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]

“Hybrid media” (newspapers) an acquired taste for the advertising community

On occasion, I'm invited to speak to the advertising community on behalf of newspapers about our industry's view of the emerging media ecosystem. Tomorrow, my audience is the Union of Belgian Advertisers in Brussels.

In the course of my research for this speech, I ran across an interesting web site called the “Print Power,” operated collaboratively among the major print industry players in Europe.

It's here where I found the advertising industry's phrase to describe the Industry Formerly Known As Newspapers: “hybrid media.”

“The new phase of planning media has to deal with hybrid media,” according to a recent posting by Print Power editors. “Media that are not any longer what they seem to be. We have seen newspapers migrating to the internet, sometimes even in the same layout as the printed version. But more spectacular is the integration of other media 'genes' like the use of e-ink in the anniversary issue of Esquire in 2008. ...[more]

Marketing challenge: how to close the online value gap between publishers and consumers

U.S. newspaper publishers are sharply disconnected from how consumers perceive their newspapers' brands in the online space. The marketing challenge for newspapers is how to close that gap and to evolve positive perceptions of newspaper web sites into irreplaceable ones for consumers.

This is my alternative “lead” to yesterday's story emanating from suburban Washington, D.C., where the American Press Institute (API) hosted the presentation of a survey by Belden Interactive and ITZ Publishing regarding online revenue possibilities. (Download the full PowerPoint presentation here.)

The survey was designed to show the latest thinking by U.S. newspaper companies regarding online revenue possibilities.

DISCONNECT: PUBLISHERS AND CONSUMERS

Not entirely unexpected, newspaper publishers have a much higher opinion of themselves than their consuming publics.

What the API survey cleverly included was Belden Interactive data on how consumers see newspaper web sites alongside what publishers thought their consumers would say about their ...[more]

To see tomorrow’s hybrid business models, segment usage and passion

Reading through background materials on the online paid content debate in today's media industry, I'm struck by the sledgehammer approach by our industry's smartest people. Too often, the debate is between “everything must be free” and “everything must be paid.”

An industry that has invested in marketing and research would know better.

We're not in one of those industries.

There are basic marketing premises about “value of content” that must be addressed – and I'm confident the major companies are already dancing around this.

The core marketing principle is audience segmentation. Probably a bit less about lifestyle and geography and a bit more about usage and passion.

“Light” users of web sites, like “light” users of print newspapers, have questionable commercial value that we tend to lump together in glorious, but misleading, “averages.”

According to a survey by the Center for Digital Future at the University of Southern California (USC), heavy internet users spent ...[more]

Postcard from India: circulation pricing and the Digital Revolution

From the outside looking in, the Indian newspaper industry looks like the envy of the publishing world with its favourable demographic trends, an aspirational consumer market hungry for news, and advertisers falling over themselves to feed it. These conditions have encouraged confidence in newspaper publishers – especially this decade – creating expansionary visions for the 20+ companies that dominate.

When I began visiting India five years ago, there was a curious disconnection from the rest of the world. Digital revolutions occurred outside of India's cocoon. Talks of faltering relationships between publishers and advertisers didn't happen in India. The “death of print” was negative talk by Americans or Europeans.

Then, the Great Recession hit.

Indian publishers today confess they had never seen revenue declines – not in their careers, not in their lifetimes. U.S. publishers staring at 29% advertising declines may laugh, but break-even growth can be tough if you're ...[more]

Content’s monetary value determined by content, audience, source segmentations

Perusing the voluminous material on the paid online content debate during a lengthy flight last night, I couldn't help but be struck by the gap among experts who seem to view segmentation as some kind of disease.

On one extreme are the newspaper-phobes who hate virtually everything our industry does, believes we are going to die, and therefore advocate that all of our worthless content be free and open to consumers.

On the other extreme are the newspaper-philes who are in love with themselves, believe we are misunderstood and under-valued, and therefore advocate that all of our valuable content should have a price tag for consumers.

Bet on the guy in the middle – if and when a middle emerges. Trust me on this one.

One of the news industry challenges is that we remain governed by people who see audiences and institutions as one-size-fits-all. That goes for the people in the boardrooms and the people ...[more]

Memo to publishers: show advertisers that newspapers work by practicing what you preach

It's not difficult to understand the irony of an industry that suggests its advertisers spend 5% of their revenues on marketing themselves in the pages of newspapers that, themselves, are marketed with often only one-third of the firepower.

In short, newspapers don't practice what they preach when it comes to marketing.

This is a shame because marketing works. And there's plenty of evidence to support it – especially during recessions.

One of the best resources for marketing knowledge is the Strategic Planning Institute in the United States, which maintains a database of more than 3,000 strategic experiences dating back more than 40 years. PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategy) measures the relationship between business actions and business results.

Simon McDonald, research manager of the Financial Times, drew from this database in a recent conference speech to draw a correlation between “share of voice” and “perception of quality” for products by consumers. In short, ...[more]

2 decades of circulation trends re-write global newspaper landscape

For 20 years, the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) – in its various incarnations – has published World Press Trends in conjunction with ZenithOptimedia, a true gem of a report on country-by-country data of the global newspaper industry.

For those same 20 years, I've used this report to augment my private chronicling of circulation trends among paid-for daily newspapers. I take the circulation data and chop it up in different ways to see our industry in unique ways.

The circulation data, over time, tells me less about the health of newspapers or of newsmedia companies and more about consumer buying habits of news on paper.

Here's what the just-released 2008 data shows me:

Mature vs. emerging: Global circulation data hides huge performance gaps between mature and emerging countries. While global circulation may be up nearly four-tenths of 1% in the past year, that is entirely on the backs of South Asia, China, Brazil, ...[more]

10 questions newspaper CEOs must confront about their transformation

In my previous blog posting, I celebrated the return to profitability of newsmedia companies – a step back from the abyss. I noticed a few comments in the blogosphere that I was celebrating a return to normalcy.

Quite the contrary.

Saving a company from death is a first step and should be applauded. The follow-up question is what these re-scaled media companies will do with their profits.

Will they continue sinking resources into black holes such as editorial department coverage of topics that are irrelevant to today's consumer, big printing monstrosities, preservation of departmental silos, payouts of enormous dividends, and the pursuit of large advertisers at the expense of the small?

No, the big companies have a lot to prove before a prolonged celebration.

Here are 10 questions newsmedia industry CEOs should be asking themselves about the reformulation of their budgets and plans over the next 18 months:

1. Are you shifting capital expenditures to ...[more]