Category: Happygood Funny Blog

BPA Worldwide freezes rates, remains arrogant and irrelevant

BPA Worldwide, a leader in providing third-party circulation audits, has announced that it’s freezing membership dues and audit rates at their July 2008 levels — good through June 2010.

If you’re in the business, you know that BPA is especially strong among magazines with controlled circulation. If you’re not in the business, you need to know that third-party circulation audits are how publications validate their readership claims to advertisers.

BPA is facing obsolescence at an astonishing rate. If BPA is a dinosaur, then the killer meteor has already hit the Earth and the toxic cloud of extinction is on its way. Holding rates will make as much difference to the organization’s future as putting on a sweater.

Am I being a little harsh here? Perhaps. But set aside the fact that for the previous 20 years of my career BPA was one of the most sluggish, obstinate, arrogant and regressive entities I had to deal with. Set aside the fact that — even though it was owned by its customers — it always, without exception, acted as though its role was to prevent me from innovating in my job. Set aside that I don’t know anyone in publishing (though I’m sure there are a few) who doesn’t take some quiet pleasure at seeing BPA suffer.

What BPA faces aside from all that is the fact that its member magazines must find ways to radically reduce distribution costs. That’s required to offset declines in two key performance indicators: advertising pages sold, and cost-per-thousand (CPM) paid for an average page of advertising.

In other words, advertisers are reaching readers less often, and every reader they reach is worth less to them today than it used to be. The only thing advertisers care about is how many people take a measurable action as a result of seeing an ad.

And what is BPA’s ultimate value to publishers? Proof of readers reached. There is nothing that it does, or wants to do, to measure the responsiveness of those readers.

In my last year running business-to-business magazines, I withdrew two of them from membership in BPA. Not because I was so frustrated with the deplorable service BPA provided; but because my advertisers no longer cared about BPA audits. They told me they wanted to know how my audience would respond to their advertising; if I could provide better response per thousand readers than my competitors, nobody cared to see the expensive and painstakingly designed BPA audit statement. (To be fair, advertisers had been telling me that with increasing urgency for about eight years; it just reached a watershed last year — probably brought on by the recession.)

Since that time, I’ve heard of about two-dozen magazines that have terminated their BPA membership — something that used to be as acceptable in media circles as, say, passing gas in an elevator. Entire divisions of media companies have simply walked away from BPA because the organization’s work has ceased to be of value.

I suppose that freezing rates is a reasonable first response. But I don’t give BPA enough credit to understand how inadequate that step will prove to be as its irrelevance grows like a toxic cloud.

Facebook’s future: It’s in your shorts

Just yesterday, a friend (that’s a lower-case, analog friend) told me how much he hates Facebook. He can’t believe how much time people spend there, he wishes he had never registered for it, and he resents the amount of attention it tries to demand from him.

With that said, he asked if I thought it would eventually fade away.

Social media is here to stay, I responded. While Facebook and Twitter may not always be the dominant portals, the notion of social networking that they represent will continue to evolve and embed itself into our communication – just as web browsing and e-mail have done.

Then this article, on Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed, crossed my desktop and my opinion evolved.

The most insidious aspect of Facebook is how it brings in new members. First, as I explained to my flesh-and-blood friend, every time someone sets up a new Facebook page, they get the opportunity to scour their own address book for potential Friends (digital, capital-F friends). And because Friends are the currency of Facebook — the more you have, the “wealthier” you are — most people accept this initial chance to let the social networking site into their personal data.

So Facebook searches your computer address book for people who are already registered with the site. I don’t know if it just looks for e-mail addresses or follows a more complex algorithm, but within seconds, it will identify every Facebook member you know and offer — with a single click — to ask them to Friend you. (It’s notable that Facebook has already created a legitimate verb in the word “friend”.)

Then Facebook makes a more extraordinary offer: It identifies everyone in your personal address book who isn’t registered at the site and offers — again, with one click — to let them know how much you’d like them to join Facebook with the purpose of becoming your online Friend.

Insidious and ingenious. For the new user, this is simply a shortcut to Facebook-style wealth — lots of Friends. For Facebook, this is the shortest route to ubiquity — which it could be argued has already been achieved.

So now, Facebook has acquired Friendfeed, which “enables you to discover and discuss the interesting stuff your friends find on the web.” This isn’t unique; Digg.com is better known and does essentially the same thing.

But here’s the key: Friendfeed lets you “Read and share however you want — from your email, your phone or even from Facebook. Publish your FriendFeed to your website or blog, or to services you already use, like Twitter.”

This isn’t unique to Friendfeed either. I’ve seen lists of social media sites that have 350 to 400+ sites listed, with new ones being entered daily. Try Googling “list of social media sites”. Most of them make it easy to publish on your blog, Facebook, Twitter and other leading sites.

What’s the point? Facebook is paying $50 million to buy a social media site that, as its primary function, collects more people — not just from the Web, but also from their phones.

This won’t surprise anyone who thinks strategically about social networking. But for anyone who wonders whether Facebook is going to fade away: It’s less likely every day.

Resistance is futile: You WILL buy an e-reader

Amazon’s got the Kindle, now in generation 2.5. Sony just announced that it’s reducing the price of its base-level e-reader to $199 — $100 less than the Kindle — though you can’t download books via wi-fi like you can with Amazon’s unit.

You can also buy e-readers from Panasonic and Samsung, with another coming soon from a startup called Plastic Logic. Microsoft had been rumored to be moving toward the e-reader market, and everyone seems to be waiting for what Apple might come up with.

The Kindle is built around a proprietary platform, as I assume Apple’s would be.

Early this year, Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise — an e-book vendor — to compete directly with Amazon. (Here’s one article announcing the purchase.)

Do you get the sense that you’re going to be hearing a lot about e-books in the months and years ahead?

At various times, it was unimaginable that we’d all have our own computers and cell phones. So if you’re insisting right now that the book can’t be improved upon and there’s no reason for an e-book reader to enter your life, it’s just a matter of time before you change your mind.

The price will have to come down; a war will have to be fought and won over platforms and standards, and at some point, some respected company will have to take a leap and make its products available only in e-book format. None of this will take as long as it is for BlueRay to replace DVDs.

Nintendo actually put an e-reader on the market in 2004 — as did Sony and a few others. They flopped; perhaps because the technology wasn’t advanced enough yet, but more likely because the content providers didn’t have enough economic reason to support it. At the time, an e-reader was just another gadget.

That’s changed.

From magazine companies to newspapers to book publishers, nobody’s business model can continue to absorb the high cost of printing and distributing paper. So your resistance is futile; there is just too much corporate desire now to replace paper with something digital.

At some point, there will be a first New York Times bestseller that never actually came out in a printed edition. I’m putting my money on it happening by 2013.

According to the chart below from Forrester Research, more than 4 out of 5 people are familiar with the concept of an e-reader — compared to less than 2 out of 3 last year.  And while ownership of e-readers has more than doubled in the past year, market penetration is still less than 2 percent.

So do the math: Hardware providers are climbing over each other to break into this market; content providers are eager to support them; consumers have very quickly become aware and curious.

It sounds like an obvious post-recession boom to me.

 

United breaks guitars and, unfortunately, YouTube records

United Airlines allegedly broke a passenger’s guitar and refused to pay for the damage. Unfortunately, he was a professional musician who knows how to gain a following. Join the millions who have heard his song and seen his video on YouTube:

A green GM logo won’t bring in the green

gm-green-logoIt’s been reported in several media over the past week or two that GM is considering changing its logo to green to reflect a leaner, more environmentally conscious identity.

I can’t think of anything less meaningful to the company or its customers.

GM’s future has nothing to do with telling the world that it’s lean and green — which is what the new logo color is supposed to represent. The only thing that matters is whether the  public comes to perceive that GM and its products reflect the right values.

Honda and Toyota do well in the U.S. (and most places) because, to a vast number of people, their brands have come to represent cars that are among the easiest and most enjoyable to own: affordable, reliable, durable and neither too ugly nor too fancy. People didn’t come to feel that way because Toyota and Honda continually told us that their cars were just right (even though they DO continuously tell us). People came to feel that way because their experience was consistent with all the wonderful things Toyota and Honda always say about themselves.

GM would argue that it’s making cars with these same wonderful attributes. Whether that’s true is irrelevant. What matters is whether people perceive that it’s true.

Further, it’s not enough for people to agree when GM says it. People have to assign these attributes to GM products without any prompting before GM can regain its role as a leader in the global auto industry. That’s what branding is all about. And it takes years — not just years of marketing, but years of consistency in what you promise and what you deliver. Today, GM is still too close to the Hummer for anyone to really believe that it cares a lick about lean and about that kind of green.

GM may engineer a financial recovery over the next couple years, and that will be a great thing. But it’s going to take far longer than that for people to  know, in their bones, that GM stands for lean and green — if, in fact, that’s really what GM wants for the long haul.

And I don’t even think that’s the right message. Because in 15 years, green is going to be the price of entry in the car business; if your products aren’t environmentally responsible, then you won’t thrive. So is GM going to rebuild its very identity around meeting the next generation’s minimum standards?

Do Honda and Toyota really get respect for the energy efficiency of their fleets? Or do they get respect for pursuing a mission — building cars that people want to own — with so much focus that energy efficiency naturally became a part of it at the right time? Their fleets were energy efficient before the 2008 run-up in gas prices. The only thing that changed was the advertising.

If the new GM is smarter than the old GM, it will focus on the reasons people really buy cars — the perfect combination of price, style, durability, maintainability and lifetime affordability. Green fits in there for sure. But it won’t always be the headline. And even today, I doubt it’s the reason most people choose which car to buy.

A thought on leadership

Team Blue Thunder, but are they well-lead?
Team Blue Thunder, rally in progress

I’m coaching my son’s youth baseball team. I’ve found that leading a group of 11-year-old boys is pretty much the same as leading a group of adult professionals.

In both cases, the job involves:

  • keeping them focused
  • keeping them motivated
  • removing roadblocks to allow them to remain productive
  • assigning each individual a role that benefits the entire team while complementing that person’s skills, interests and style.

Finally, here’s a quote on leadership, with which I wholeheartedly agree, that’s attributed to the book, The Four Agreements: A practical guide to personal freedom:

“The primal responsibility of leadership is to prime good feeling in the people we lead.”

How does one do that other than by helping them fill a role they enjoy, and then helping them to stay motivated, focused and productive?

OK, there may be one difference between adults and kids: Adults aren’t as motivated by the promise of pretzels and a juice pouch.

On the art of ‘followership’


In his dependably brief and insightful blog, marketing guru Seth Godin writes about this video of a spontaneously developing community  at a dance festival: “My favorite part happens just before the first minute mark. That’s when guy #3 joins the group. Before him, it was just a crazy dancing guy and then maybe one other crazy guy. But it’s guy #3 who made it a movement.  Initiators are rare indeed, but it’s scary to be the leader. Guy #3 is rare too, but it’s a lot less scary and just as important. Guy #49 is irrelevant. No bravery points for being part of the mob.
“We need more guy #3s.”

There are lots of lessons you can take away from this. The one it most illustrates for me has to do with starting a business or launching a new product. More than once I’ve found myself dealing with a leading-edge product that I thought was brilliant. Too often, the response from the target market was, “Interesting. We’ll wait and see.”

The first copycat to come out with a similar product validates it, and makes it easier to sell. The next competitor helps flip the switch among customers from “wait and see” to “hurry up and buy.”

One’s an innovator; two’s competition; three’s a movement.