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LISTEN WHILE YOU WORK
Higher Income Shoppers Hear More Radio
Listen while you work. That's a modern version of the tune Snow White's Elves made famous. Today it's listen, not whistle because a whistler in the office is frowned upon, while a radio isn't.
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TWO PLUS TWO IS FOUR?
If
you’re old enough to recall drilling on those impossible multiplication
tables, you’re probably too old to remember your name. But cheer up.
Neuroscience can now explain how life can be beautiful and math can be ugly.
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HOW PEOPLE SENSE MEDIA
The Use and Limitations of Eyeballs and Ears
The following ray of sunlight is from an interview with a copy testing company (name delicately withheld). "There is an open battle for the eyes and ears of consumers...and a silent battle for their hearts and minds." I think they got it right the first time. Checking eyes and ears can make our media dollars smarter. Hearts and minds I leave to Beth Israel.
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A MESSAGE FROM CANNES
It’s Time To Watch The Watchers
Did you get that faint SOS from the Cannes International Advertising Festival last month? It read “Mayday! Our audience has gone from watching commercials to making them. . .”
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THE BENT ACRONYM
Scrambled Letters from the Internet
Like the crusty part of muffins, acronyms are the tasty tops of words. At best they’re sharp as lemons; Nixon’s Committee to Reelect, or CREEP, comes immediately to mind. At worst they’re over-familiar comfort foods like Keep It Simple Stupid’s KISS.
We live in the age of acronyms. A speeded-up world compressed by the ease and ubiquity of messaging. As our in-boxes swell, the need to respond overwhelms the need to communicate creating a perfect breeding ground for the three letter reply. DYA?
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A HANDICAPPER’S DREAM
Using PPM Patterns to help buy Radio Diary Markets is a License to Steal
Overwhelming agency and advertiser support of the Arbitron PPM as a better way to measure radio is encouraging, but also in a way disappointing. It’s like one of those familiar UN resolutions giving a sense of the members with no call to action. I hope that impression is wrong.
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DELIVERING THE MESSAGE
How Consumer Involvement Flows from Magazine Content to Advertising
For several years now, magazines have promoted measures of “engagement” as evidence of real value to their readers. And it’s no surprise magazines involve readers. After all, they select titles by content and pay money to read them.
However demonstrating the value of reader involvement to the advertiser has been another matter.
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REACH TRUMPS FREQUENCY
How Radio Can Build Business in A PPM World.
Whenever I hear “Radio is a frequency medium” I shudder. It implies two things, neither good. Either Radio messages don’t communicate very well, so you need say it again and again just to be sure. Or Radio’s reach is so limited that any typical schedule soon runs out of new listeners.
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ADDING PROZAC TO THE MEDIA MIX
Advertising News Has Become a
Continuous Nail-biting Industry Blog.
Does the media business realize it’s suffering from Acute Anxiety Disorder (AAD), an ailment spread by eating too much raw news?
In addition to sleeplessness, a key symptom is the rapid spread of half-ideas like “time-spent” and “multi-tasking,” as evidence of change, because between reading, and worrying about what we’re reading, there is too little time left for thinking it through.
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THE UNINVITED
Commercial Avoidance and the Media
The Uninvited. Great name for a ghost story. But this tale isn’t about ghosts. It’s about a media presence so palpable that half of all consumers want to run the other way.
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THE BROKEN COVENANT
If Commercial Avoidance Destroys TV,
Mass Marketing May Go With It.
In the beginning, when RCA and Dumont created Television, the agreement with America was “watch commercials and the programs will be free.” This was advertising supported Television. Other countries, like the UK, chose a different model.
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THE EGOISTS
Why Don’t Media Respect Advertising?
Interesting? Involving? Engaging? Those are the kinds of questions we ask people about advertising. And at $12,000 a second to construct an average TV commercial, the answers better be good.
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HARD ROCK
Notes from the 4A’s Media Conference, Orlando, Florida
Orlando is a theme park so I searched for the theme. Hard Rock. It was right there in the name of my Hotel. Hard Rock, as in the green times are gone. A song crossed my mind.Our Zeppelin is Led, but it still has to fly.
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FEAR AND TREMBLING . . .
"TIVO has no poetry. It’s a dismal way to die." -anon
Forget that cough Camille. Television holds the record for the longest death scene. Were you there for its 650-page swan song in “Three blind mice,” Ken Auleta’s 1980’s tour de force obituary of CBS, NBC and ABC?
All three survived.
Did you hear the requiem bell again when cable surged in the 1990’s and multi-channel competition cut Network ratings down by half?
But the beast proved hard to kill.
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AN OUTDOOR RATINGS MANIFESTO
Traditional Sample-Based Research Won’t Solve Outdoor’s Ratings Problem.
Try counting grains of sand with your fingers. That’s what the ratings try to do today, and with about as much success. Media are fragmenting and measuring the tiny pieces drives consumer-survey sampling crazy. But the industry seems not to have noticed.
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THE PUZZLING PASSIVITY OF PRINT
The Pitch is “Buy Hearst not Condé Nast.”
It isn’t “Buy Print not Television.”
Fatalism mists the air. While Advertisers audition media-mix, Magazines hide in the wings. They’ve left the larger hunt to Television and fight for scraps they already own. The only competitors they see are fellow publishers.
Their pitch is “Buy Condé Nast not Hearst,” It isn’t ”Buy Print not television.”
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THE WEB’S UNSEEMLY FLIGHT TO BRANDING
How a Genuine Response Medium Fled Response Instead of Learning to Use It.
Is it just me? Or do you also find the New Media people a bit distracted when they talk about branding?
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TURBO-TELEVISION?
Interactive TV Has Been Just Two Years Away For More Than A Decade.
Interactive TV. The idea is simple and powerful. Take the world's most effective ad medium and make it better by making it interactive. Let the viewer click on the TV image for information or even to purchase what is being shown. Turn passive to active. Make media magic -- Turbo-TV.
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BRINGING ONLINE, ON LINE
The mainstreaming of the Internet is inevitable, but it will not happen easily.
Have you noticed how anxious everyone seems? The Old Media are worried about the New Media (check-out those Olympics ratings). The New Media are worried about advertiser dollars (check-out those credit ratings).
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TACOS OR DIAMONDS?
Sponsorship Sells Because Celebrity is Surer than Sales.
Buying a program (or even a piece of one) is a feel-good media experience. It is the unassisted triple-play—an ideal setting for repeating messages to the brand’s target without competition. Compare sponsorship
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OR IS IT AN ELEPHANT?
Stretching Our Minds for a New Web Pricing Model
This paper is dedicated to the late Seymour Banks of Leo Burnett, who started us down this path 35-years ago with the publication of "Toward Better Media Comparisons."
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RESPONSE NOT READERSHIP IS PRINT’S PROBLEM.
The Failure of Print Planning.
Bankruptcy Court In London is on Carey Street. UK Publishers are fond of saying "The way to Carey Street is paved with broken rate cards." Not true in the US. Here publishers don’t need a pyrex rate card to make it.
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THE GHOST OF NETWORK PAST
TV Fragmentation Doesn’t Mean Tighter targeting.
It was two months 'til Christmas, but the Ghost of Network Past walked the Sheraton Hotel ballroom. Eight hundred people crowded the Network television association's first annual meeting to hear about the future of network television. They left disappointed.
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