Ear to the Track

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I’ve been effectively cross-marketed into purchasing a subscription to Business Week magazine.  I subscribed to the magazine’s podcast several weeks ago and liked it — a “behind the cover story” concept in which the magazine’s editor discusses the weeks lead story with the author(s).  The latest cover story is entitled: “Beyond Blogs: What Business Needs to Know. “

The story’s authors, Stephen Baker and Heather Green, had written an article in 2005 entitled, “Blogs Will Change Your Business.”  Their key message in 2005 was: “Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out.  Catch up or catch you later.”

In the recent podcast, Editor John Byrne, said that Business Week for the first time in its history decided to update an article.  The 3-year old “Blogs Will Change Your Business” was still one of the top hit-getters in the magazine’s online archive, but, as co-author Baker put it, a lot has happened in three years, including the success of YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.  When the article was written, Friendster, was the closest thing to a hot social networking site. Tempus fugit, indeed.

He summed up the message of the updated article as “Social Media Will Change Your Business.”

I made a mental note to buy that issue of Business Week the next time I passed a newsstand. A few days after listening to the podcast, I received an old-fashioned subscription offer from the Business Week — not the first time — and it was a slam-dunk.  So, Business Week, if you’re wondering how to “monetize” your podcast, I am evidence that it sells subscriptions.

After sampling a number of business-related podcasts and failing to find one that inspired my loyalty, I heard The Skeptics Guide 5×5 and shouted Eureka!

The Skeptics Guide 5×5 is a weekly production of the New England Skeptical Society. I think that it does almost everything right:

Title and tag line:  The Skeptic’s Guide 5×5: “Five minutes with Five Skeptics.” The title caught my eye and correctly led me to believe that this would be a skeptical inquiry into a topical story involving religious, paranormal, pseudo-scientific hokum.  The weekly topics that appear in the title are also irresistible:  Man regenerates finger, Surgery under hypnosis, Ghost photographs, Steven Spielberg to create paranormal online community.   The tag line, “Five minutes with five skeptics” is in the first sentence spoken by the host, and tells me that I only have to invest five minutes — a major attraction for my limited attention span, and a benefit I’d like to incorporate into my own podcast title or tagline.

Concept viability:  The Skeptics Guide hasn’t missed a week since it debuted in January of this year and the dozen episodes that I’ve listened to have all featured the same 5 skeptics who are identified only by their first names. A major strength of the concept is that there is no shortage of preposterous paranormal stories to debunk. In world where an appearance of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich makes the front page, The Skeptics Guide 5×5  will never be in danger of running out of material.

Audience targeting:  Perfect for the secular humanist such as I who is exasperated by the popular willingness to suspend disbelief over the latest miracle, ghost story, UFO sighting or Virgin Mary appearance. An important ingredient of The Skeptics Guide is that it’s both sober and entertaining.  It doesn’t shoot fish in a barrel. The panel is scientifically savvy and examines the story at hand with dispassionate analysis. No matter how ridiculous the reported event is, they debunk without disparaging the perpetrators or the nitwits who are falling for the story.

Promotion:  A banner for The Skeptics Guide 5×5 is featured on the organization’s home page along with their “main” pod cast which features longer interviews.  As a non-profit probably operating on a shoestring, they probably don’t have the budget for off-site promotion.

Production.  Overall, very good.  The five panelists are professionally mic-ed, their voices are distinguishable from each other, and there’s rarely any cross-talk. The theme music is original and appropriate, which just a hint of sci-fi. The one significant flaw is the absence of title artwork, which, to the skeptical podcast surfer, signifies that this production is probably in the home-made category. It definitely is not.

The Skeptics Gude 5×5 archive

Bob Garfield is a senior editor of Advertising Age, one of the two leading magazines that track the advertising industry, the other being Adweek. Garfield is also co-host of NPRs, On the Media, which I subscribe to in podcast form.  He’s generally regarded as the industry leading ad critic. A positive review of your campaign by Garfield is something to include on your resume.

The main blogging challenge for a critic would seem to be in making it significantly different than your regular column, which, by nature, is similar to a blog in that it’s a forum for your personal opinions.

Garfield generally succeeds by consistently using his blog in two ways that are distinctive from his columns. One is to comment on a range of topics related to the ad industry, such a the recent suicide of a leading creative executive at the agency, DDB.  The other technique is to deliver mico-critiques, such as a recent post that pointed out that Bud Lite’s campaign featuring a guy who responds to series of situations with the single word, “Dude” is virtually identical to a campaign for the Ford Focus that ran 8 years ago.

This is an example of what I value most about the Bobosphere: Garfield’s long-term perspective on an industry that seems to be perpetually undergoing radical change for all the obvious Web 2.0 reasons. For me, a middle-aged guy who’s paddling fast to stay current in a youth-crazed industry that’s seems to be having a panic attack as it tries to convince clients that it still has the answers, Garfield is a refreshing and reassuring voice of reason. He knows from whence we came and uses his blog to remind us that the media may change, but the principles of good branding and effective persuasion never go out of style.

Visually, there’s nothing in the masthead of the Boboshere other than the title and subhead that distinguish it from Garfield’s regular column.

My main gripe with the Bobosphere is the irregularity and infrequency of it.  The last two posts were April 29 and March 2, which suggests that Bob isn’t exactly embracing the concept of having yet another deadline.  I’m hoping that he’ll blog about the pain of having to blog because your editor said you have to now. As a writer who is still reluctant to launch my own blog for fear of taking on another deadline, I’ll keep tuning in to the Bobosphere to see how Bob is feeling my pain.

The Bobosphere

I have a client who’s warming up to the idea of doing a podcast and I referred him the CommonCraft tutorial. It answered the “What’s a Podcast?” question for my client far better than I had. I remembered Lee mentioning in his presentation that they use the “It’s kind of like this….” approach to explaining things — a technique that I favor in especially when selling he merits of technology products. I used it this morning in web copy about the music, video and photo capabilities of Windows Mobile phones: “It’s like having a media center in your pocket.”

I like what I call the “simile strategy” so much, I recently based an entire web video campaign for Safeco Insurance on it. The campaign is intended to give consumers useful nuggets of insurance knowledge without directly selling Safeco. It features brief monologues by four characters who each explain their topic by comparing it to something they’re very familiar with in their work.

Here’s one example:

This week, the broadcast TV networks pitched their upcoming schedules to advertisers in an annual television industry ritual known as “the upfronts.” Back in the what both sides now must think of as the Good Old Days of linear TV before TiVo and YouTube, the networks extolled the strengths, not just of individual shows, but of an entire evening’s prime-time lineup.

But according to an article in last Monday’s NY Times, the days of the “lineup” may be numbered. Recent Neilsen ratings report that prime-time viewership of the 4 broadcast networks is down by 6 million viewers compared to a year ago.

A major reason appears to be the increasing popularity of time-shifted consumption — one of the primary benefits of podcasting. Viewer are recording on DVRs, using cable on-demand services, purchasing TV episodes on iTunes and going to advertising- supported streaming sites such as Hulu and Fancast.

DRVs are the most popular time-shifting technology, with one in four households using them, a 10% increase in the past year. The DVR has forced the networks and Neilsen to revise the traditional ratings metrics to include shows watched within three days of being originally broadcast, which has boosted the ratings of some prime-time shows by as much as 25%

The articles quotes Alan Wutzel, the head of research for NBC as saying that “he DVR is both a friend and an enemy for the networks, “the classic frenemy.” The good news is that time-shifting is enabling viewers to watch more television because they can watch at their convenience. They bad news is that, on average, DVR viewers skip about half of the commercials that make those shows possible.

For advertisers, television continues to offer the greatest immediacy, persuasive impact and broadest potential audience. Measuring the effect and value of advertising has always been a black art (“I know that half of my advertising is working, I just don’t know which half,” is the classic connundrum), and it now seems trickier than ever.

Personally, after using TiVo for the past six months, I rarely watch a program at the time of broadcast even when I can. If there’s something on at 8 PM tonight that I’ll want to talk about at the watercooler tomorrow morning, I’ll set it to record, and start watching it at 8:15, just so I can skip the commercials.

No wonder advertisers are buying space on airplane overhead compartments, urinal deoderant cakes and bald heads.

This is a follow-up to last week’s class discussion, and my last post, on Mitch Joel’s hypothetical question: “What If Everything We Knew About Marketing and Advertising Until Now Was An Anomaly?”

The Television Bureau of Advertising (TAB) last week released results of a survey on adult consumer media habits that support my contention that traditional media remain far more influential for marketing communications than the internet — at least with adults, who were found to spend more than half of their media-consumption hours per day watching television.

The survey of 1246 adults aged 25 to 54 was commissioned by the TBA and conducted by Nielsen Media Research in January 2008.  Among the findings:

•    53% of total daily media hours are spent with TV, more than all other mediums combined

•    90% reported watching TV in the previous 24 hours, compared to 80% for radio, 72.1% for the internet, 58.9% for newspapers and 48.3% for magazines

•    The time spent with TV in the same 24-hour period was also significantly higher (222.7 minutes) when compared with radio (106.5), the internet (99.7), newspapers (22.1) and magazines (15.1)

•    TV advertising remains the most influential with 81.4% of the 25-54 adult segment, compared with advertising on the internet (6.5%), newspapers (5.8%), radio (3.9%) and magazines (2.3%)

•    Respondents said TV had the most persuasive advertising (69.9%), compared to 9.5% for newspapers, 7.5% for radio and 8.1% for magazines.

•    Among all media, the internet scored lowest in persuasive advertising, at 5.1%.

•    55% said they were more likely to learn about products and brands they might like to try and buy on TV, trailed by the internet at 18.7%, magazines at 14.6%, newspapers at 7.1% and radio coming in last at 4.5%.

While this survey suggests that online advertising has questionable persuasive power, Advertising Age’s annual revenue survey of U.S. agencies, also released last week, attributed an overall revenue increase of 8.6% primarily to the growth of digital advertising revenue.
Granted, the survey did not include adult usage of internet social media. But the dominance of TV over the internet in total hours of consumption, influence and persuasiveness are dramatic. Clearly, anyone who thinks traditional marketing communications will be rendered anomalous anytime soon needs to turn off the computer and get some air.

In “What If Everything We Knew About Marketing and Advertising Until Now Was An Anomaly?” Mitch Joel speculates, “Maybe Web 2.0 and Social Media is ushering in not only a new way for Marketers to think about how Consumers engage with Advertising, but it is the beginning of the “real” way in which businesses will connect with their Consumers.”

I think this is a simplistic view of the current chapter in the evolution of marketing communications (marcom). Granted, consumers can now have a more prominent voice than ever in the making or breaking of a brand, but all the blogging, online customer reviews and amateur commercials on YouTube only amount to a greater volume of one type of marcom known as “word-of-mouth.”

Word-of-mouth has always been part of a successful marcom mix, and the fact that there’s now more of it, and more dialog between company and customer, doesn’t signify that traditional forms of marcom, from Super Bowl ads to junk mail, are going away anytime soon.

Ad spending is certainly shifting, but spending on “one-way” media — print, radio, TV and direct mail — is showing no signs of dropping off as Web 2.0 activity picks up. That’s because the audience is still there and traditional marcom is still far more effective than social media during two critical phases of the marketing persuasion process: getting the attention of and generating interest among the greatest numbers of prospects. This is the specific function of advertising, and why many successful campaigns are known more for their entertainment value than their factual content.

Traditional media also packs far more impact, in a “medium is the message” way. If Move-On.org’s full page “General Betray Us” ad in the NY Times (dreadful as it was) had instead been a front-page blog on the Huffington Post, it would only have received the attention of other bloggers. Ho hum.

Mitch is overly exuberant when he says: “In watching Consumers leverage real power to share their insights, voice and passions, I can’t help but feel like this is just beginning and we’re entering into - what will become - how Marketing, Advertising and Communications was truly meant to connect.”

In fact, consumers have always had the ultimate power over marketers by voting with their pocketbooks. One of the principles advertisers live by is that the most a great ad campaign can do for a bad product is to get people to try it once.

And then they tell their friends…

As mentioned in a post last week, I’ve been considering recommending to one of my clients that they produce a podcast, but have refrained from doing so until I convince myself that a podcast would be a practical and beneficial undertaking for this company. I floated the idea past the marketing consultant who directs the company’s marketing communications efforts and she was unreservedly enthusiastic. She has a general and vague idea of what a podcast is, but at least knows that its one of those Web 2.0 things that’s getting a lot of buzz these days. What’s not to like? she seemed to say. She wants to see a proposal.

Her reaction reaffirms what I believe is one of the most appealing aspects of podcasting as a marketing communications “product:” It’s one of those things, like blogging and web video, that businesses think they ought to be doing to be “cutting edge.” And since I am ultimately in the business of selling and manufacturing marketing communications products — print, broadcast and online ads, web content, video, etc.— adding podcast production to my list of services has great appeal, because:

• It seems relatively easy to get clients excited about podcasting. Even if they don’t know what podcasting is, they like the sound of it. And it sounds more affordable than video.

• Podcasts are far simpler to produce than other “cutting edge” assets, such as web video, and seem less cumbersome to business executives than doing their own blog. As a sole proprietor, I like that I could realistically produce a client’s podcast without enlisting outside resources. I can’t do that with video. I wouldn’t even attempt to create a web page for a client without a graphic designer.

• Podcasts have higher perceived value than, say, a comparable amount of content on a web page or in a brochure. And they are far less of a commodity than other marcom tools, and so potentially more profitable.

I’ve talked myself into doing the proposal.