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
OAS_RICH('Middle1');

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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More on AP, newsroom cuts and outsourcing

Is the current economic crisis a game-changer for the media landscape? (I thought I'd just try and throw in that much over used media term to see how it reads: ghastly. I think I might start playing 'game-changer' bingo.)

With some newspapers struggling to meet their commercial paper obligations, certainly in 2009, and certainly when 2009 ad forecasts are revealed, some may go under. To prevent this, all issues are on the table, including the heavy usage of wire services such as AP.

I've blogged extensively on wires, and personally have my own thoughts as to what their future is and how in-house resources could and should be better allocated.

Here's more on the AP story. (Previous posts from E&P, then typically MSM behind the story, in a NYT piece that managed to catch up, but not even mention E.W. Scripps!), then more from E&P today.

Are we reaching a tipping point on the viability of many American newspapers, the viability of AP being the symptomatic tip of exactly that point but not the point itself (if I may be allowed to mix my metaphors)?

The more worrying picture for all these newspapers who attempt to devalue paid content from AP is that they devalue their own paid content in so doing. Why should consumer readers pay for content if newspapers won't. Equally, if the AP won't hold the line, or starts a panicky pricing slash in a short-term recession, they may live to regret it, if they live that is.

I'll come back to price cutting in a recession in a minute, but broadly speaking, in media, once you cut prices, it's a long slog to get those revenue figures back-up.

Time for steady hands and steadier nerves.

Will Scripps Follow Tribune In Dropping AP?

By Joe Strupp

Published: October 20, 2008 12:50 PM ET
NEW YORK Just days after Tribune Co. revealed it had given its two-year notice to possibly drop the Associated Press following a recent new rate structure, another major newspaper chain indicated it is considering the same move and is negotiating with AP over rates.

E.W. Scripps, which owns 17 daily papers including the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., declined to say if it already had or had not given notice to AP.

But in an e-mail to E&P, Tim King, Scripps vice president for corporate communications and investor relations, stated: "At this point, all I'd be comfortable saying is that we are a member in good standing of the AP, but we have been engaged in discussions concerning pricing so the future is uncertain."

Rocky Mountain News Editor and Publisher John Temple declined to comment on the situation when asked if notice had been given or if the chain would drop its AP membership. But he said he did believe his paper could operate without AP content.“I think we are very close to being able to do so,” Temple told E&P. “I think there are different papers that could put out a paper without AP in different ways. I believe you can do it and satisfy the needs of your readers.”

AP Spokesman Paul Colford declined to comment on Scripps' situation. The news cooperative just recently received the required two-year notice from Tribune, which owns nine daily papers, that could result in that chain dropping AP in 2010.

Several editors at a handful of Scripps papers declined to talk about the AP on the record, although several said changes could be in the offing. Don Kausler, editor of the Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail, said he did not know exactly when or if notice had been given, but said papers are ready to do without AP if needed.“It’s much like what Tribune is doing, leaving options open,” Kausler said. “When AP requires two-year’s notice, we see no harm in exercising that option. That doesn’t mean that in two years we won’t be running AP stories, but by giving notice, that can happen.”

Kausler said for a small paper like his, which often runs no more than one page a day of national and international news, AP can be expensive.

“Sports is probably the area where papers are more dependent on it,” he adds. “But in the next two years, you will see more alternatives.”

Shane Fitzgerald, editor and vice president of Scripps' Corpus Christi (Tex.) Caller-Times, agrees: "We will just wait and see what happens. We have other wire services, too. We use AP and others."The recent decisions to drop AP service follow the planned AP rate structure change, which was announced in 2007 and takes effect in 2009. The rate change initially prompted complaints from numerous newspapers, including two groups of editors who wrote angry letters to AP to complain in late 2007 and early 2008.Under current AP policy, each newspaper buys a package of general news created by AP based on that paper's location and circulation. The package usually includes breaking news, sports, business, and other national, international, and regional news relevant to the client's market, including its state AP wire. ((Under the new structure, AP member newspapers will receive all breaking news worldwide (including items from other state wires), as well as breaking sports, business, and entertainment stories. In addition, a package of premium content — made up of five types of non-breaking stories including sports, entertainment, business, lifestyle and analysis — will be available at an additional cost. ((When the new structure was announced in 2007, AP promised a combined savings of $5.6 million across newspaper member budgets, which increased to $14 million —and, finally, $21 million just days before the April annual AP meeting. AP also recently instituted a hiring freeze.

In recent months, other papers have given the required two-year's notice to drop AP. Those include: The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, The Bakersfield Californian, The Post Register of Idaho Falls, and The Yakima Herald-Republic and Wenatchee World, both of Washington.

The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., is trying to cut ties without a two-year notice, planning to discontinue AP content at the end of 2008. At least one newspaper, The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., tested the approach by publishing an entire newspaper for one day last month without AP content. So far, that paper has not given notice to cut the service.

Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.

Meanwhile, over at AP, in the middle of consumer rebellion, the Chairman of the Board of AP thinks it's a good idea to announce that he personally thinks it's a good idea to outsource editorial offerings. Sex on the beach in the UAE, here we go. The AP CEO must be thrilled at his Chairman's fantastic sense of timing.

Personally, until I know a lot more about what's on offer in Bangalore et al., I'm with Bernard Lunzer, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA. "It may in the short run save costs. In the long run, what does it do to the quality of the product?"

Production and other back office outsourcing to Bangalore is one thing, editorial content, quite another.

APMediaNews CEO: Outsourcing could help save money

Monday October 20, 7:24 pm ET By Matt Sedensky, Associated Press Writer
MediaNews CEO says consolidation, outsourcing could help newspapers survive
AVENTURA, Fla. (AP) -- Consolidating and outsourcing news operations -- even overseas -- could help newspapers survive as their revenues continue to shrink, the head of a major U.S. newspaper company said Monday.
MediaNews Group Inc. CEO Dean Singleton, who also serves as chairman of the board of The Associated Press, told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that his company was exploring outsourcing in nearly every aspect of their operations.
"In today's world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn't matter," Singleton said after his speech.
MediaNews publishes The Denver Post, The Detroit News and 52 other daily newspapers and is well known for cost-cutting efforts, including combining many operations of its papers near San Francisco.
Singleton said sending copyediting and design jobs overseas may even be called for.
"One thing we're exploring is having one news desk for all of our newspapers in MediaNews ... maybe even offshore," he said during the speech.
Other publishers also have consolidated newsroom functions this year. Two Florida papers owned by The New York Times Co. said in August they were merging news and copy desk functions, design, layout and pagination. The McClatchy Co. papers in Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., are sharing sports and political reporting staff.
But few have sent newsroom functions overseas, limiting off-shoring mostly to ad production and other non-editorial functions, said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with Outsell Inc.
Notable exceptions are Thomson Reuters, which has been using journalists in Bangalore, India, to handle some basic news such as corporate earnings reports, and a Web site called pasadenanow.com, which has five regular contributors overseas who write about Pasadena, Calif., using webcasts of council meetings and information provided by citizen volunteers.
"We used to have on-the-ground reporters, but the expense was prohibitive," said James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the site. "Regretfully, we had to lay them all off."
Macpherson said he saw no reason a larger publication couldn't adopt similar techniques to save costs.
"You might miss the nuance of a sneer on a councilman's face but you know how he voted and what he said," he said. "That's factual and can be reported on from anywhere."
In a statement, Thomson Reuters spokesman Joe Christinat said that "by reporting some of the more commoditized news from Bangalore, our reporters are freed up to add greater value to the file with more insight, analysis, interviews, exclusives and market-moving, in-depth stories."
Despite this year's dismal drumbeat of layoffs and revenue drops, Singleton said newspapers still have incredible reach in the country, calling them cornerstones of democracy. But he said they must change in order to survive.
"Fond memories of dead newspapers will do nothing for our communities," he said.
Singleton praised electronic versions of newspapers because they eliminate printing and delivery expenses. He also said newspapers could heal their bottom lines by building up their ad sales forces and producing more niche publications like wedding magazines to attract more advertising.
Singleton said no decision has been made to outsource editorial functions overseas at any MediaNews publications, though it was recommended by consultants. He said publishers were trying to consolidate editing and design domestically, whether in one place or several, and see if they could match the savings they would see by going overseas.
Editors and reporters have intensely questioned newsroom outsourcing. Long-distance editors might miss locally relevant nuances or fail to fill in context based on a knowledge of the region, said Bernard Lunzer, president of The Newspaper Guild-CWA.
"It may in the short run save costs. In the long run, what does it do to the quality of the product?" he said.
But Singleton said Monday that local editors would always maintain final control and that no page would go to press without their approval.
Singleton talked about outsourcing delivery of newspapers, relying more intensely on syndicates for non-local news, and moving circulation call centers offshore.
He mentioned outsourcing printing to competitors and centralizing ad production and said that may be as cheap as going overseas. But he said most of the preproduction work for MediaNews' papers in California is being done in India, a move he said cut costs by 65 percent.
"If you need to offshore it, offshore it," he said.
AP Business Writer Anick Jesdanun contributed to this report from New York.

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Some papers in financial trouble are leaving the AP to cut costs (IHT)

I blogged on this too yesterday:

Some papers in financial trouble are leaving the AP to cut costs
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Monday, October 20, 2008
For most of its 137-year history, The Columbus Dispatch has carried articles and images from The Associated Press. Like most big American newspapers, it supplements the work of its own staff with dozens of items daily from The AP.
That may end soon.
Unhappy with both the AP service and its price — more than $800,000 a year at a time when The Dispatch's finances are severely pinched — the paper on Friday took the once-unthinkable step of saying it would drop the service.
What had been a minor newspaper rebellion against The AP suddenly grew much more serious last week, when the Tribune Company, one of the largest newspaper chains, said on Thursday that it would drop out of the association, followed by The Dispatch's announcement. A handful of papers have made the same move over the last few months, but with the exception of The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, they were relatively small.
Tribune, in disclosing the plan to sever its ties with The AP, voiced no complaints about the service, saying only that it needed to cut costs. The move raised the prospect of major Tribune papers like The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune publishing without the aid of a wire service that has been an essential part of American journalism since the cooperative was established more than a century and a half ago.
But editors and publishers at some other papers have become vocal critics of the way The AP operates, saying that it charges more than they can afford, delivers too little of what they need and — particularly galling to them — is sometimes acting as their competitor on the Internet.
"They seem to have forgotten that they are there to serve us," said Benjamin Marrison, editor of The Dispatch.
That anger spilled into public view in April at a meeting in Washington when the president and chief executive of The AP, Tom Curley, discussed his plans to cut prices and add new services — and then watched as editor after editor stood to scold him.
The AP says it is trying to save money for its more than 1,400 member newspapers, and all the changes under way will benefit them. Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of The AP, said the protests came from a small number of papers and stem from "some element of misunderstanding about what AP is trying to do" and frustration over the papers' finances.
"I don't think any of us can ignore the economic circumstances newspapers are in now," Carroll said. "Being the editor of a newspaper in the United States right now is really hard."
Contractually, newspapers must give two years' notice to drop the service, so those that recently opted out have until 2010 to change their minds. AP executives say they suspect that some papers are using that notice as leverage to bargain for lower rates.
In addition to the papers that said they would leave the wire, others are considering it, and still others have set up regional cooperatives meant to supplant part of their relationship with The AP — a trial run for life after the wire service.
Newspapers are going through their most wrenching time since the Depression, with advertising revenue falling about 25 percent over the last two years. But the balance sheet of The AP, a nonprofit company, is healthy; last year its profit rose 81 percent, to $24 million, on revenue of $710 million, according to a financial statement issued to its members.
It remains to be seen whether defections become a major problem for The AP, the world's largest news-gathering organization with more than 3,000 journalists in about 100 countries. Without the rich diet of articles, photographs, audio and video it feeds its clients, most American newspapers would be much slimmer and their coverage less expansive.
Newspapers banded together 162 years ago to create The Associated Press. Only daily papers in the United States can be members, giving them ownership and a vote in elections for the board. The company has more than 5,000 other domestic clients — broadcasters, Web sites, weekly papers and magazines — and roughly 8,500 abroad.
In addition to the news that AP reporters produce, the wire also takes breaking news articles from its members and distributes them to other clients.
For many members, The AP is one of their biggest expenses.
"We pay in excess of $1 million a year to The AP, which is equal to 10 to 12 reporters in the newsroom," said Nancy Barnes, editor of The Star Tribune.
Several editors interviewed for this article said they could find other sources for written material — wire services like Reuters or Bloomberg News, or the news services sold by major newspaper companies. But other AP products, especially photography, would be harder to replace, they said.
"We thought, 'We have two years to try and figure this out,' " Barnes said. Her paper is one of the industry's most troubled; it recently stopped making payments on its debt.
This summer, dissatisfied with the way The AP handles local news, eight papers in Ohio formed a cooperative to share articles, and some of those papers say they might drop the wire service. Newspapers in Pennsylvania are exploring a similar arrangement.
"We're facing terrible economic challenges, so naturally we're looking at one of our biggest costs," said David Shribman, executive editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The editors in Ohio, in particular, say The AP has retreated from one of its traditional roles: producing a lot of routine, breaking-news articles.
The AP wants to make its work more engaging, with more enterprise journalism like features, investigations and analyses — but that is also the direction many papers are going.
Marrison of The Columbus Dispatch said that course had forced newspapers to devote more resources to small stories that used to be covered by The AP "Then The AP rewrites our story and sends it out," he said. "So we're sacrificing our enterprise so that AP can do its enterprise? No, no, no. We're the owners."
Carroll of The AP said it had only "trimmed back on things that weren't getting much use."
"We're not trying to absolve ourselves from nuts-and-bolts news, but we cannot survive if we are spending our day doing the mark-up of some legislative measure that is of interest to one part of the state but not another," she said.
The AP does not release details about what clients pay, but newspapers' fees vary based on their circulation and the services they receive. For the last three years, the company has held those fees flat. The AP says the fees are partly subsidized by the higher prices it charges to nonmember clients, which account for about three-quarters of its revenue.
The AP says that a new price structure, set to go into effect in January, will give papers a 10 percent price cut on average. But even that plan caused complaints, leading to multiple revisions since it was first announced last year.
Papers object to a requirement that they allow The AP to apply its electronic tags to the articles they publish in order for the papers to qualify for the discounted fees.
The tags are bits of computer code, invisible to readers, that are intended to make Web pages rank high in Internet searches. While The AP says that most member papers have signed up for the tagging program, the largest newspapers, including The New York Times, have developed their own tagging systems and so far have not switched to The AP's.
The AP recently introduced an ad-supported mobile Internet service, fed by its own work and that of newspapers in the tagging program. To some newspaper executives, the mobile service looks like a bid by The AP to make money from their work — and to compete with the papers' own mobile services.
"If you want our content, you should have to come to us for it," said Barnes of The Star Tribune.
Similarly, some editors and publishers dislike The AP's practice of selling a news service to aggregators like Google and Yahoo; they want their own articles on those sites instead.
Jim Kennedy, an AP vice president and its director for strategic planning, said that papers should not see The AP as a competitor. He said the mobile network would share ad revenue with participating papers — many of which do not have the resources to develop such services — and drive Internet traffic to those papers.
"We're trying to be the portal, linking back to the contributors," he said. "We know there are members who would rather we didn't license our content to Google," he said, "but the money The AP gets from that helps defray the costs that members don't pay."

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Resolved to keep on marketing, even in tight-fisted times (IHT)

I blogged on this exact point yesterday:

Joseph Tripodi, chief marketing and commercial officer at the Coca-Cola Company, whose Coca-Cola brand is the strongest in the world, according to a new survey by Interbrand, evoked imagery from the Great Depression."Don't go to the ledge," Tripodi said. "Don't let the urgent overwhelm the important.""It's very easy now to panic, and we cannot panic," he added. "Invest in your brands now, especially in these dry times. The easiest thing is to shut down, and that's the worst thing."


By Stuart Elliott
Monday, October 20, 2008
ORLANDO, Florida: Attendees of a big annual conference for marketers, held here last week, could have been forgiven for believing they had stumbled into a symposium for scholars of American history in the 1930s.
These are some of the words and phrases heard during the conference, the 98th annual meeting of the Association of National Advertisers: "financial crisis," "scary," "foreclosure," "economic crisis," "difficult times," "the chaotic financial markets," "devastating," "under siege" and "unprecedented."
There were even references to "Happy Days Are Here Again," which became the unofficial theme song of those who fought to forestall the effects of the Great Depression, and to "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," the encouraging words of Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first inaugural address, in 1933.
"The consumer is sitting at the bottom of a bunker with his head in his hands, wondering if it's safe to come out," Jez Frampton, global chief executive at Interbrand, an Omnicom Group agency specializing in corporate and brand identity, said during a general session of the conference.
"It's up to us to stimulate demand in the marketplace again," he added.
•
Whether the members of the association — 400 companies that together spend an estimated $100 billion a year on advertising and other forms of marketing — are willing to stick to the spending plans they made "before the globe went mad," as Frampton put it, is a crucial question.
If marketers cut budgets, that could intensify the recent sharp downturn in consumer spending. Conversely, by maintaining, or increasing, spending levels, they just might shorten the length of whatever recession might be coming (if it is not already here).
"Look, everyone is going to want to cut, but no one wants to be first to say it in public," said one attendee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his company has not completed its planning for 2009.
"That's especially true given that we still have some time before Christmas," the attendee said, referring to the importance of the holiday shopping season for marketers and retailers. "Anyone who says anything now could go down as the Grinch who stole Christmas."
The closest any speaker came to tipping his or her hand was Anne Saunders, brand and advertising executive at Bank of America.
"We aren't done planning '09 yet," Saunders said, so "we're not concluding at the moment that we would necessarily cut" spending.
If a decision is reached to make cuts, "we don't expect to see a substantial cut," she added, because "it would be a mistake to say you don't need to continue to tend your brand, even in a challenging market like this."
Other speakers made the same point, in more emphatic and colorful language.
"It's incredibly important to be risk-takers in the economic climate we're in," said Michael Mendenhall, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Hewlett-Packard, when "people have a tendency to pull back."
"In economic times like these, you don't hunker down and go in the bunker," he added.
Rebecca Saeger, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at the Charles Schwab Corporation, quoted Mendenhall approvingly in her remarks and added: "Let's all go for growth. Let's see this as an opportunity."
Increasing sales and profits has "never been more important," said Saeger, who was elected during the conference as the chairwoman of the association for 2008-10. "There has never been a more crystal-clear realization of why you need a strong brand."
Joseph Tripodi, chief marketing and commercial officer at the Coca-Cola Company — whose Coca-Cola brand is the strongest in the world, according to a new survey by Interbrand — evoked imagery from the Great Depression.
"Don't go to the ledge," Tripodi said. "Don't let the urgent overwhelm the important."
"It's very easy now to panic, and we cannot panic," he added. "Invest in your brands now, especially in these dry times. The easiest thing is to shut down, and that's the worst thing."
James Stengel, who is retiring from his post as global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, was asked whether consumers seeking to save money might be tempted to switch to private-label products from brand names. That would mean paying less attention to ads for brands — no matter how much marketers spent.
That is unlikely, Stengel replied, if marketers understand that "in these times, people are looking for the right value."
"If we're there for consumers when they need us," he added, "I'm sure we'll be fine."
Procter, the world's largest advertiser, survived "tough times" in countries hit hard by recent economic crises, Stengel said, like Argentina and Russia. He even remarked on how Procter made it through the '30s.
Two speakers described how the upheaval in the American economy is inspiring advertising campaigns.
"Right now, given where America is, people need to go back to the comfort of home," said Mark Addicks, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at General Mills. So a new campaign for the company's Pillsbury brand will carry the theme "Home is calling."
A commercial that Addicks showed, by the Saatchi & Saatchi division of the Publicis Groupe, began with people from all walks of life clicking their heels together like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz" and ended with a family coming home to a meal with Pillsbury crescent rolls.
•
Claire Bennett, senior vice president for marketing at American Express, said the "challenging environment" gave her brand "a unique opportunity" because of its "legacy of trust and confidence."
"We will be talking about that in the coming months," she added, and "our own card members can speak for us."
The entreaties of the speakers may have influenced the estimated 1,200 attendees at the conference, based on results of instant polls during two general sessions.
Asked about immediate plans, 33 percent of respondents said they would maintain the level of their marketing spending, 33 percent said they would reduce spending and 27 percent said they would spend more. (The rest were unsure.)
And when asked about 2009 compared with 2008, the largest number of respondents, 28 percent, predicted stability, followed by 26 percent who forecast spending increases of more than 10 percent. Nineteen percent predicted decreases of more than 10 percent, 14 percent predicted decreases of less than 10 percent, and 13 percent predicted growth of less than 10 percent.

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Bang on right. In the core of a Depression both Newsweek and Esquire launched.

Lots and lots and lots of people and companies lose a packet in a recession/depression. But lots of others make a bundle. No time for the faint hearted. Invest in your future or die.

November Continues The Monthlies' Ad-Page Recession (-14.09%).

In an earlier era, publishers might have asked, Brother can you spare a page?, because the poor differentials look 1930s-ish. A little solace, though, comes from increased integrated-marketing programs, which means that publishers are less dependent on pages in 2008 than they were in 1933, though we note that in spite of that being the "core" of the Depression, both Newsweek and Esquire launched. Amidst all the November minuses is a nice plus in Self (+25.00%), as vp/publisher Kim Kelleher will celebrate 2008 with the August birth of her second son and--maybe--an up year (+1.27% through November). Fast Company publisher Christine Osekoski is a shoo-in to end her first full year up (+26.83% through November), but Playboy publisher (since January 2006) Lou Mohn's +26.31% November could not prevent Playboy Enterprises stock from trading at near its $1.70-per-share low. Unhappy post-anniversary... to Harper's Bazaar senior vp/publishing director Valerie Salembier, with November's -23.24% competing with last year's 140th-birthday celebration. See minonline for November's monthly chart. See the complete chart in min.

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Big Media. Bad Idea. (Portfolio.com)

Big Media. Bad Idea.
by Sophia Banay Oct 15 2008
Ask any shareholder not named Murdoch or Redstone—big media just isn't working

Say what you want about the benefits of synergies and size for big media companies; for their shareholders, the bigger the company, the smaller the gains. Between last week and the same week a year ago,Time Warner shares were down 50 percent; Viacom was off 59 percent; G.E. had fallen 46 percent; News Corp. slid 65 percent; and Disney, the big winner, had tumbled a mere 34 percent.Is it time to say "Enough already" with big media and the dead-as-disco idea Japanese giants such as Sony had about buying movie studios to sell their VCRs? How about small media? Or at least smaller media?
It sounds fairly logical. The supposed "synergies" between the divisions of modern conglomerates like Viacom, G.E., and Time Warner have never really blossomed. Time Warner's magazine group, cable networks, AOL, pay TV, and movie-studio divisions barely communicate, let alone work together. And if that lumping together doesn't deliver value in the stock market, why suffer through it?
Time Warner took one step toward unraveling those holdings last spring, with the spinoff of Time Warner Cable, which delivered shareholders over $10 per share in dividends. Before that move, long-awaited by analysts, the cable unit's success was never reflected in the larger company's share price.
AOL, by contrast, has had a disproportionately negative affect on the company's stock, leaving many investors wondering when a sale of the unit—or of the floundering magazine unit—will take place. That's a tough break for the company's better-performing assets, like Turner Broadcasting, home to cable hits like The Closer, and stellar studio Warner Bros., responsible for summer smashes like Sex and the City and The Dark Knight. Spun off independently, any of these properties could deliver substantial value to shareholders. As it is, the albatross of AOL is the only thing visible to anyone looking at Time Warner's stock price.
CBS is a similar story. Last week, it put Showtime content front and center in a new partnership with YouTube, offering the channel's most recent series premieres of Dexter and Californication to viewers for free. In doing so, the company, whose share price was down 72 percent from a year ago last week, is trying to capitalize on its marquee pay-TV brand to bring viewers and media attention to its shows online, where it will take in revenue from ads played at the start, middle, and end of its shows. But could CBS unlock the value of its increasingly shiny Showtime brand by spinning off the network into its own independent entity? The premium-cable channel is obviously feeling its oats, as buzzworthy original series like Californication, Dexter, and Weeds have led a 2 million jump in subscribers, to 16 million, over the past two years.Some analysts agree that Showtime, as a stand-alone stock, could be the secret weapon of CBS shareholders. On its own, "Showtime would probably be worth more than CBS today," says Porter Bibb, a managing partner at Mediatech Capital Partners in New York."It's hot, it has an interesting future, and it's making money with video on demand." Of course, not every premium pay-TV channel would perform as well as a stock. HBO, for instance, is probably better served—for now—by remaining a part of Time Warner, under intense pressure as it is to deliver hot, game-changing new shows with the frequency it used to, says Bibb.
But in general, if a media property is strong, it performs better outside of a conglomerate than inside one. Why keep a company's most valuable assets hidden inside a decaying shell? The Dolan family's Cablevision, which owns a slew of valuable cable networks through Rainbow Media—including the Sundance channel, IFC, and AMC, home to the breakout hit Mad Men—is another example of a media company whose stock is undervalued. Cablevision would do well to spin off some subsidiaries—or even just stop making new acquisitions. After paying almost $650 million for the paper Newsday, the company got very little back in terms of stock value.
G.E., which has been urged to spin off NBCU by eager analysts, no longer has that luxury with G.E. Capital suffering in the economic crisis. But should it do so in the future, the new company—made up of a movie studio and theme parks, with business models that are not advertising-reliant, plus a mature slate of cable networks with dual revenue streams—would likely perform well in the stock market. News Corp. and Disney are two possible exceptions to the big-media curse. Disney makes sure that ESPN programming on ABC, for example, is obviously marked as such, an effective cross-marketing tool. And News Corp. is steadily integrating Dow Jones' components, such as MarketWatch, into its daily operations.
But even the most skilled managers are overextended when trying to grapple with the various subsidies of their enormous conglomerates.
A(nother) case in point: YouTube has lost some of its tech-darling status since being swallowed up by Google. Perhaps that explains the new partnership with CBS, which aims to expand YouTube's niche from clips of cats falling from trees to more mainstream content like you'd find on Hulu.com. But can one mammoth media company save another?
"I don't believe in conglomerates from a financial point of view because they totally depend on having good management," says Bibb. "That's a tough thing to depend on."
In other words, don't count on it.

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Could Recession Help Big Media? (Forbes)

Online Publishers

Could Recession Help Big Media?

James Erik Abels, 10.15.08, 7:45 PM ET

Today's ugly media truth: Online advertising rates are falling. "Pricing has definitely trended downward this year," says PubMatic President Rajeev Goel.
His firm, which lets publishers automatically search mulitple ad networks to find the one that will earn the most money, has been tracking online display ad rates since the fourth quarter of last year. In a report issued on Wednesday, Goel says these rates dropped 21% in the third quarter of this year to $0.27 per thousand impressions from $0.34 per thousand impressions in the second quarter. The information is culled from some 180 online ad networks, including seven of comScore's top 10 largest ones.
Numbers like these chill media honchos from coast to coast. At a Media and Money Conference in New York on Tuesday, a whole panel of executives discussed the issue. Martha Stewart Omnimedia co-CEO Wenda Harris Millard said she's worried, noting that advertisers are holding out until the last second to buy ads.
But so far it's hard to say how a recession will impact digital media. On one hand, the rate of online display ad spending has been slowing down. Though it reached $11.5 billion in the first half of this year, reports the Internet Advertising Bureau, the 15.2% growth rate that got the industry there was a lot slower than the rate seen in the first half of 2007, which was 27%.
On the other hand, the slowing market may actually help, boosting traditional media's control over the digital media ecosystem by giving it an opportunity to buy smaller upstarts or watch them get crushed. Think about it this way: The digital businesses that may be hit hardest by a downturn aren't really media businesses at all. Instead, outfits like Facebook, Meebo, and Twitter provide fun tools and communications technologies for people who, when aggregated in one spot, may be worth a lot of ad dollars--if they can actually grab them.
That's going to get tougher. Chrysler said Wednesday that it is starting to withhold ad dollars from "experimental" ad campaigns for things like virtual worlds or social networking applications. That hurts Facebook but maybe not traditional publishers like Hearst. It's also bad news for ad networks and helps to explain their plunging rates.
Here's why. Advertisers have a pretty good idea on their own of who is paying attention to certain types of editorial content--and they bet its quality level improves the value of their ad. In the media universe, it's called "sold against" and it's nothing new. But online advertising networks, which place ads via technology, have devalued the notion in recent years by making ad serving a commodity business that benefits nonmedia sites as much as it does media ones. Some see the value of "sold against" gaining more ground online in a nervous time when fewer dollars are available.
Brian Fitzgerald, president of Gorilla Nation Media, an ad rep firm that exclusively sells display ads for publishers and others, such as Marvel, says his rates aren't slipping yet. And though he admits it's still early to know how the markets will ultimately affect them, "We're actually seeing revenues growing, CPMs are constant," he says.
Constant--and a whole lot higher than $0.27 per thousand views.

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TV Guide Sold for a Buck (Advertising Age)

TV Guide Sold for a Buck
SEC Filing: Buyer Got $9.5 Million Loan From Macrovision to Do Deal
By Nat Ives Published: October 15, 2008 NEW YORK (AdAge.com)
How much is TV Guide magazine worth in a morphing media business and molten credit markets? Try $1.
That's how much the private equity fund OpenGate Capital has agreed to pay Macrovision for the unprofitable magazine and all its liabilities. The cover price, by way of comparison, is $2.99.
Take this magazine -- please.
To sweeten the deal even further, Macrovision is loaning OpenGate up to $9.5 million to help get going -- at a very friendly 3% interest. "I'd borrow from Macrovision any time," one investment banker said of the terms. The terms were not disclosed when Macrovision said Monday it had struck a deal with OpenGate, but emerged in a Macrovision filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday.
For Macrovision, the deal clears from its books a money-losing print magazine and its 3 million subscribers who need to be serviced.
Money pit
It acquired the title when it bought Gemstar-TV Guide for its digital assets last January. But the magazine lost about $20.3 million in 2007, according to Gemstar's 10-K filing for the year ended December 2007. Gemstar said in that 10-K: "We currently anticipate continuing, but declining, losses for the next two to three years." OpenGate believes it can turn the title's liabilities into profits. "The reason we acquired this business is simple," OpenGate managing partner Andrew Nikou told AdAge.com yesterday. "It needed additional investment. We're investing in this company to take it to the next stage." Macrovision is selling cable's TV Guide Channel separately.

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In a recession/depression who does better? Internet advertising, print advertising or sponsorship?

Good question. Certainly, in the last recession display advertising overall went badly downhill, but the key point here is that when the economy rebounded, print display advertising did not in the same quantity as it had done before. Media buyers, looking to maintain brand visibility on lower budgets migrated heavily to the Internet. If the same thing happens again this time, newspapers are in even greater trouble. It's not the 2009 advertising budget the NYT needs to worry about (well, they do, but you'll see my point), it's the budgets post-recession/depression.

Another problem, and this is very specific to the IHT, is that in a recession advertising budgets contract (or in 2009 perhaps implode) so media buyers go the bottom of their scheduled buys (by bottom I mean the marginal add-on spends that in flush times they can afford) and cut them.

And the IHT, because of its poor performance on research (which Goldmark - see previous post - tried to fix but then gave up on as cost-cutting became his way to serve his masters), is one of those marginal, add-on spends.

Some excellent IHT material regarding sponsorship to reflect on in the two IHT articles posted below.

The first article is interesting in that Richard Scudamore, the English Premier League's cheif, manages to talk about revenue and over-leveraged debt without mentioning the words 'sponsorship revenue'. As if the clubs problems were consumer confidence (buying tickets to games) and high salaries.

He is presumably aware that West Ham's sponsor, Excel, went bankrupt?

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English Premier League chief says game is sustainable

LONDON: English Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore said Thursday the structure of the game is sustainable despite the global financial crisis.

"People need to be realistic. We are entering interesting financial times. But football is very sustainable. Club names are very sustainable, they don't disappear. Revenues are very sustainable," he told Sky Sports News.

"We are not complacent, I am not saying we won't at some time feel the wind of the consumer crunch, but generally we are not in such a bad condition."

FA Chairman David Triesman said Tuesday English football had amassed debts of about three billion pounds and a top club could fold in the current financial climate.

But Scudamore has moved to calm fears that a leading club could go bankrupt and put the debt situation into perspective.

"Debt is neither good or bad, it is inevitable," he said. "It depends on the value of the asset the debt is against, and some of our clubs are hugely valuable assets, certainly the biggest clubs."

It is also a product of whether you can service the debt. And that is a debate that goes on.

"I'm not saying we don't have concerns, but it is also dangerous to be alarmist in the current financial conditions."

We have always worried. Football has always spent a little bit more than it has earned."

However, Scudamore ruled out a salary cap in the Premier League although he said it had been debated for some time.

"We have discussed it on and off for 10 years but we don't believe that, with the range of clubs we have, you can come up with a meaningful salary cap," he added.

"There are only two ways of doing it. A percentage of turnover -- where the likes of Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea would have a huge potential wage bill."

Or to put a fixed amount in, what would you fix it at?"
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/10/10/sports/OUKSP-UK-SOCCER-ENGLAND-SCUDAMORE.php

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In hard times, who's in the mood for Volvo's high seas adventure?

We know they are resilient. How could they not be as they prepare to leave Saturday from Alicante, Spain, for the Volvo Ocean Race, a grueling round-the-world event that will take them to five continents and eventually to the finish line in St. Petersburg, Russia, in late June?We know they are intrepid. How could they not be if they choose to take part in a 35-year-old race that remains one of sailing's supreme tests as crews push their boats to the breaking point or beyond with wind shrieking and waves breaking across their decks?But the real question, with all the danger on shore and on Wall Street these days, is whether anybody in the all-too-real world is much in the mood to keep close track of sailors courting danger for the sake of a mere sporting event.One suspects not.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/10/sports/arena.php

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