Posts tagged advertising

When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird Get Weirder

My local watering hole usually has newspapers on the bar counter. Makes for easy reading over a beer.

A few weeks ago I came across this full-page ad in the New York Post. It’s for a “documentary” called “Dreams From My Real Father” and takes birtherism to even weirder, alternative heights.

As Talking Points Memo explains, “Instead of focusing on claims about the president’s Hawaiian birth certificate, the film is narrated by an Obama impersonator and claims the president is a closeted communist, bent on instilling a ‘classic Stalinist-Marxist agenda upon America at home and abroad.’ A disclaimer for the film notes that many of the scenes are ‘re-creations of probable events, using reasoned logic, speculation, and approximated conversations.’”

It does so by claiming that Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a former journalist, and civil rights and labor activist. Evidently, he got Obama’s mom pregnant, which was scandalous, so the family invented a Kenyon father instead which was somehow less scandalous.

If you’ve worked in print you know that the ad department looks for advertisers who reflect well on — and reinforce — the brand. Have a luxury magazine, your sales team is looking for luxury brands. Have a sports magazine, your sales team looks for advertisers that reiterate that lifestyle.

If you’re the New York Post? Well, form follows function.

And if you’re from Alabama, your GOP party chair is a nut job.

As The Mobile Press Register recently reported, Bill Armistead was speaking to a Republican Women’s group and had this to say:

“We have to win this election. This is about our country. Our country will not be the same,” Armistead said. “I’m convinced, if Obama wins, our children and grandchildren will not live under the same conditions that we’ve lived in these wonderful years. Obama has a different ideology than we do.”

Armistead suggested that audience members see the movie ‘2016: Obama’s America,’ a documentary by conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza that is critical of the president.

“If you haven’t seen it, you should,” he said. “But I’m going to tell you about another movie. The name of it is ‘Dreams From My Real Father.’ That is absolutely frightening. I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it. People can determine.”

People can determine, indeed. — Michael

Image: Full page ad in the New York Post for Dreams from My Real Father.

This is What an Advertising Revenue Free Fall Looks Like

Via Mark J. Perry:

The decline in print newspaper advertising to a 62-year low is amazing by itself, but the sharp decline in recent years is pretty stunning. This year’s ad revenues of $19 billion will be less than half of the $46 billion spent just five years ago in 2007, and a little more than one-third of the $56.5 billion spent in 2004.

Here’s another perspective: It took 50 years to go from about $20 billion in annual newspaper print ad revenue in 1950 (adjusted for inflation) to $63.5 billion in 2000, and then only 12 years to go from $63.5 billion back to less than $20 billion in 2012.

Even when online advertising is added to the print ads (see red line in chart), the combined total spending for print and online advertising this year will still only be about $22.4 billion, less than the $22.47 billion spent on print advertising in 1953.

I think “ooph” is the ongoing sound I hear an industry make. — Michael

Image: Newspaper Advertising Revenue Adjusted for Inflation, 1950 - 2012. Via Carpe Diem.

Why Yes, That is Katie Couric on a Billboard in Baghdad

The Iraqi Electricity Ministry is issuing five minute daily news bulletins about the state of the day’s electricty. The unauthorized face of the campaign: Katie Couric.

Via the New York Times:

At more than two dozen locations around this city, officials have posted giant billboards of Ms. Couric, billed as “America’s Sweetheart” during her time as a host of the “Today” show on NBC. From high above the steamy streets, or from the side of blast walls, Ms. Couric beams out at passers-by in an advertisement for a daily news bulletin about electricity that is produced by the government and is shown on 11 satellite television channels.

“It doesn’t give me hope about electricity, but I like to see her beautiful face,” Habib Harbi, who sells watermelon in the summer and sweets in the winter, said as he looked across the street at the billboard from his fruit stand…

“We were looking for a bright and optimistic face that inspires the people to imagine a better future for electricity,” said Musaab al-Mudarrs, the spokesman for the Electricity Ministry, who said designers had plucked Ms. Couric’s image from the Internet…

Mr. Mudarrs said the face of an American woman was sought for the campaign because showcasing an Iraqi woman would violate cultural taboos. And Ms. Couric, he said, was dressed appropriately in the picture — she was wearing a brown Max Mara blazer — and was the right age. “We didn’t want someone to be very old or very young, and she was in the middle,” he said. Mr. Mudarrs did say he was a bit worried that “when she finds out, maybe she will file a lawsuit against us.”

Katie Couric: Not too old, not too young and dressed just right.

Couric tells the Times there will be no lawsuits but the billboards are “bizarre and slightly amusing.”

New York Times, Putting a Megawatt Smile on a Simmering Problem.

Facebook Ad Targeting

Inspired by Felix Salmon’s post yesterday on how untargeted his Facebook ads are I decided to take a look at what they’re feeding me.

As you can see, the ads don’t even come close to relevant, which surprises seeing how much information they have about anyone who even moderately uses the site.

As Felix wrote: “This, my friends, is the next-generation hyper-targeted marketing platform which makes Facebook worth $100 billion. Or, you know, not.”

Slow clap. — Michael

Select image to embiggen

Warren Buffett buys 63 newspapers, we scratch our heads

About two weeks ago, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett bought 63 newspapers from Media General, a news company that operates throughout the US Southeast. The purchase has gotten a lot of criticism, as you can imagine, and some praise too. Let’s dissect the argument.

The papers themselves are small locals, and Buffett has said he wants to focus on local reporting. Fair enough.

via Buffett:

Our future depends on remaining the primary source of information in certain subjects of great importance to our readers. Technological change has caused us to lose primacy in various key areas, including national news, national sports, stock quotations and employment opportunities. So be it. Our job is to reign supreme in matters of local importance.

Buffett knows that much of what traditionally made a newspaper a newspaper – the classifieds, funnies, world news – is now free and online. So he’s wants to lean on local issues that only a local paper will cover. There’s got to be a market for that, right?

And he wants to charge for online content, probably:

We must rethink the industry’s initial response to the Internet. The original instinct of newspapers then was to offer free in digital form what they were charging for in print. This is an unsustainable model and certain of our papers are already making progress in moving to something that makes more sense.

But he’s missing something, according to the critics. Namely, that you can’t expect subscriptions or paywalls to finance a paper.

 writes Clay Shirky:

He makes much of drops in print readership, but circulation has not been strongly correlated with revenue for two decades now.

Buffett expects that quality reporting will boost readership, boost sales, and then boost business. But it’s not that simple.

Shirky goes on:

Reading the letter, you’d never know that papers make most of their money from companies, not citizens, and have done for the better part of two centuries. It is disruptive competition for ad dollars, not changing reader engagement, that has sent the industry into a tailspin.

FJP: The jury’s still out on paywalls, but if they only sort-of work for the New York Times, then their adoption by a paper in a town of 10,000 doesn’t incite our confidence.

Matthew Ingram of GigaOm puts it well: newspapers have changed. The internet has most of what a paper has always had, and makes it easier to find. And the ad money, which has always financed the news, has followed our collective attention away from print.

Ingram writes:

The real business of a newspaper has been to aggregate content — news, but also comics and horoscopes and classifieds and lifestyle tips — as a way of capturing the attention of readers, and then sell that attention to advertisers. And the problem for newspapers, both hyper-local and national, is that advertisers are no longer as interested in that arrangement as they used to be. Much of the attention that they seek to monetize has gone elsewhere, to websites and services like Facebook — especially the attention of younger readers with disposable income.

But Warren Buffett is a business man, and as one of the world’s most successful investors, it’s not surprising that he’s not in much danger of losing money.

via Devin Leonard:

Yet it’s also important to look at the price Berkshire is paying for the Media General papers. As recently as six years ago, newspaper companies sold for more than 9 times Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Stephen Weiss writes today that Buffett’s company paid around 4 times Ebitda for the Media General assets.

At that low price, Berkshire Hathaway could make a nice return on its money. As the Wall Street Journalreported earlier this month, it has done surprisingly well since purchasing the debt last November of Lee Enterprises, another troubled newspaper publisher, from Goldman Sachs.

And there you have it, for now.

Image: Fiscal Muses.

Publishers, Cookies and Privacy, EU Style

Last week Josh Sternberg posted about how publishers are dealing with user privacy.

The Too Long, Didn’t Read version of it is that they haven’t.

Instead, they say that privacy issues lie upstream with the ad networks that feed behavioral advertising to readers of our favorite sites. Publishers then — more or less — are sitting on the sidelines when it comes to questions about the how the likes of you or I are tracked and followed with cookies when we access their content.

I write shorthand though. Because what we’re talking about when we talk about publisher ambivalence to privacy is US publishers. Across the European Union a new consumer privacy law has taken effect that requires sites to spell out how cookies are used, how users are tracked and — most important — how users can opt out of being followed and tracked.

For instance, in the screenshot above that I took over the weekend, a giant notice appeared alerting users how to manage cookies when accessing the BBC Web site. Click through and you end up on a privacy and cookies page that fairly clearly spells out the types of cookies the BBC uses, and then has another page that lets you select what type of cookies you choose to accept while on the site.

I asked John Johnston, our UK-based contributor about this implementation. Here’s what he had to say:

Basically, you have to make users aware that you use cookies to run your site and that they are the subject of the cookies and they are given the choice to allow them or not. Although it’s an EU law, it’s been implemented in different ways. In the Netherlands for instance all users have been opted out and must specify to have cookies dropped (usually with the promise that the site will work better with them), while here in the UK you only have to make users aware and give them a way to opt out.

Meantime, ZDNet reports that even though the cookie law went into effect over the weekend, and applies to all member states, institutions like the European Parliament and European Commission haven’t implemented the necessary changes on their Web sites.

If cookies and privacy are your thing, here’s the European Commission’s directive on online privacy behind the new law (PDF).