Posts tagged ‘Media Companies As Marketers’

  • 04 Jun 2010 at 2:06 PM

What Would William Randolph Hearst Say About the iCrossing Deal?

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When William Randolph Hearst died in 1951, television was only just beginning to firm its grip on American culture and newspapers still set the agenda. The Internet hadn’t even been imagined. Yet, I believe, it’s safe to say that if Hearst the man could weigh in on Hearst the company’s latest acquisition — not a newspaper, a magazine or even a website, but a company specializing in buying search keywords and performing social media — he’d like it.

Hearst, after all, was the guy who uttered this immortal line: “Putting out a newspaper without promotion is like winking at a girl in the dark — well-intentioned, but ineffective.”

It’s a sentiment that might be well-over a half-century old but one many publishers still struggle to understand. Hearst knew it wasn’t enough to just produce news stories, how ever well-reported or beautifully-written, and hope that readers would come. Even in the primitive tech environment of Hearst’s time, news media suffered from fragmentation, with multiple broadsheets and tabloids competing for reader’s interest in any given city or town.

Hearst knew that to succeed in that cluttered environment a publisher had to be a bit P.T. Barnum. And, as a result, the Hearst name will forever be associated with yellow journalism techniques that led to a war and mainstream acceptance of all kinds of crazy psuedoscience.

The point here is not that audience development should come at the expense of truth, but that you can’t ignore the environment in which your content lives. If you do, it won’t live for long. That’s as true now as it was then. The difference today is rather than be part Barnum, it’s best to be part Ballmer.

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  • 24 May 2010 at 5:14 PM

What Yahoo’s Deal for Associated Content Means

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Last week Yahoo agreed to spend $90 million on Associated Content. While we sniffed at the quality of Associated’s two million-plus consumer-written articles, the deal has serious implications for the media business. Here’s how it impacts four different constituents.

For Yahoo
I think we can safely say that it depends on post-deal execution, as it usually does with these things. On the one hand that $90 million could prove to be a big ol’ waste of money: Associated’s content isn’t high-value stuff, CPM’s for lower-value inventory will inevitably keep being driven drown by the proliferation of supply and the reduction of friction in the buying process, and both Associated’s network of Joe and Jane Doe contributors and its technology platform could’ve been replicated by a company with Yahoo’s resources for a lot less than $90 million.

On the other hand if it can focus this army on providing the types of content demanded by advertisers — particularly local and niche advertisers who’ve yet to be effectively mined as a source of display revenue but could be extremely lucrative — while finding better ways of vetting the content for quality and building greater demand for brand advertising online, that $90 million could end up looking like a small price to have paid.

For media dealmakers
Dealmakers will read this as another positive indication that the media M&A market is coming back. I’ve only spoken to one lawyer and one banker on the topic, but both seemed confident this was good news for them. We’ve already seen an acceleration of the pace of dealmaking in the technology sector and the banker’s theory was that this deal would trigger more activity in the digital content space.

Obviously if you’re an entrepreneur looking for crazy multiples, you’d still rather you had invented some instantly scalable, must-have mobile software, but the fact that Yahoo — which has at times tried to distance itself from the media business — is snapping up content and talking about why it wants to be a media company must be a good sign for media owners who create original content. Right?

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The Best Recent Writing (and Ranting) About the Media Business

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The media business, you may have heard somewhere, is in upheaval. Anyone with a stake in the production of content needs smart dissection of business models, careful parsing of data and, of course, pointed investigations that cut through the hype that always accompanies technological change. Too bad strong acts of journalism are few and far between, with most media writers chasing their own tails.

There have, however, been a few standout pieces of reportage and analysis of late, a few of which we’ve assembled below for your convenience.
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  • 26 Apr 2010 at 7:43 PM

Media Companies Need to Kick Their Ad Dependency

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I recently spoke at the annual conference of the Canadian Media Directors Council in Toronto. It was a good event as these things go, with an impressive speaker lineup (Bill Buxton, Microsoft’s principal researcher, was particularly fascinating), and the only reason I squeaked onto the agenda was that when they asked me if I’d do it, I was the editor of Ad Age – a job I left at the end of 2009 to come here to Breaking Media – and had just written a column on the future of media companies that someone at the CMDC found interesting.

As it turned out, the audience of 700 senior media agency and media owner executives had to listen to the manager of a small, startup digital media company that is still taking its first few tottering steps, telling them how they should prepare their considerably larger businesses for the future. I guess I’m lucky that they were Canadians – too polite to tell the presumptuous little British bloke to pipe down.

The main point I tried to get across (and I think it sort of worked), is that advertising-dependent media companies need to think of themselves as being in the business of providing marketing solutions. Don’t get me wrong. We here at Breaking Media love ads. They help pay our bills and we believe we deliver  an effective suite of advertising services to a growing set of clients who love our highly-engaged, loyal and affluent audience. But a problem arises when the end-all and be-all of a company’s revenue stream is ad sales.

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