Fourth quarter, credit crises and more bad news

The circulation figures of the USA newspapers show a decline of almost 5% in 2008 compared to the first six months in 2007. Only USA Today and The Wall Street Journal remained almost unchanged. The decline coincides with news about lay offs of newsroom staff, closing down of newspapers, increased use of e-books announced at the Frankfurter Buchmesse and the deal Google made over the digitisation of libraries worldwide.

The news gathering and news dissemination is at stake. Customers still read the news, but more do so online, and (almost all) for free. Advertising revenues for the printed newspaper decline as fast as the Dow Jones, so how to pay the news makers. A new business model is required, soon.

Traditional and new media winners in Brussels

Today I went to the award ceremony of the Enterprise of the Year of Ernst & Young. The winner of this award and of the Flemish award for the most talented company proved to be two antipoles: CartaMundi was the winner of the serious Enterprise of the Year award and Netlog was chosen the most talented company. CartaMundi is a world leader in the production of all kinds of playing cards, cards used in Las Vegas or Pokemon cards collected by kids. Netlog is the Belgian-based European leader in social networking. Both represent social networking: the traditional and the new way. Social networking for the digital immigrants and for digital natives.

Use less paper - by Xerox

Yesterday Xerox Belgium organised an event titled Paperless Attitude. Almost 400 people representing end users, printers, creative people and service providers attended the session. Xerox presented various ways how their machines can help to manage paper use and paper flows. Pierre Collette, head of communications, told his audience that 80% of all printed documents have a life time of less than 24 hours! Being more conscious about the use of paper should therefore certainly be on everybody's agenda. But a lot more needs to be done to achieve this paperless attitude.

Future of print media perspective

Last week I presented a Future Perspective on Print Media to a group of Dutch advertising and graphic professionals, all of them clients of Spijker and Scaldia. As always happens with this presentation there was a lot of interaction and discussion. On one point we all agreed: innovation is key for print media to maintain its current position. The Esquire cover was seen as an innovation and a way for magazines to attract readers. When magazines do so these impressive machines can continue producing fine paper.

Newspaper sales in perspective

Erwin Busselot from Kodak forwarded me a slide that puts the news (see post of September 7) about declining sales of newspapers in more perspective. This slide - although from 2007 - shows the difference in evolution between the continents.


Ww Np Sales

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Magazines offense

This week marks the Magazine Week in the UK featuring a "buy one, get one half price" promotion, a poll on Britain's favourite cover and various promotional activities in retail stores. The theme of the PPA is "Indulge your passion.. try another magazine today". For the advertisers and media agency there are plenty of facts that support the strong position of magazines: consumers spend ₤ 2 billion on magazines each year, more of the internet generation read consumer magazines than any other age group, average reading time of a magazine is 50 min. and a magazine is picked up 5.4 times before it is finished with. I'm wondering whether the consumer and b2b sides of this campaign are compelling and unique enough to be convincing.
In the US the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) also launched a B2B campaign titled "Under the influence of magazines". This campaign consists of magazine ads, online ads and a website and is directed at the marketers and advertising agency industry. Key message is the sales impact magazines have. A separate website covers the research that supports this claim. The US magazine market also shows a decline in the number of ads placed. Over the first half of 2008 the decline was 7.4%. The initiative comes just a couple of days prior the the annual magazine conference titled Unleash the Power.
Claiming results to sell media space is also the message of online advertising and was the message of TV advertising. Despite the convincing facts it remains uncertain whether magazines will become HOT again among planners and advertisers thanks to this $ 1 million campaign.

Mythbusters

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