Pearls of wisdom from the road: reinvent or die, nuances of brand extension, and too much content

One of the tragedies of today's recession is that many newspaper executives are unable to attend the many wonderful industry conferences that provide opportunities for rejuvenation. You can look at the PowerPoint presentations and hear the reports, but this captures perhaps 20% of actually being there.

One can't innovate from a cave, though a few publishers are trying to prove me wrong.

I attended a few of these conferences in recent weeks, including the INMA/OPA Europe Conference in Liverpool. Below are three presentations that piqued my curiosity.

Reinvent newspapers based on profitable audiences, multi-media, differentiation

Juan Señor, partner with Innovation Media Consulting Group, told the INMA/OPA Europe conference in Liverpool of the four great choices facing newspapers in this rapidly changing marketplace: a) exit; b) sold or be taken over; c) cut until the cash cow bleeds to death; or d) reinvent the business by focusing on profitable audiences.

Señor lamented the vanilla journalism that ...[more]

Outlook for newsmedia in 2010: my initial thoughts

I'm preparing for 10 days of conferences, board meetings, and press interviews about my outlook for media companies in 2010. I don't yet have a “lead” to the story. Yet in keynote presentations at the SNPA, Inland, and INMA conferences in Naples, Chicago, and Liverpool in the coming days, I'll be expected to have a “lead.”

Here's what I know.

2010 will mark the year in which newspapers decide what they want to be post-recession. Real economic growth will return in 2011, as will further disruptions to the status quo such as the semantic web.

The newspapers that shifted expenditures to marketing, sales, research, and digital entrepreneurialism in 2009-2010 will be the ones who succeeded in turning danger into opportunity.

I fear most newspapers simply scaled their expenses to the revenue reality – across the board. And as you know, we don't have “across the board” challenges in our industry. Our challenges are unevenly distributed.

 ...[more]

Prism of planning should be broadband saturation and doubling of broadband speed

One of the questions I'm getting from INMA members these days involves the prism of strategic planning. A recession just punctuated an already-fast migration to an embrace of digital technology, advertising markets remain in flux, and even basic economic projections are unreliable.

My emerging view is that 2010 will be a tepid and uneven economic recovery worldwide. That's a fair description of what I think will happen to newspapers – with advertising categories responding differently and defying generalisations.

Yet there is a longer-term prize to keep an eye on.

What do our newspaper companies look like in markets where 100% of households are broadband-enabled, where everyone has a smartphone, and where broadband speed to PCs and mobiles are double and triple what they are today?

Seems extraordinary, but that is precisely where technology is going in the next five years in most Western European, North American, and South Pacific markets. And in markets where the digital ...[more]

Integrating print and online advertising sales teams: move with your market

INMA members appear more stirred than usual about the issue of integrating their print and online advertising sales teams.

Mindful of this, I asked members in recent weeks to provide feedback on the issue. I also asked about this last week during a whirlwind trip visiting media companies in Belgium, Sweden, Finland, and The Netherlands.

Here is the broad consensus among market-leading newspapers in 10 countries:

Happening now: First, all but a few major newspapers are integrating at this moment, seriously considering integrating, or have already integrated.

Improve effectiveness and efficiency: Second, the overwhelming reasons to integrate are what you might expect: effectiveness and efficiency. “Effectiveness” because the advertising community is rapidly re-tooling to embrace marketing performance across channels. “Efficiency” in that an integrated team selling multiple solutions should mean more customer contacts, having only one per visit the same client, and package selling key accounts.

Impediments to success: Third, there are serious impediments to ...[more]