A very long time ago I was working in sales at a business journal. While the newspaper itself just about broke even, the annual Book of Lists was enormously profitable. I became a big hero when I not only broke the record for the biggest ad package ever sold, but shattered it.
What makes the story interesting though isn’t the event itself, but how I actually made it happen.
Beyond the headlines and hype, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the magazine business and most likely stage a strong comeback.
While no one can predict the future, the most likely scenario going forward is very positive for print periodicals (although not for dailies). Moreover, any problems magazines might have won’t be due to any digital threat. Whatever the future holds, publishers hold their destiny in their own hands. Any failures will be their own.
As Marshall McLuhan once said, “A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.” We encounter that perilous luxury every day. Achieving true insights is easier said than done.
What can seem like a great idea when mutually reinforced among colleagues in the office often falls flat in the marketplace. Moreover, those of us who are senior managers often find our ideas accepted without question. How can we achieve insight into the greater world when we only directly experience our local environment?
If innovation is so great, why don’t more companies do it?
While gurus proclaim “Innovate or die,” the truth is many companies get along fine without it and still others do their best to avoid it. Innovation isn’t always profitable. If it were, corporations would always pursue it, which they clearly do not.
However, innovation is important for the rest of us, which is why we need to encourage and protect it.
While the emergence of Social Media has been amazing, much of the talk surrounding Social Media has become divorced from reality. Social Media is, and will most probably continue to be, a small (albeit important) part of the overall marketing picture.
Unfortunately, the way Social Media is being hyped will probably do more harm than good – a backlash is inevitable.
Many people believe that it is important to develop a standard audience metric for the internet. GRP’s have worked for TV, what should replace them on the web? In fact, nothing needs to.
The rationale for a standard metric stems from the perception that one standard works very well for offline media, is what advertisers expect and if interactive media could produce a single standard it would attract more ad dollars. This is clearly a misperception about how media is bought and sold.
Imagine what would happen if we couldn’t encrypt our information. Nothing we do electronically would be safe. Hackers could run up our phone bills, buy things on our account or just simply steal all of our money and not bother with the rest.
Therefore, it is troubling – to say the least – that encryption we now consider “unbreakable” will be broken routinely in as little as a decade or so from now.
Rupert Murdoch, in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, once again proclaimed the advertising business model dead and the era of free content over.
There is no doubt that Murdoch is an astute business man. He has made a fortune in media, much of it in tabloids and by cozying up to dictatorships in countries such as China and Russia. He cynically titled the piece that he published in his own newspaper to further his business interests, “Journalism and Freedom.”
Generally speaking, I’m a fan of Murdoch. They say, “you can’t argue with success” and I usually don’t, nor do I want to. However, in this latest episode his reasoning is so divorced from the facts that I have doubts as to whether he’s really serious.
