- Advertising revenue (Rs. 11100 cr. in 2008) will grow by no more than 10% in 2009 due to overall cuts in the marketing budget and the shifting of marketing budgets to digital media.
- Circulation will decrease (from 169 million in 2008) and so will the number of pages, but cover prices will increase in a bid to replace advertising revenue with subscription revenue (Rs. 5850 cr. in 2008).
- Both the number of employees as well as the cost of employment will be scrutinized. Rajesh believes that this will open up an opportunity for Indian bloggers to syndicate their content to newspapers (I disagree).
James Surowiecki argues in The New Yorker that the dichotomy of higher popularity and lower profits in the newspaper industry can’t continue indefinitely –
The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. People don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it…
For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.
Adman Rafael Storch de Freitas was surprised when he saw a presentation by Brazilian publishing house Editora Abril at a recent conference (via Andrew Grill) –
He was surprised when they showed a ranking they have created for the media channels most liked and disliked by (youngsters in Brazil), to receive advertising communication.
Mobile advertising appears on the lower “neutral” area of the ranking, followed by a 1/4 page magazine ad.
Rafael’s comment was that the adoption of mobile phones in Brazil, is growing incredibly fast, but… SMS advertising is seen as SPAM, since mobile operators use it without any connection with the target audience.
Here’s the conundrum. Social media and mobile are amongst the most important communication media for the youth because they are an intimate part of their social lives. However, their intimate nature also makes them less amenable to traditional advertising messages. Marketing on mobile and social media will only work once marketers realize the importance of permission and switch to subscription based invertising. Till then, advertising messages on social media and mobile will continue to be seen as spam.
This was a big year for women. Yet the advertising world has not caught up to the advances of half our population and continues to use stereotypes and violence to prey on our most vile desires. Here are the worst of them–the trends that won’t die despite our cultural outrage, and personal boredom.
The fact that these trends are so widespread is not the fault of the advertising world–these people are paid to appeal to our ids, they are often self-aware in their tendency to make the world harder for women, that’s the life they’ve chosen. It is mainstream companies like BMW, Mitchum, Nikon, mainstream publications that host these images, and mainstream readers who use these products despite their appalling treatment of women that are truly to blame.
And what about news organizations, like The Huffington Post, who use such morality tale stories to showcase the very provocative images they are trashing?
Randall Stross at NYT chronocles Procter & Gamble’s experiments with Facebook and is left unimpressed –
Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.
When major brands place banner advertisements on the side of a member’s home page, they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little attention. When advertisers invite members to come to pages dedicated to their products, they can attract visitors only by investing in expensive creative material or old-fashioned promotions like prize contests.
And when they try to take advantage of new “social advertising,” extending their commercial message to a member’s friends, their ads will be noticed, all right, but not necessarily favorably. Members are understandably reluctant to become shills. IDC, the technology research firm, published a study last month that… described social advertising as “stillborn.”
While it’s unfair to dish social advertising on the basis of one brand’s experience, advertising on social networking sites is indeed something of a mystery. I think we will see some significant headway in social advertising in 2009, driven by the desperation to crack social shopping. Stay tuned.
Quick Summary: Brands should embrace social media because social media will soon be the only cost effective to reach consumers.
- X - X - X -
Question: Why should brands embrace social media?
Answer: Brands should embrace social media because social media will soon be the only cost effective to reach consumers.
I have noticed two trends both as a marketer and as a consumer –
Trend 1: The cost of interrupting people with advertising is increasing.
Tired of the over-clutter of things in their lives, people are going “off” consumption. Tired of the bombardment of commercial messages, people are learning new ways to block out advertising. At the same time, media consumption has become more fragmented. Therefore, it has become more costly to interrupt people with advertising.
Trend 2: The cost of engaging with people via social media is decreasing.
“Listening to” consumers, “engaging with” consumer, and “touching” consumers has always been the holy grail of marketing. For the first time, social media allows marketers to “listen to”, “engage with” and “touch” people, both as individuals and consumers, in a cost effective way.
Quick Summary: You are invited to join SocialPundit, a collaborative wiki-based community for social media practitioners in India, where we track trends and resources on the evolving social media landscape in India.
- X - X - X -
I’m delighted to invite you to join SocialPundit, a collaborative wiki-based community for social media practitioners in India.
What is the need for SocialPundit?
As I started tracking social media trends and resources in India, I felt the need to create an easily accessible master-resource on social media in India.
To start with, the SocialPundit wiki will track trends and resources on social media in India.
Over time, I can see SocialPundit playing an active role in evangelizing social media in India by organizing events and workshops on a non-profit basis.
As advertising permeates into more parts of our lives, people learn how to block out advertising, develop blind spots, which prompts advertisers to find yet more ways of cutting through the clutter, leading to a self-propagating cycle of more advertising and less ad-free non-commercial space.
Italian agency MTN Company recently used zebra crossing advertising to promote an architecture and design event called “Settimane dell’Architettura e del Design” (via I Believe in Advertising).
See the pictures on Flickr (they are not shared under a Creative Commons license, so do think twice before you put them up at your blogs) —
– or watched the making of the zebra crossing ads on YouTube –
The ads are done really tastefully and add to, rather than take away from, the public space they use as a platform. The Sentieri Urbani project, for instance, uses a similar street art approach to to beautify public space. My experience, however, is that it doesn’t take long for an innovative new medium like this to devolve into lowest common denominator space. It’s one thing to have black and white flowers and hearts on the zebra crossing, it’s another to have loud multi-colored “Buy Now!” price and promotion ads.
Not a day goes by where we don’t see high profile bloggers get in each other’s faces, creating drama and soap operas, by saying what they really think, and letting their emotions hang out.
So the question that naturally follows is, why SHOULDN’T this be true for advertisers online?
It’s a radical thought, and I love radical thoughts, but I don’t see corporates using advertising as a conversation tool anytime soon, for the same reasons corporates rarely use CEO-blogging as a conversation tool (and, yes, I have read Naked Conversations). To participate in a conversation, you need to know that the conversation is bigger than yourself, you need to listen more and talk less, and you you need to be ready to admit that you don’t have all the answers. Corporates are not very good at any of these things.
Advertising (and CEO-blogs) will begin to become more like conversations when the three billboards in my previous post look like this -
Jet Airways: “A BIG ‘Thank You’ to all our competitors: you made us change!”
Scott Adams on his contribution to energy conservation -
Then I remembered I’ve never procreated. That’s a huge energy savings. When you create new humans, they start leaving the lights on, driving, eating, pooping, and doing all sorts of energy-inefficient things. By not creating any new humans, I’m saving a huge amount of energy!
Scott Adams would have made a very different campaign to encourage people to save power in Mumbai -
