Tag: ROI

Outside the marketers’ echo chamber, print lives

According to B2B magazine, ABM, the trade association for the business-to-business trade press, held a series of panel discussions recently in which participants declared that print isn’t dead.

Wouldn’t we expect them to say that? Of the four pro-print souls mentioned in the article, three of them still make their living by running, editing or selling for print magazines.

I’m not arguing their point either; I believe print is a vitally important communications vehicle and somehow will remain so in the future.

What’s notable in this discussion is the reasoning offered by the fourth panelist, Bob Drake, who runs Drake Creative agency. He said that a recent ad campaign that included a print component succeeded. He’s quoted by B2B as saying, “It goes against everything we’re hearing, but we can engage people for a long period of time (in print) and they stay engaged.”

I don’t know Bob Drake, and I don’t mean to pick on him. But if he’s hearing that print doesn’t work, then he’s talking to other marketers and not to marketees.

Marketers are abandoning print because it’s harder to measure as a marketing vehicle than Internet-based technologies. This is undeniably true. But at some point, that legitimate objection got simplified to the assumption that print is broken, which has been simplified even further to the notion that print is dead.

But if you ask readers, that’s not even close to the truth. The same article cited a poll by Roads & Bridges magazine (conducted by Internet, ironically enough) that indicated a strong preference among its audience for getting information via print. This is consistent with every bit of research and opinion I’ve ever seen. People prefer reading words on paper  – especially glossy paper with charts and pictures.

The point? Like everyone else, marketers are susceptible to the echo-chamber effect. Print isn’t in trouble because it doesn’t work; it’s in trouble because shorthand communications of marketers obscure the nuance that is the truth.

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?
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.

What B2B advertisers really want from media

I’m not an advertiser, but I’ve spent the last 10 years selling to them.

I think my first day selling was the last day of the golden age in B2B media — back when magazine people spent all day bending over to pick up money, and then marveled at how hard they were working.

On my second day the balance tipped; customers by-and-large stopped looking for reasons to advertise, and started looking for reasons not to advertise. This has been documented and discussed. What’s missing from the discussion is why industrial advertisers might actually want the trade media to fail.

Start with the assumption that as much as buying marketing, these advertisers were buying security.They followed a  simple formula, perfect for the engineering mindset that drives these companies. It was this: Advertising with trade media is the only reliable way to reach a targeted audience. So by doing whatever the competition does you will achieve similar results.

Feeling aggressive? Spend a little more and you’ll do a little better. There were few variables, like the strength of your creative, and the novelty of your logo-ed novelties. It was neat and simple and let companies get back to the business of making stuff — which was their true DNA.

Then came the Internet, which replaced measurement by lead-generation with measurement by click-throughs and unique visits. It put a premium on speed and courage; and it created so many variables that there was no longer assurance you could match your competitors’ results by matching their spend.

Suddenly, buying print meant spending a lot of money without getting any security.

That would be enough for marketers to resent the media. But there’s another piece.

The traditional media model is sponsorship: Media creates content, which advertisers sponsor to reach a targeted audience. As friend and former boss Teri Mollison now at F&W Media, likes to say, this is the “We talk, you listen” model of marketing.

The Internet? That’s more like, “No, you listen.”

This is an uncomfortable thing in industry, where blunt and scratchy feedback didn’t always have to be tolerated. Nonetheless, it emphasizes how little feedback print really offers. That’s troublesome because of print’s other historical value proposition: distributing product information.

What good is that function in the Internet era if the information takes a a month to get out; doesn’t provide a lot of feedback compared to emerging alternatives; and inevitably gets filtered by a team of trade press editors.

It’s not news that cuts in ad spending have been offset by increased expenditures by industrial marketers on videos, articles, e-books, blogs and other original content. The Internet empowers them to do something the trade press won’t: get information to the market quickly, with no strings attached, and without a filter. There’s no begging, no pitching, no sending of gifts (which never really works, by the way), no threats to the publisher. The media’s old customers like being able to do their own media work. They don’t want to give up the flexibility and the freedom. They don’t want to see the power move back to the edtors.

Media companies are suffering terribly in this recession, but I’m not sure if many of them really understand why. It’s not just because there are too may other choices. It’s because industrial marketers aren’t interested in their survival.