Tag: media

A single metric to compare different publications

You’ve received quotes for advertising from two publications or websites; one wants to charge $150 and the other $350. How do you know which is the better deal?

Creating an apples-for-apples comparison between different publications is difficult because it involves so many variables.

The most common calculation for this job is cost-per-thousand (CPM), which measures the amount of money it takes to reach 1,000 people. You can use it for any medium – broadcast, print and online. (But it won’t hold up if you try to compare one medium against another).

Here’s the formula:

CPM = Rate/(Circulation x .001).

So if an ad costs $250 and the publication’s distribution is 8,000 copies, the CPM is $250/8, or $31.25.

It’s a simple calculation, and it lets you compare the rates of different publications with different circulation sizes.

But it has limitations.

For instance, it only works when comparing rates in the same media channel – print v. print or online v. online. That’s because the economics to produce different media – and the results they generate – are so different. Even when using it to compare two similar offers, be aware of these complications:

Ad size: CPM for a half-page ad will be higher than for a quarter page ad in the same publication.

Frequency. The more ads you buy, the lower the price will be for each. That means a single publication will have a different CPM for every ad unit and every frequency rate. The Heights Observer, which offers a pretty typical rate structure, has 60 different CPMs depending on the size of the ad and the number of insertions you buy.

Page size: Move vexing, a quarter-page ad in one publication (The Wall Street Journal, for instance) may be much larger than a quarter-page ad in another (i.e. Reader’s Digest).

That’s why it’s helpful to take CPM a step further – CPM per square inch (CPM/i²).  It’s the cost you pay for each square inch of space to reach 1,000 people. Here’s the formula:

CPM/(height x width)

This will get you closer to that apples-for-apples comparison between different publications. It’s still not perfect. The bigger the differences between two publications, the less relevant CPM/i² will be. But in such cases, it may be the only tangible link for comparing  disparate ad products.

So what’s the best way to use CPM and CPM/i² to make advertising decisions efficient and painless?

Step 1: Decide which publications you’re interested in, based on who they reach and how you feel they’ll work for you. Then look up or request their rates.

Step 2: After getting past the sticker shock, decide how much you want to spend per week, month or year. (Plan to advertise consistently over an extended period. It works best when treated as a long-term investment.)

Step 3: Select ad units in each publication that fit within your price range. Include any extra charges for color. If you can afford a full-page ad in one publication but only a small ad in another, that’s OK. CPM/i² should become a smaller part of your decision but it’s still instructive in your evaluation.

Step 4: Using the same frequency rate (i.e. if you use the 12x rate in one publication, use the closest thing to a 12x rate in every publication), calculate CPM/i².

Now you can evaluate the pricing with confidence, knowing this is as close as you’ll get to an apples-for-apples comparison.

In the end, CPM/i² is only one metric; it should never be the your only consideration. Such factors as a publication’s acceptance among readers, the relevance of its content and its customer-friendliness are at least as important.

Your gut may have to take you the rest of the way.  But you’ll know there is at least some science behind the decision.

Image courtesy of Suvro Datta/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

The economics behind the media meltdown

What really happened that caused traditional media to shrink so much over the past decade – and why are so many still struggling to come back?
That’s the subject of this presentation, which I’ve given several times over the past few years.

 

Why the media meltdown from Bob Rosenbaum

Names make news (2.0)

reading paper_graur razvan ionut_freedigitalphotosTwo years out of college, as a young reporter for a business weekly in Upstate New York, I met the crusty old publisher of the Pacific Business News – a business journal in Honolulu. I didn’t like him much. I was idealistic and ready to change the world. I was living in the snow belt and learning how businesses work. I was reporting on Michael Milken (a Master of the Universe, the junk-bond king, deal-maker supreme) and leveraged buyouts. I was writing about how empires were made, how old cities were rebuilt, how capitalism made the world turn.

This old guy, meanwhile, was living in paradise and frustratingly pragmatic. Standing before a room full of wide-eyed people like me, he was asked to dispense some advice to us young guns. After something like 50 years in business, you know what he came up with?
“Names make news,” he said. That was it.
To look at his newspaper was to understand how this pedestrian philosophy played out in the real world. While it has been updated over the past 25 years to get ahead of changing times, the product I saw that day was gray and cheap. Articles were short, reading as if written by flacks and hacks. Every person’s name that was mentioned – there were a lot of them – was bold-faced. Some articles seemed concocted for the specific purpose of highlighting a large roster of names.
I was unimpressed. I promptly forgot that old publisher’s name and promised myself I’d forget his tired old advice too.
What I discounted was his experience. He’d been running the same publication for something like 50 years. It’s possible, I now realize, he had learned and discarded many other truths along the way – distilling his success into one rule of thumb that fostered success for his product in his market at his time.
Names make news.
I never did manage to forget that advice. While it’s not the only rule I’ve lived by over the years, I’ve had many occasions to apply it, and it has never failed me.
It came back in a rush this morning when Seth Godin’s most recent blog post came through my e-mail. Seth is a marketing guru; he dispenses more good advice in a week than many of us dispense in a lifetime.
Seth’s advice on the subject doesn’t come across like that of a crusty old publisher marking time in Hawaii. It’s contemporary, directed at social media marketers, online journalists, bloggers – would-be masters of the new digital universe.
But it’s equally concise and to the point. When people look at photo albums, he says, they go directly to pictures of themselves.
He writes:
Knowing that, the question is: how often are you featuring the photo, name, needs or wants of your customers where everyone (or at least the person you’re catering to) can see them?
So listen up Internet 2.0ers. Your self-indulgent rants, your complex business models, your highly-designed user experiences are all well and good. But as media change, some things don’t. Names make news. They always have and they always will.

Image courtesy of graur razvan ionut; FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Everybody’s a publisher now

I moved from the editorial side of the publishing business to the money side in 2000 and my timing couldn’t have been worse.

In my first month of selling advertising, it was my job to convince would-be advertisers why they should select my products as opposed to anybody else’s.

By the second month, I was answering a much more difficult question: Why they should advertise at all.

Even in 2000, at the height of the first internet bubble, marketers were figuring out how to use digital technology to disintermediate the media – in essence, becoming publishers themselves. That forever changed the nature of the publishing business and it led to my own nine-year journey that eventually resulted in my decision to leave the publishing industry behind.

Here’s just one piece of evidence: A blog from Alan Mutter, the self-proclaimed Newsosaur. He says big retailers have gone much further than disintermediating their former publishing partners; now they’re competing with newspapers by selling advertising on their own e-commerce sites.

Today, every company needs to think like a publisher. Here’s what that means:

Content: Publishers develop content that’s meaningful to their audience. For companies, this means creating content that’s useful to customers and prospects. In the business-to-business world, that shouldn’t be difficult. No matter what product or service you provide, you’re likely to have more technical expertise about it than any trade journal.

The challenge is purely cultural. Most companies rush to say what they want prospects to know. Those that are successful content marketers instead provide information prospects want to hear. There’s a difference; while the marketer’s first instinct is often to load up on features and benefits, the prospects are really looking for solutions. Business-to-business marketers who can figure out how to help prospects solve problems first will quickly gain permission from those prospects to provide judicious and thoughtful sales messages too.

Audience: Publishers spend a lot of resources to develop audiences for their content – and more important, for the advertising messages they carry. Companies now have the capability to develop their own audiences through social media, skilled distribution of valuable information, and dedication to keeping their contact databases current.

This isn’t magic. It’s not easy and it’s not free; the reason companies have been cutting back on advertising over the past decade is to divert funding to become successful publishers themselves. And those that do are succeeding in a world where target audiences play a more active role in the marketing process than they ever did in the heyday of newspapers and magazines.

 

Advertisers will always go where the people are

Alan Mutter, who calls himself the Newsosaur and whose opinions on the news business I deeply respect, points out that newspapers are now well into their sixth year of declines in advertising demand. In a recent blog post, he noted that annual newspaper sales hit $10.7 billion in 2006 – and now stand at $4.3 billion, about the same level as 1983. And they continue to drop.

While the drop in advertising isn’t new for newspapers, it hasn’t always been their No. 1 problem. Credit for that goes to the systemic and ongoing declines in circulation. Newspapers are simply less relevant across society than they once were.

But the dynamic behind shrinking advertising is different; it’s more like the experience of magazines – especially business-to-business – over the past decade.

I’ve written about the reasons behind the loss of advertising for magazines, and I’m not alone. The issue isn’t that advertising has ceased to work; I don’t believe that’s the case now, nor do I foresee the day when it is.

The issue is that other things now work better. And by other things, I really mean one other thing: social media.

First, more people are involved in social media than in any other media channel. If you lump together YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare and the thousands of other social media websites, day-to-day participation is as broad as any other media channel.

Further, in most cases participation is free – even for the marketers, at the most basic level.

Further still, results are always measurable.

The equation is really simple: Marketers who are pulling back on their traditional advertising are merely following the lead of other marketers. And those who are not actively involved in social media are negligent. Marketers need to be where the people are, so they simply aren’t going to ignore a media channel that has so quickly attracted a large percentage of the world’s population.

I could predict that advertising revenues are going to continue their decline for newspapers, because consumer advertisers are now discovering what business-to-business advertisers learned several years ago: With social media, you can  (and should) become your own publisher – developing an audience and serving it with meaningful, interesting and helpful content.

That doesn’t mean newspapers, magazines or any other type of print media are doomed. But newspapers of the future will be very different than they were just six years ago. The sooner they figure out how to unhitch their fortunes from advertising, the better off they’ll be.

The Rules of Social Media Content

Rule #1:
They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
(Attributed to many sources including Theodore Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr.)

Rule #2:
It’s not about what you say; it’s about what they hear.

Rule #3:
Fast. Short. Meaningful.

Rule #4:
An incomplete solution now is better than a complete solution later.

Rule #5:
Instead of giving a lecture, tell a story.

Rule #6:
You can’t educate ’em if you don’t entertain ’em first.

Rule #7:
You can keep your audience busy with quotes and retweets. But to build an audience, you need to be original.

Rule #8:
Of course you’re there to sell. But your audience isn’t necessarily there to buy. Remember it and respect it.

Rule #9:
One sales pitch for every 20 pieces of non-selling content. Maximum. And that’s if your content is really good.

Rule #10:
More like H.L Mencken. Less like Billy Mays.

Rule #11:
You’re not a guru until OTHER people call you a guru; so don’t even bother trying to prime that pump.

Rule #12
Write like you talk, and talk well.

(More to come, or suggest your own)

Content: made simple

In a longer interview on consumer media by iMediaConnection.com, Professor Henry Jenkins from USC’s Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism offers this breathtakingly simple explanation of the role of content – and a fair warning to those who would exploit it with hands of ham:

“… In a world with many media choices, consumers are actively selecting what content is meaningful to them and circulating it consciously to people they think may be interested. They are deploying media content as gifts for their personal networks, as resources for ongoing conversations. Until marketers understand [this], they are doomed to insult and alienate the very people they are hoping to attract.”