Make Digital Marketing Work

Its the season for top tens and predictions for next year.  Never to be one for missing out on a trend we include our predictions for 2010 below:

1)      Digital marketing will come of age and stop focusing on tactical disciplines.  Leading on from this the value of strategic marketing will become better understood by digital marketers and welcomed by clients

2)      Publishing will experience an extremely turbulent year and many publications could potentially be put up for sale discontinued or merged together

3)      Google will stop being viewed as the enemy of publishers and acknowledged as a valued partner

4)      Online broadcast of TV content will become a huge issue for TV companies and lead to similar scenes as we have seen this year for news publishers

5)      The concept of a mobile wallet will become a common thing for consumers

6)      The world wide web and mobile web will converge as mobile browsers become as common as laptops

7)      Wifi in the city streets for everyone

8)      Display advertising will enjoy a short renaissance followed by a larger debate about banner ads use and effectiveness

9)      Offline and integrated marketers will face a huge task as they move from a broadcast media model to one that is customer led.  Not everyone will be able to adapt.

10)   A pure digital agency will secure lead agency status by a times 100 company

Oh and one more for luck

Arsenal will win the FA cup!

What are your predictions and what do you think of ours?

I found the news waiting for me this morning that Media Week is to be removed from the newsstand and another of my favourite Haymarket Business Media titles, Revolution is to become a quarterly supplement giveaway with Marketing Magazine.

According to the story I read, Media Week is going to retain an online editor and utilise the staff of Brand Republic which is a several times a day destination for my browser.  The brand is also going to survive (at least for now) as the Media Week Awards and the Media Week Annual Conference but that must be slim solace for a brand I’ve known in the industry for a very long time, not to mention the staff who are being cut.

Revolution is going to be published as a supplement to Marketing Magazine which the press release says is unaffected by the changes and also backed by what the press release calls a “Blogging initiative in 2010”.  Not sure what that means, but along with New Media Age, Revolution acts as my compass in the industry and I for one am going to miss the title a lot.  When I worked in New York Revolution opened their offices at the same time as we did and the two ex pat crews had a drink or three on Bleeker Street several times.

It is the first of what I suspect are going to become more regular announcements from magazine and newspapers of layoffs, restructures, consolidations and new initiatives all aimed at cutting costs to make up the shortfall from falling circulations and advertising sales.  It’s a brutal world out there now if you are in publishing and we send our thoughts out to anyone at Haymarket who has been adversely affected.

We put our thoughts down about newspapers and magazines in previous blog posts, and we saw Nick Gregg offer his advice in a piece entitled The 5 key action points that might save publishers. Similarly  Robert Andrews gave out his advice in his piece Four Controversial Ways To Save Regional Papers Online, and that struck us as intrinsically the best way for publishers to think.  Utilise the assets you have in new markets to preserve funding for your product.  The move away from print to online is now pretty irresistible and unless publishers have got a strategy in place to meet it, more and more titles are going to disappear or be consolidated and it is going to happen very quickly.

Over the last few weeks I have been looking at publishing.  It’s too big a subject to fit into one or even a week’s posts and there is a lot going on in the rest of the agency but I did want to include a bit about magazine (periodical) publishers because whilst they do share things in common with newspapers it is a hybrid problem that they face and one which may require the most outlandish of solutions if profits are to be protected by the publishing companies.

First off I have been a dedicated magazine reader all my life.  When I was a child I read comics, and then at the age of 11 started reading titles such as ‘Skateboard Scene’ to go with my new found passion whilst trying to learn how to bowl ride.  Other titles that I have been devoted to have included The Face, NME, The Stage, Diver Magazine,  Which, Home and Garden, Private Eye, The Economist, Personal Computer World, , PC User, Computing, PC Week, Internet Magazine, Internet User, Wired, Marketing, Marketing Week, Revolution,  New Media Age.

The point is that I have read a lot of magazines.  They can loosely be split into titles I read for pleasure and titles I read for work.  Of the ones I read for pleasure I read them to find out what was new, what was cool, what to buy, what was a better buy, how to find the best price. I also read some of them to find out where to go and what to do.  I made sure I was in the know and that the kit and equipment I had was as up to date and as quality as I could afford.

Of the titles which I read for professional reasons I was able to keep my knowledge up to date and current, abreast of new trends and thought processes, aware of competitors and what they were doing and saying.  I was able to get good deals for equipment I wanted the company to buy and I was able to check my salary against similar jobs when it was leading up to a wage review and I was able to find new job opportunities when it was time to move on.  I read them on the train, at home and in the office.  I read them early in the morning in the evening at weekends and at lunchtime.  They were informing, entertaining and reference material.  They were an invaluable part of my life.

That’s a pretty exhaustive list and my memory fails me at what point I learned that these were actually termed as business to business and business to consumer titles.  I suspect that my experience of magazines is not so dissimilar to that of other people.  They provide in depth knowledge and resources for niche audiences.  The more information and stats it was able to provide me with the better I liked it.

These days I have a single resource for pretty much all these things and that is the Internet.  The Internet is extremely good at providing resources to niche audiences at a low cost which is bad news for the B2C titles.  It is also the greatest information resource yet conceived by man which is bad news for B2C titles.  Blogging provides more analysis and news than I can ever consume in a single sitting and Google provides me with lots of research material to base purchases on.  It seems that advertisers, the bedrock of all periodical publication agree with Ad revenues down for the entire industry.

It’s a problem that publishers have seen coming but now it is here most seem to be no nearer a solution and ill prepared for the shift.  Instead of tooling up and preparing for this well in advance there is suddenly a wealth of ads for digital directors and Heads of Digital.  Head hunters are on the phones screening candidates for their ‘gravitas’, knowledge, and willingness to explore any and all possibilities to find the correct solution for their business.  The sad thing is that if this is genuinely their first foray into this arena then it is probably already too late to find a business solution to the problem.

Fortunately that doesn’t include the majority, who have explored a number of possibilities over the years, from teasers and paywalls to new news free and value added services.  The trends and solutions have gone in cycles with the Economist recently announcing that more of their content will move to behind the paywall.  They are putting a lot of faith in the belief that news and commentary has value to the audience, especially as there are free alternatives available on blogs.  Their issues (certainly as far as some points go) are therefore the same as those facing newspapers and there are enough citizen journalists who will be more than willing to write the story and capture the audience whilst they come up with new and interesting ways to monetise their blog.  Most will fail and vanish after a few attempts but they will soon be replaced at the speed of Google and eventually someone will figure out the method that sticks.

One model I looked at some ten years ago now was for an independent magazine called SimplyCity.  It was aimed at the modern urban living woman and seemed to me to be perfect for the Carrie Bradshaws of New York which is where it was first issued.  The magazine provided content and ideas on where to go, what to buy, what to wear, and other lifestyle information.  It had a catchy title and an attitude that epitomised single women living in the city at that time.  The website then gave additional content but most importantly provided access to purchase the products and other items that the printed magazine had introduced its audience to.

There was also a theme that ran through the articles and follow up articles so that each subsequent version directed traffic to the next instalment.  If the previous instalment had been online then the next one would be offline and visa verse.  This was therefore a case of offline driving traffic online and online driving traffic offline.  You got some content free (online) and paid for other content (offline) and online supported itself with eCommerce.  It’s a model I loved but in amongst the dot com crash the cost of managing what was effectively two sets of publishing teams (offline and online) and carrying stock was too much for the company and its investors to bare.  We were all pretty young then and I know my knowledge wasn’t as rounded then as it is now and so I wasn’t able to give them as good advice as I could today.

If we were doing this today I would recommend that the magazine operate as an affiliate which would claim commissions back from products featured, and sell advertising to increase the visibility of lead products and services.  That would negate the need for stock and fulfilment whilst providing an online revenue stream and a reason for the site to co-exist alongside the printed version rather than cannibalising it.  The question of dual content is one that is still expensive but if the audience could be tapped into this a series of trackbacks to relevant blogs could also be integrated so that commentary and discussion was provided and boosted the audience’s own SEO efforts.

Another idea that has been suggested to me and which I agree with is providing access to tools and data to subscribers.  The content is therefore available to anyone online but methods to interact with the stored data of the publication are made available through applications.

I began by saying that this post was too long for a single article so I will pick it up again in another article.

I have been finishing off my blog post about Magazine publishing and its proving to be too lengthy to post in one go but a couple of things appearing in the Guardian also caught my eye recently which ask some pretty important questions of the publishing industry in general.  The first one is the move by Murdoch to remove News Internationals content from Google once the paywalls have been implemented.

This is a bold move and in some of the discussions I have seen appearing on the web the following comment seemed to sum up a view that whilst harsh may have some truth in it if things continue to play out as they have been.

“ Everything he’s doing is looking increasingly petulant and misguided.  He’s a relic of a bygone age, lashing with what monetary clout he still has against his increasing irrelevance”.

As a self confessed intellectual snob I certainly won’t miss content from the tabloid arm of News International and removing it from the world’s search results to me is a bit like cleaning up the distorted noise on a 1940s swing recording, but that is not all that we are talking about here.  The full list of News International titles includes The Times, The Sunday Times.  Whilst these are absolute bastions of British journalism, it would be rare for a truly news worthy story to appear uniquely in these titles.  As I pointed out in my blog post about newspaper publishing on the one hand you have the BBC content and on the other you have a multitude of bloggers and citizen journalists who are all capable of writing their own story and gathering opinion from around the world that will all then be available across the web in seconds.

News International are never backward about coming forwards with their criticism of the BBC and the younger Mr Murdoch’s recent tirade against public funded news coverage demonstrates his beliefs very clearly.   Rupert Murdoch has pledged his support for the Conservative party at the next election and the Conservative Party has made a pledge to look at the BBC’s charter.  Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt whilst speaking to the Financial Times was quoted as saying “We are looking into whether it would be appropriate to rip up the charter in the middle of it, or whether one should wait”.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see what the master plan is.  Newspaper publishing is fighting for very big stakes at the moment and the BBC offers a free alternative to those plans.

This leaves citizen journalism though and we are yet to see how this thorn is addressed by the fourth estate.

Also in the Guardian was another article Foreign media count cost of UK libel laws in which it announced that titles form overseas are considering whether to continue to publish in the UK.  This content is protected by laws of Freedom of Speech abroad does n not enjoy the same protection here and as such title owners are considering whether to block access to their sites and withdraw the foreign titles from circulation in the UK due to the threat of libel.

These all seem to me to be a classic case of an old world meeting new technology with new conflicts seemingly appearing every other day.  The Internet is very good at asking questions of an industry, it did it first for software and is currently asking questions of the music industry. The rule of thumb the Internet has proved time and time again is that the advance of new technology is as unstoppable as a tidal wave.  It is up to industry to adapt to technology or become obsolete.

Personally I don’t think that removing your content from Google is a great move, because the alternatives will not stop the story appearing.  It will only stop your point of view appearing, and I think being included in the conversation is better than not being included in the conversation.

Whether it is business models or the diversity of domestic law pertaining to an industry, the Internet is causing a dramatic rethink and more than likely a few sleepless nights for existing media owners.  If they do not accept that the broadcast model as we knew it is morphing into something new then they will be the ones who will increasingly marginalise themselves and therefore become increasingly irrelevant to the conversation.

I wrote yesterday about book publishing and predicted that the book was not dead and would continue with its admittedly minority but niche audience.

Newspaper publishing is less clear.  Over crowded tubes and the increasing switch of commuters to pedal power has made a noticeable difference on the number of Times and Telegraphs left behind on the 7:43 to Liverpool Street in the mornings.  Murdoch correctly predicted that news would be delivered digitally.  What he failed to predict was the way that the value of news was commoditised and made freely available.  On the one hand, the BBC has its mighty news service which breaks stories of interest throughout the day and on the other hand citizen journalism is providing some excellent news coverage that is trusted by more and more people.  Then there is Google that aggregates it all together and makes it available at the type of a search string.

As a child I remember watching the movies of the thirties which many would say was the golden era of newspaper publishing.  Reporters took on heroic levels of importance with a dogged determination to find the story and rush it to the editor’s office for inclusion in the morning episode.  Even Superman was a journalist at the daily Planet and everyone knows that Spiderman took the pictures that mattered for the Daily Bugle.

Today however both Superman and Spiderman would have problems.  Whilst they were holding the train one handed to stop it plunging into the river,  everyone down below would be pointing their camera phones whilst a blogger sat in Starbucks and published the story as it happened.  Superman could fly faster than a speeding bullet but could he conceivably fly faster than a wireless connection with broadband?  I suspect not.  Krypton’s last son would get scooped every time.

Please excuse me for vanishing into my childhood for a second but I think the analogy highlights the problem perfectly.  Daily newspapers were all about the scoop and the strength of commentary.  Even with super powers it is difficult for the news agencies these days to replace the person on the ground equipped with modern communication methods, so what hope does a mere mortal with a press pass have?  Similarly an army of young boys in short trousers can never  build a distribution network as efficiently as Google with its ability to help people “read all about it”

One of my favourite movies when I was growing up was All the Presidents Men, which is probably also journalism and newspaper publishing’s finest hour.  The complex story showed two dedicated professionals use every ounce of their experience and professionalism (as well as a few little strokes) to get the story that ultimately removed a president from office.  Never before, never since was the ethic of journalism so well highlighted.

I found myself wondering how it would go down if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein found the story today.  Would they have waited to publish in the Washington Post or would they have released it piece by piece in an anonymous blog to gather information in the form of other anonymous comments which would then be tweeted and linked across the world.  One can imagine deepthroat.wordpress.com becoming one of the most read blogs in the world if it did play out like that and all the Presidents men wouldn’t have been able to stop it.  The recent story of Trafigura which was first reported in WikiLeaks shows that the Internet is understood by everyone at the top of a story as a way to circumvent even legal attempts to stop the story being told.  No need for Superman in that little episode.  All you need is the power of the Internet.

Newspapers are hurting there is no doubt about it.  Times and Sunday Times bulk bundles ceased to be given out to airlines and hotel chains this week and joins the same move by the guardian and Observer a few weeks ago.  So what can publishers do to stop them taking their place amongst the ranks of the Dodo?

I can’t help feeling that life is all a bit desperate for publishers at the moment.  Just about every publishing house that doesn’t have a Director of Digital is frantically looking around for one those that do have a digital team are looking at their costs of content and weighing them up against shrinking ad revenues and dwindling circulation numbers whilst trying to figure out what to do to get more money out of consumers.  As for consumers, many of them (myself included) haven’t bought a newspaper in years, are devotees of mobile devices and are getting very excited by citizen journalism scoops.

It all looks a bit bleak.  Except that it is wrong to lump all published content together.  There is and always will be something comforting about a book that you can hold and feel the pages warm up in your hands as it transports you to as many imagined places as imaginations exist.   They thrill, they educate, they inspire, they entertain, they help and as far as most people are concerned they are of insignificant interest when compared to the television, games console or computer.  Those of us that do own a wall full of books are definitely in the minority.  Most people own more DVDs than books  but as those and CDs move on to hard drive storage, and everyone consumes media digitally does this mean that we are going to have nothing to put on bookshelves anymore and that Ikea will stop selling the Billy bookcase, favourite of the recent graduate?

I think not, or at least I hope not.  We may not be a book reading nation but the minority of people who do buy books buy a lot of books and have access to the internet and own game consoles and own mobile devices and still enjoy the feeling of printed paper beneath our finger tips.  There is also something incredibly disappointing about opening a Christmas parcel and finding a sim card e-book volume or download short code instead of a nice weighty copy of Jamie Oliver to pass round whilst you attempt the annual marathon that is Christmas dinner.

No I think that shares in Waterstone’s are safe for the minute (although anybody taking share tips from me should probably be considered reckless at the very least).  Reading a book is an experience that excites all your senses, not just your sense of sight, and I think people will continue to enjoy this.  At least I hope so.  I have however made a mental note to think of a new piece of furniture or household appliance which will fit where the unwanted bookshelves once stood.