of your advertising proposition.  Seth Godin says,

    “As long as your site is about something else and the ads are a distraction, you’ll see CPM rates drop. As soon as you (or the advertisers) figure out that creating online communities aligned with the advertising, where attendance is a choice by the consumer, then you’re creating genuine value.” 

    In B2B that means making ads relevant and targeted.  Don’t give up on vertical search solutions.  Keep experimenting – there are riches ahead for the media company that gets it right.

    3) Audit every activity that leaves the building and assess it for value.  Use that value audit to establish the prices that could be achieved.

    4) Give up on the idea that you are going to survive by doing the stuff you used to do.  News products supported by advertising are going to be very small businesses.  Plan and implement a series of new product developments that will help you scale your business.  Buy some expertise to help you do it.

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

    July 20, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | Advertising Sales, Search, b2b media, business media strategy | , , , | No Comments Yet

    Strategy Destroys Value

    In another ineresting talk at the Acitivate 09 Summit, Umair Haque of the Havas Medai Lab points out that we are now all hyper connected.  This hyper connectivity is driving a new kind of networked economics.  This network effect can be seen all around us.  Look at how Obama used the network to raise funds; look at the velocity of growth of Twitter as it leveraged viral networks.  But there are unintended consequences too.  There are viral diseconomies that can lead to panic effects.  Look at how the passing of toxic assets between banks spread rapid panic and led to an implosion of the financial markets.  

    These negative viral effects are what Haque calls, “the zombie economy”.  An economy which is stuck and unable to innovate its way out of diffiiculty.  When there are negative viral effects value is destoyed and strategy ceases to create value.  He concludes thet, “Twentieth Century capitalism is not fit for twenty first Centry purpose.  We need a new constructive capitalism.”  This must be based on renewal, democracy, peace and equity rather than exploitation, tyranny, war and domination.

    How very Guardian!

    Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

    July 6, 2009 Posted by neilthackray | Uncategorized | | No Comments Yet