The Thoughtful Thud Revisited

Is digital the magic dust to help newspaper titles survive?

Newspaper publishers are already making their content available on mobile phones, through Twitter streams and other platforms.

What is fascinating though is that the experience of The Guardian in the UK is that there is still a section of its readership who want nothing more than to read the newspaper in a newspaper format.

 

What is smart is that The Guardian is listening to its readers and has re-launched its digital editions through NewspaperDirect, who already has agreements with over 700 newspaper and magazine publishers from 80 countries internationally.

 

The core feature of this type of digital edition is the customer’s ability to browse a day's newspaper in the format it was printed. What is clever is that the customer can also search for words or set up email alerts.

 

What is great is that digital - supposedly the enemy - is actually helping in this survival act through the new applications being offered by Apple and others in their App store development.

 

This is the new formula of a print newspaper meeting digital – and making sense. This new initiative of The Guardian and Observer newspapers to embrace change could yet be an important chapter in fight of newspapers internationally to survive and monetize content.

Who would be in advertising right now?

The scale of the decline of advertising spend continues to dip alarmingly, falling 10% in the fourth quarter of 2008 with the newspaper sector the biggest casualty with a 12% drop, according to new figures compiled by the World Advertising Research Center for the Advertising Association.

 

It shows once again the speed of communications change as companies slash budgets in the recession or move out of advertising. But if clients are cutting budgets, it ought to be yet another opportunity for the PR industry working with evaluation companies to prove the value of public relations relative to advertising budgets.

  

What is sadly happening to the advertising industry nevertheless remains a great opportunity for the public relations industry.

 

The PR firms who will emerge the other side of the recession will be in a very different shape from when the economy first took a nose dive. They will be leaner. They will offer a multi channel approach. And most important of all, they will have put social media at the centre of everything they do.

  

It will be interesting to ask recruitment search professionals how CV’s have suddenly changed to reflect a candidate’s awareness and experience of the online world! Search firms - anyone want to contribute?

Perhaps it is because they are free that people leave them behind!

As regular readers to my blog know, I have a belief in the future of traditional newspapers, whilst acknowledging that it is not a “one size fits all” solution with others preferring to access news online.

 

But take a look at this image. Tacky, is the word that comes to mind. And that’s the impression you remember when you enter a carriage of tube trains on London’s Underground, literally littered with discarded copies of free newspapers like The Metro and City A.M.

 

It’s not a positive image of the newspaper industry at a time when what it needs is…a positive image.

 

I'd like to know how other countries with free newspapers manage to avoid the litter mess.

Is recession the big opportunity for PR?

I’ve just read a fascinating piece in the Daily Telegraph in the UK about a new kind of advertising and planning agency called BrandThinkTank which believes that the major advertising agencies have run out of Big Ideas.

 

What Pierre-Emmanuel Maire, founder of BrandThinkTank suggests, in fact, has an uncanny resonance to PR consultancy. He believes that the traditional full service advertising agency model is living on borrowed time – hence the birth of his own small company which can focus on Big Ideas. His thoughts about size and scale of an advertising agency are thoughts shared by many about the traditional PR consultancy model.

 

But what is true for the advertising industry, hampered by the expense of TV and print advertising, is not directly applicable to PR, leaving the thought: Has PR got an even bigger opportunity than the industry thought in a recession?  In other words, this is PR’s time!

 

I am judging a national PR awards scheme in the UK again in a few weeks time. As ever, I will be looking for difference, for outstanding creativity – Mr Maire’s Big Idea. But I also want to see how the programme demonstrably connects with the right audiences in a multi-channel approach.

 

.....and it must have shown that it worked through independent measurement. 

Do you have what it takes to tweet?

It seems to me that Twitter has become highly fashionable as the social site to use because of the unexpected push from the celebrity corner. In doing so they are helping define the Twitter brand and drive massive growth figures.

 

Show business people are so excited by their Twitter experience that they take every opportunity to tell their TV or radio host and millions of viewers or listeners about it, which is great news for Twitter’s profile.

 

A good example of that is Stephen Fry - wit, writer, raconteur, actor and quiz show host, who says: "If I added up all the hours I've sat watching a progress bar fill up, I could live another life."

 

His Twitter feed is the world's second most popular, pipped at the post by ….Barack Obama. Other high profile Twitterers include BBC presenter Jonathan Ross, Demi Moore, Richard Branson, John Cleese, Lance Armstrong, and US star of "The Office" star Rainn Wilson.

PR Leaders see importance of evaluation

There’s good news today in the UK from the reenergized PRCA with a Leaders Poll which shows that 84% of PR firms believed that evaluation is “very important” to the credibility of PR.The results of the Poll are encouraging and optimism for still further progress. In a recession, with pressure on both agency performance and on budgets,the opportunity is there for PR firms and all programme owners to fight their corner to include an evaluation component in every client programme.

 

The cause for optimism centres around the fact that in the Poll 60% of PR leaders said there had been no change since the economic downturn in the proportion of PR budgets spent on evaluation. In other words, there is a huge opportunity gap for agencies to fill to prove client value with factual evaluation measures which cannot be challenged.

So, highly encouraging and the PRCA is to be congratulated for its willingness to work with AMEC to champion evaluation. Along the way we have a couple of evaluation myths to break down:

1)    That evaluation is expensive;

2)     Clients are not sufficiently interested in evaluation to pay for it.

Needless to say there is compelling data and the proof available to answer both points.

The best show window to show the range of international best practice will be at the 1^st European Summit on Measurement in Berlin from June 10-12. The Summit is being presented by AMEC and the Institute for Public Relations. Christoph Keese, Group Managing Director, Public Affairs from Axel Springer and Dr Roland Kuntze, Head of External Communications, O2 have become this week’s latest confirmed major company speakers, joining Royal Dutch Shell, BBVA, Siemens and the UK Government’s Central Office of Information. A full list of speaker is shown on the Summit website, see link below.

Can’t get the budget to attend the whole Summit? Then bag a cheap flight (Ryanair, easyJet, BMI and come for the Workshop Day on June 10 to learn about evaluation from specialists from the US, the UK and Germany. You won’t get a better opportunity at a lower price anywhere. http://www.ameceuropeansummit.org

 

PR LEADERS POLL RESULTS: SOURCE - PRCA 1. ON AVERAGE WHAT PERCENTAGE OF A PR BUDGET IS SPENT ON EVALUATION?
Answer	Responses	Rate
0%	6	13.95%
1-2%	17	39.53%
3-5%	15	34.88%
5-10%	5	11.63%

 

2. HOW IMPORTANT IS EVALUATION TO THE CREDIBILITY OF PR?
Answer	Responses	Rate
Occasionally useful	2	4.65%
Quite important	5	11.63%
Very important	36	83.72%
3. HAS THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN HAD AN IMPACT ON THE PROPORTION OF PR BUDGETS SPENT ON EVALUATION?
Answer	Responses	Rate
Decreased significantly	3	6.98%
Decreased slightly	8	18.60%
Increased slightly	6	13.95%
No change	26	60.47%

Apple would call it….genius!

Footballers are known for their penchant to be glued to their iPods as they get off the team coach arriving for a big game. Now 26 year old Manchester United goalkeeper Ben Foster has taken the use of an iPod to a new level.

 

Foster was in the Manchester United team facing sudden death penalties in the Carling Cup Final. What he did in the minutes he had before after extra time had ended in stalemate helped him win the game. In those minutes Foster watched footage of Tottenham Hotspur’s penalty-takers, prepared by Eric Steele, United’s goalkeeping coach on his iPod of how his Tottenham Hotspur opponents placed their kicks.

The result was that Foster saved the first key spot kick and it influenced the result – United’s way.

Foster’s success is an Apple marketing man’s dream and yet another innovation for the iPod generation