To the Power of the Times - NYT Trade Campaign

On the subject of the NYTMG being pro-active in hard times, I don't think I posted on their new trade campaign.


I'll just make two comments.


If you're the marketing director of the NYTMG and this is your first trade campaign in a decade, you're taking your consumer base for granted. And that's not good, whoever you are.

The FT dominated the international senior business decision making market for as long as I worked in it, and they never took their foot off the pedal with trade campaigns, even if could have done so given their earnings and dominance of the market and market research numbers. Ditto The Economist.

It isn't so much that hard times aren't detering the NYTMG from running a trade campaign now (sorry, yet), it's that good times did. So when the bad times come and you need to advertise, you look weak and out of brand character.

Media buyers smell this sort of thing.

Secondly, what's the spend on this campaign? We don't know. And Denise doesn't know if it will continue into 2009.

I'm going to take a pint of best bitter bet it won't, outside of in-paper/site executions.











Hard times don't deter 'New York Times'
Newspaper launches trade ad campaign, expands online coverage of business
By Marie Griffin
Story posted: October 13, 2008 - 6:01 am EDT
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At the end of last month, The New York Times launched its first national trade advertising campaign in more than a decade, even as the stock market was tumbling and a financial bailout plan was being hotly debated in Washington.
The media plan was finalized before a string of failures among financial institutions started to shake the nation in mid-September, so the crisis could have justified a reduction, delay or cancellation of the trade campaign, said Denise Warren, senior VP-chief advertising officer of the New York Times Media Group. “We decided not to pull back,” she said. “We said, "This is really the time to send a message of strength and stability to our advertisers and the advertising community.' ” The campaign targets “the whole food chain” of advertising decision-makers, Warren said, from media planners and buyers to CMOs at major companies. The print and online effort includes such vehicles as Advertising Age, AdWeek,WWD and MediaBuyerPlanner.com.
The trade campaign is scheduled to run through the end of the year. “We're still planning budgets for 2009, so I can't say if it will continue,” Warren said. The budget for the campaign was not disclosed. The concept behind the creative is “to the power of the Times,” executed as if it were a mathematical formula in which (nyt) takes the place of a numeral (such as a superscript 2, indicating squared). In the first creative wave, three words are spotlighted: influence, innovation and ROI.
“We really wanted something that was distinctive and flexible . We're very happy with the concepts, the creative and the execution,” Warren said. “There are many other executions that have not yet been seen. You can imagine, for example, "technology to the power of the Times.'

” The trade campaign debuted less than a week after The New York Times made two announcements about its Web site, NYTimes.com. One was the public beta launch of TimesPeople, a social networking feature that allows registered users to share and view each other's thoughts and recommendations on New York Times content. The other was a significant expansion and deeper segmentation of its online business coverage.

On Sept. 23, The New York Times rolled out a redesigned “Technology” section with subsections on enterprise technology, the Internet, venture capital and start-ups, and company-specific news. The Bits blog, backed by an expanded staff, and content from the IDG News Service are more prominently featured. The same day, a new “Economy” section and Green Inc., a blog on energy and the environment, debuted.

Over the coming months, NYTimes.com plans to expand sections on small business, personal technology and Your Money; to deepen coverage within its DealBook franchise; and to continue to add new tools and multimedia features. Frannie Danzinger, VP-media at b-to-b marketing agency HSR Business to Business, said she has delved deeply into the metrics for The New York Times for her clients. “It's very clear to me that the Times truly is a business newspaper, even though that isn't necessarily the general perception,” she said. “The [deeper] vertical segmentation will be helpful because marketers really are honing in on smaller segments within a larger universe. Green is one of the topics they are expanding, and it's really top of mind in business today.”The TimesPeople feature, which is free, includes a toolbar that appears at the top of users' pages on NYTimes.com. The toolbar links to profile pages, which display the public actions of the user and other network members who have opted in. The public activities included in TimesPeople are readers' comments, recommendations, reviews and ratings. Danzinger said social media tools are “extremely important, but they can't become a commodity. If they're everywhere, it takes away from the value social media provides.” As for TimesPeople, Danzinger said, “They're a little late to the game, so they might have an uphill battle.” Vivian Schiller, senior VP-general manager of NYTimes.com, noted that Cisco Systems is the launch partner for TimesPeople. “The long-term business model for monetizing social media is not fully formed, to say the least,” she said. “We want to get the technology right, to get the features and functionality right, and to build an audience now while we're sorting out the business model.”

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Ad Firm Tracks Consumers Across Media (WSJ)

ADVERTISING
OCTOBER 14, 2008
Ad Firm Tracks Consumers Across Media
Special Software in Cellphones Measures Customers' Exposure to Marketing on TV, Radio and Movies

For years, marketers measured the reach of their ads one medium at a time. For TV, it generally was Nielsen; for radio, Arbitron; newspapers and magazines report circulation figures; while the Internet shows hits and page views and other traffic data.
But there haven't been many ways to measure an ad campaign across all of these media at once.
A small media research company called Integrated Media Measurement is trying to bridge that research gap with a new technology that measures consumers' exposure to the audio in ads on television, radio, computers, mobile phones, DVDs and inside a movie theatre -- using a consumer's cellphone.

NBC is among the networks using the cellphone-based data

to track how people watch shows like 'Saturday Night Live.'

The Internet's ability to produce evidence on the effectiveness of ads -- such as how many people viewed an ad and whether or not they clicked on it -- has led to something of an industry obsession with new forms of measurement. The financial crisis promises to make marketers even more reluctant to risk money on ads, especially if they can't keep score on how effective the spots are. Meanwhile, media fragmentation continues, as big-tent events like the Olympic Games and the Super Bowl are consumed in more and different ways.
"People don't know how to measure the multimedia world we live in, so any piece of the puzzle is helpful," says Brad Bortner, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
IMMI embeds its software into the cellphones of the company's 4,900 panelists. The software picks up audio from an ad or a TV show and converts it into its own digital code that is then uploaded into an IMMI database, which includes codes for media content such as TV shows, commercials, movies and songs.
IMMI's database then figures out what the cellphone was exposed to by matching the code. Cellphone conversations and background noise are filtered out by the software, IMMI says, since there is no "match" in the IMMI database.
To get a handle on the effectiveness of a given ad, IMMI's data can show, for example, when a panel member is exposed to a movie trailer on TV and whether that same consumer later goes to see the movie. Similarly, IMMI data can show if a panelist watching a promo for a TV program will later watch the show, either on TV or online. IMMI thinks it can expand that idea from films and TV shows to consumer products like shampoo or toothpaste. It is testing its technology with a national grocery store chain.

"We follow the same person from end to end," says Tom Zito, IMMI's chief executive.
IMMI isn't the first company to attempt this kind of measurement, but past efforts were stymied by the costs of creating a large-scale panel. IMMI's use of cellphones means that consumers don't have to labor over diaries or push buttons, says Mr. Zito, who worked for years as a journalist and rock critic before launching a number of Silicon Valley start-ups since the mid-1980s.
IMMI is still a tiny company, especially compared with competitors like Nielsen Media Research. The company's 4,900-person panel has teenagers and adults in just six major markets -- New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Houston and Denver. IMMI panelists are paid $50 a month or receive free phone and data service in exchange for making the cellphone their primary phone, and carrying it with them at all times.
But the San Mateo, Calif.-company has managed to attract the attention of movie studios and broadcast networks like General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal and Walt Disney Co.'s ABC. NBC has used IMMI data to track how people watch shows like "Heroes" or big sporting events like the Beijing Olympic Games.
While the technology isn't perfect, IMMI is helping NBC answer questions about how viewers watch its programming, says Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC. "I'm convinced the handset will be the way we will measure media going forward," he says.
Still, IMMI is unlikely to change the way marketers develop ad campaigns. Mark Loughney, vice president of sales and strategy research at ABC, says that IMMI's panel is still too small to make long term decisions. "For now, it's a supplement, not a replacement to what we use," he says.
IMMI also doesn't measure outdoor or print ads, or Internet ads that don't use audio.

But the company is already getting the attention of big competitors like Nielsen, which teamed up with IMMI to sell a service that tracks ad exposure in places like bars, health clubs, hotels and the office. Walt Disney's ESPN and Zenith Media have already signed up for the service.

http://online.wsj.com:80/article/SB122394454320231201.html

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