Bob Rosenbaum | The MarketFarm

Does Glenn Hansen have a death wish?

In a recent article in Media Business magazine, Glenn Hansen, president and CEO of BPA (the dominant auditor of controlled circulation media) said this about his organization’s website auditing service:

“Our numbers are going to be lower than any other numbers that you get from any other source, whether Google or any commercial Web-analytics company.”

Add some coal-tar?

It’s impossible to tell from the article, but I infer that he was proud of this.

Several years ago – the last time I seriously looked into auditing websites – my research told me that I could expect a 50% drop in reportable traffic by doing a BPA web audit. At the time, my company was using an analytics tool that, when implemented, had already cut traffic 33% by weeding out search engine spiders.

In the end, I didn’t need the BPA audit, and I sold around the numbers delivered by our analytics system by focusing on products that gave customers what they were asking for: guaranteed impressions, delivery of clickthroughs, and various levels of leads. When we did these things, the prospects didn’t worry if we had the largest or busiest website.

I’ve previously written about BPA’s lack of contact with the reality of its members; and about why audited circulations continue to shrink.

It’s natural that BPA, like any auditor, would seek to extend its product line by pushing website audits. But boasting about the great difference between BPA’s traffic measurement and those of other analytic systems demonstrates that BPA is as far away as ever from understanding the grim future that it faces.

The problem BPA members are having is that an audit – whether it’s for a print product or a website – addresses advertiser questions that are now obsolete. Not all advertisers have figured this out yet, but the number that has is growing. A recession hastens the education process, as marketers are forced to coax more measurable impact out of a reduced spend.

An audit is testimony to the nature of a media outlet’s audience: it’s size, the sources from which it was recruited, and any additional information that members of the audience themselves volunteer to offer.

That’s not what advertisers want – or ever really wanted. What they really want is a measured response to their marketing activities. The audit always fell short of that goal. Whether any of us knew it, the circulation audit was just a long-term stop-gap – an alternative set of metrics until technology created a way for the desired metrics to be used.

Today that technology exists. It’s called the Internet, and advertisers (if you haven’t heard) are swarming to it.

BPA hopes to secure some kind of future for itself by pushing website audit services. But those services aren’t necessary, because advertisers can get all the measurement they want with intelligent programs that generate clickthroughs and other direct responses. And unlike audits, which provide a snapshot that is 6 to 12 months old, clickthroughs and leads arrive in real time. Within 30 days, an average marketer can tell if he or she is getting an adequate return from a specific program.

Worse, not only is BPA measuring the wrong stuff in its website audits, it’s bragging that the numbers members will be compelled to report are well below the numbers that non-members get to use.

To summarize: It provides undesirable information that people don’t need. I can’t help comparing it to Burger King putting a dollop of coal-tar on it’s bacon triple cheeseburger.

If there is ROI in this for the publisher, will somebody please help me understand?

I don’t know why anyone bothers with a BPA website audit; if I were a buyer, it would be an immediate sign to me that the website’s owners are slow to understand or respond to the customers’ changing needs. The best thing a BPA web audit could tell me is to look elsewhere.

Dallas Morning News restructures, Armageddon begins

If this were April 1, I’d write it off as a joke. But this close to Christmas, it might be a sign of the Second Coming.

The Dallas Morning News has reorganized; the people who generate editorial now report to people who sell ads.

Under the plan, editors of sports, real estate, entertainment, auto and travel now report to sales managers – who have been given a new title: General Manager.

In The Dallas Observer, a news blog, the extensive report includes an interview with Editor Bob Mong – who has been given a new title: Pimp.

In that interview, he told The Dallas Observer: “There’s no journalist in our organization who will allow a business person to cross the line. It just won’t happen. I’m not going to allow it to happen. [Managing editor] George [Rodrigue] isn’t. [Executive sports editor] Bob Yates or [Lifestyles deputy managing editor] Lisa Kresl won’t. But I think it’s an attempt to go to market in a different way.”

Look, I know t hooker imes are tough for newspapers; I’ve written about little else since I started this blog. And coming from the B2B world, where editors are expected to be as rigid as Silly Putty, I know it’s possible to operate on the up-and-up without a huge barrier between sales and edit.

But perception is reality. And it’s already near-impossible for newspapers to operate without the perception that their coverage has been bought. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t strengthen the paper’s case when editors get their annual reviews from sales managers. The reality is that journalists have always had the dominant voice in newspaper decisions. That needs to change; the voices of journalists and advertising folks need to be heard together. In a 167-year-old institution, I don’t think you can achieve that by simply turning it upside-down and saying, “OK, the ad guys are in charge.”

If advertisers think there’s a chance they can influence editorial decisions, then that’s what they’ll try to do. And when a news executive puts himself in the position of saying, George Rodrigue would never let anything like that happen, he’s one unforeseen circumstance away from becoming a liar. It’s an untenable position.

Further, I don’t believe this kind of change addresses the real problem that newspapers are having. They aren’t losing ad revenue because advertisers have suddenly decided there’s something wrong with the product. They’re losing it because advertisers have decided there’s something wrong with the medium.

You can’t directly measure the full response to a print ad, and advertisers now live in a culture where everything can and must be measured. They’re spending more money online, and the funding for those initiatives has to come from somehwere. It comes from print.

If anybody should know this already, it would be the DMN’s advertising staff, which is in constant contact with its customers. But instead of taking on the real issue of delivering advertising response, they’re going to try to satisfy advertisers through more interaction with the content side of the business. So they, just like the journalists, are in denial. They’re going to fix the wrong thing, and I suspect they’re going to do it poorly.

It’s true: Newspapers have to reinvent themselves. But this isn’t reinvention. It’s not innovative. It’s not courageous. And it’s not the prelude to a long and prosperous future. It’s rolling over and submitting. It’s giving up.

Here’s how BusinessInsider.com reported it:

The Adventure is over

National Geographic Adventure has lost its passport. It’s the latest casualty in the 2009 media meltdown. Staff was told today that the magazine, a 10-year-old extension of National Geographic, would close, according to a report by Folio:.

Seventeen staffers will lose their jobs, the report says. The brand will continue online and with other affiliated products.

More on AOL’s content push

This article in Media Buyer/Planner goes into more detail about AOL’s plan to differentiate itself with original content. With a staff of 3,000 journalists, AOL could differentiate itself simply by assigning them beats and cutting them loose to go report on stuff. It would be, by far, the largest deployment of journalists from a single U.S. media source.

But I don’t have much faith in the ability of algorithms to deliver pleasant surprises. By shackling its journalists to algorithmic results, I can’t help believing that they only thing we’re going to get from AOL is more of the same that it’s TMZ.com website is already producing. And heaven knows, nobody is sitting around wishing we had more of that.

More on AOL: It’s new content strategy is dead wrong

A week ago, I wrote about the futility of AOL’s rebranding unless it figures out how to become more relevant to its audience.

This week I have to write about the futility of AOL’s effort to become more relevant to its audience.

The centerpiece of that effort, according to PaidContent.org, is a three-pronged approach to generating new content:

Hire lots of journalists. It’s good news that AOL is trying to generate original content, and I’m pleased that it’s using trained content professionals – of which there are plenty available. It has a staff of 3,000 journalists, according to PaidContent, which puts it into the top tier of U.S. news-gathering organizations.
2.

Use algorithms to predict what stories people want to read, and then assign these to the journalists. The objective is clear. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong hopes that by giving people content they want, AOL will become the content place to go.

He’s wrong. This is the kind of thinking that puts Jon and Kate Gosselin in our faces day after day, week after week, month after tawdry month. It takes variety out of the news cycle, just as Wal-Mart’s unceasing desire to stock only the best-selling SKUs limits the variety of what you can buy at the world’s largest retailer.

When someone says, “I want more stories like the one about Jon and Kate,” they aren’t really saying they want to hear more about the Gosselin family. They’re saying they want information that makes them feel the same way they did when they heard it (for better or worse), and that makes them feel as informed as they did when they talked about it at work the next day.

People can tell you what was important to them yesterday, but they don’t know what’s going to be important to them tomorrow. Media have not succeeded until now, nor will they in the future, by giving people what they want so much as by giving people what’s new, important and interesting.

The real function AOL’s journalists could serve is to present information that is new, important and interesting. AOL has hired the journalists but it’s about to screw up in deploying them.

Get advertisers more involved with content. This isn’t unique and it isn’t new. It’s just one more effort to help marketers bludgeon their target audiences into submission. Hey, I’m a marketer and I still can’t stand the thought of this. Everybody on one side of the equation is doing this, and everybody on the other side of the equation is trying to tune it out. Creating more and more advertorial microsites – no matter how well intentioned some of them will inevitably be – is not the big-internet business model of the future.

In fact, this is the very reason why social media is so hot right now: because social media lets users find the information they want. AOL’s model is to deliver the information, fire-hose style, right down the user’s gullet. It may generate some short-term revenue, but it won’t make AOL relevant or desirable.

It will do the opposite.

None of this is to say that AOL’s plan is evil or particularly dreadful. I think it’s pretty typical. But that’s why it won’t work. AOL is trying to distinguish itself by doing what every other large media company is trying to do. For a company in trouble, that’s a formula for failure.

Fun with spam, Lesson #113

Content generators – we used to call them writers and reporters – are having a tough couple years. But they can rest easy on this evidence that, of the many indignities they may suffer, offshoring their jobs isn’t likely to be one of them anytime soon:

__________________

Sender: ydasyl@aol.com
Subject: We transform one dollar into one thousand!
Date: November 28, 2009 3:10:53 PM EST

Do you dream to have a rest with family this summer, but there is no money for this purpose? We shall prompt you the decision of this problem. Everything, that is required from you, it to register at the site of our online-casino, fill up the balance for ANY sum, which is suitable for you, and to start enjoying the gambling. You needn’t to be the master of board games to win huge money here. It is checked up by time!

The great search engine standoff

Seth Godin is one of my favorite bloggers, and I quote him regularly. He’s been a source of clear thinking and wisdom for me since long before blogs existed.

But in today’s blog, he writes about News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch’s idea to control how news content is indexed on web sites. He got it wrong. He writes, in entirety (and you’ve got to admire Godin’s brevity):

Rupert Murdoch has it backwards

You don’t charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.

If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.

If Murdoch were just another blogger, or just another guy with another product to shill, I would agree with Godin. But Murdoch owns one of the largest news-gathering organizations in the world. And here’s the point that Godin misses:

When search engines index vast troves of original content, such as Murdoch’s News Corp., the impact is synergistic:

It drives traffic to News Corp.;
It provides the kind of top-of-the-charts, original content that makes a search engine valuable;
It provides a large class of users with the kind of content they’re seeking.

Here’s the nuance; there is less and less original content of the kind that News Corp. produces. Anyone who has ever used the Web has had the experience of following one good link after another to find they’re all connected to the same piece of mediocre content. The money dedicated to generating high-quality content has evaporated; it’s down by more than $1.5 billion in the U.S. newspaper business alone – not to mention all the other businesses that pay content providers to create information that people want and need.

So anyone who wants this kind of content to continue, must make some kind of investment in it.

When search engines index to content like that provided by Murdoch’s company, they profit by selling sponsored search results in the space around it.

But the news organizations’ only means of profit from this activity is to sell advertising around the content. But advertising isn’t selling – nor is it expected to significantly recover. Further, a portion of the money that marketers no longer spend to advertise in newspapers and magazines has been reallocated to the paid search function of search engines.

So why shouldn’t they pay for the right to index high-end content?

The attention that search engines generate is doing less and less good for newspapers and other free-content websites. If News Corp. can’t sell ads around its content, it has no reason to care if search engines promote the content.

So Godin has it wrong. He supposes that news media get the larger share of value in their relationship with search engines. In fact, to the consternation of anyone in the news business, it’s the other way around.

Further, the search engines may be able to extract even more value. Right now, one search engine is much like another. But if one could brag that it’s the only search engine to index the world’s largest news generators, that might make a difference to consumers. I know it would to me.

I don’t know if even Rupert Murdoch has the juice to take on Google. But he may be able to set the big search engines against each other. I don’t know if he’ll succeed in getting paid by one search engine and in locking out the rest. But to me, like it or not, it sounds like the kind of clash that isn’t likely to go away without creating some kind of change that affects everyone.

Here is more background on the issue:

Murdoch no longer alone in desire to block Google

Murdoch wants a Google rebellion

Bing not likely to outbid Google for news

Murdoch could block Google searches entirely

What is the world’s smallest deck chair?

It’s the period in Aol. As in, America Online’s new branding effort, which changes the company from AOL to Aol. – but doesn’t make it any more relevant in a post-internet-service-provider world.

Seriously, this isn’t like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic; as AOL and Time Warner complete their de-merger, it’s like replacing the rubber pad on a leg of a deck chair so it doesn’t scuff the deck.

I don’t understand why Aol. even exists anymore, except that it’s too big to go away quietly. The services it provided in the early days of the Internet – everything under one roof like a well-lit mall in an otherwise under-developed part of town – have all been superseded by a wider variety of offerings on the well-developed ‘Net.

Its search engine has dropped out of the top tier and offers no unique user value that would separate it from any others.

And I’m always startled when I find myself exchanging e-mails with someone who still has an address at the aol.com domain. Actually, it’s not an exchange; any e-mail I’ve sent in the last few months to the few Aol.-users I know has bounced back to me. Just this morning, I printed out a document and put it in an envelope with a stamp, because the Aol. user’s address rejected the attachment.

Yes, Aol. has a brand problem. If you’re an investor who bet your retirement on AOL-Time Warner, the brand represents broken promises and unfulfilled dreams. For pretty much everyone else it represents obsolescence.

That’s obviously not what the folks at Aol. and its branding agency, Wolff Olins (of the Omnicom Group) are thinking.

In its coverage (linked above), The New York Times quotes Sam Wilson, managing director in the New York of Wolff Olins, the branding agency Aol. has hired. The Times writes:

The period in the logo was added to suggest “confidence, completeness,” Ms. Wilson said, by declaring that “AOL is the place to go for the best content online, period.”

The article also quotes Aol.’s CEO (or is that Ceo.?) Tim Armstrong:

Mr. Armstrong said he liked to describe the period as “the AOL dot” because “the dot is the pivot point for what comes after AOL,” whether it is e-mail, Web sites or coming offerings that will “surprise people.”

What will surprise me is if Aol. can provide the Internet community with a reason to exist other than its legacy – something about which the online world is notoriously indifferent. To me, the dot looks a lot like the head of a nail, a coffin nail maybe – which might be enough to keep the deck chairs from sliding around as the ship continues to list.

Some inside dope on ‘New Moon’

There’s a new movie out today that seems to be of special interest to girls between the ages of 11 and 16. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it, but it’s called New Moon. If it doesn’t ring a bell, here’s a short clip that’s been running on TV. (I just can’t see this too many times.)

There haven’t been so many young girls screaming so loud and so long at the same time since the historic day Justin Timberlake went solo.
Am I just grumpy, or has their screaming gotten shriller since the days of The Beatles? I’m anticipating that by the time the third movie of the Twilight series comes out, their youthful larynxes will combine with my aging eardrums to reach the effective pitch of a dog whistle.

And what’s there to say about the 50-year-old women who stand in with them and scream in solidarity for the bare-chested hunky young actors? They have more in common with John Leguizamo in To Wong Foo With Love Julie Newmar than Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie. Other than that, and the fact that I’m glad they aren’t hanging out near my son’s school, I’m pretty much speechless.

The cast has about 9,000 young, attractive people in it. So as the pre-opening hype machine was working, you could tune into any talk show – morning, afternoon, evening or late-night – and be assured of seeing a different cast member with his own, personal shrieking harem. (In fact, if Turkish sultans had elicited this kind of audible reaction from young women, the word ‘harem’ would have a very different meaning today.) With every last cast member apparently booked onto every one of these shows, there hasn’t been a minute of spare airtime in the last two months for other important stuff like John and Kate’s divorce, Afghanistan war policy, or Lindsay Lohan’s VD.

At least the movie has started its run now, bringing the inevitable decline to the 9-and-a-half weeks of hysteria (until the Blu-Ray comes out – I’m guessing just in time for Valentine’s Day).

Finally, something really important that you may not have realized about this unheralded movie: Its release coincided exactly (give or take 36 hours) with the actual new moon in the lunar cycle.

Coincidence? Or proof that President Obama is a disciple of Satan?

People will pay for online news? Now we’re talkin’

A study by Boston Consulting Group indicates people are increasingly willing to pay for local and national news delivered to their mobile devices.

On average, according to the study, the price would have to top out at about $3 a month, which admittedly isn’t much. But it offers two strong points of optimism:

People are willing to pay SOMETHING for what was previously assumed to be of no commercial value.

$3 a month, for a product that no longer has the production or distribution cost of a printed product, is worth far more in the way of earnings than it would be for a traditional media product.

No, this isn’t proof that consumers will pay the full cost of journalism. But does demonstrate that they are aware of the pressure that traditional media models are under as advertising revenue continues to erode; and that they are warming up to being part of the solution.