Advertising

No doubt you’ve heard the “big” news that the New York Times has added an advertising spot on the front page of its print edition. Shocking, eh? The New York Post in covering the news says in a graphic accompanying its story, “New York Times Publisher Arthur ‘Pinch’ Sulzberger is smashing the paper of record’s vaunted Chinese wall between news and advertising by peddling front-page space.”

Puleeze. First, kudos for NYT making a move that might bring in some badly needed serious money to its legacy business. Second, plenty of other papers do front page ads (including in the U.S., USA Today and the Wall Street Journal), though it’s more common outside the U.S. I don’t believe for a second that ads on the front page will have any effect on editorial content. The worst that can happen is some embarrassing juxtaposition of a page 1 ad for a company that’s covered on the front page for some wrongdoing. But I suspect the Times’ editorial and ad departments are both plenty smart enough to avoid that.

My point in writing this item is merely to remark on what a big deal some folks are making about this move. Unfortunately, this kind of move (“OMG! Ads on the front page!”) passes for radical innovation in much of the newspaper industry. Compared to innovation in the online and mobile communications worlds, this is just a tweak. Compared to the kind of bold innovation that newspaper companies will need to make to survive in 2009 and beyond, ads on the front page — even of the New York Times — is not even worth a raised eyebrow.

I sincerely hope we’ll see so much newspaper-industry innovation in 2009 that in year-end wrap-up stories, this will barely merit mention.

On BusinessWeek.com, Ben Kunz writes about the trouble Twitter is having coming up with a business model. He suggests a bunch of possibilities, but finds problems with all of them.

I don’t get it. It strikes me that the best model is incredibly simple, and powerful: Insert a “TwitterAd” entry every 50 entries or so. Kunz thinks “users would rebel.” I doubt it. That’s a minor price to pay for a free service, and most folks will understand that it’s a necessity for the service to continue to serve them.

And if you don’t like the ads, then pay an annual fee (say, $20) for the ad-free version.

There’s been concern that advertising in social networks doesn’t work that well, but that’s not a concern here. I’m reminded of something I learned in doing some Eyetrack research a few years ago for the Poynter Institute. When ads were put directly in the editorial flow of content, they were seen and acknowledged much more than when off to the side.

And when an ad is designed in the same way as surrounding editorial content (color, font, etc.), it’s noticed even more. “TwitterAd” tweets would fit those criteria and my educated guess is that the ads would be incredibly effective, especially if Twitter adds contextualization to the mix (or select-the-type-of-ads-you-want schemes a la WeatherBug).

Dan Pacheco and the Bakersfield Californian have an intriguing project (funded by the Knight Foundation) called Printcasting. It’s a niche publication initiative that works in both print and online, and addresses “long tail” content and advertising. (OK, that description sounds a bit dull, but it’s a cool concept.)

For my ReinventingClassifieds.com site, I’ve written up a little piece about the implications for classifieds that Printcasting represents. If you’re a media geek like me, you may find it interesting:

Printcasting: the advertising implications

Widgets should be a huge part of most media companies’ strategy in the years ahead, as a way to spread their content around the web widely. (aka, the Distributed Web.) Here’s an interesting widget example from Pulse360 that comes with built-in advertising and revenue sharing, so that there’s incentive for lots of websites to carry the widgets.

This particular one is called the CBS 4 Denver network, and includes content from Channel 4’s news operation in the widgets in either video or story format. Topics include Denver news, sports, politics, lifestyle, arts and culture (standard local news fare). Website owners that choose to carry the widget select from among the general topic feeds. Continued

Here’s more good advice from Newspaper Next 2.0 (American Press Institute). As the report points out, in most newspaper markets, less than half of local consumers are frequent newspaper readers and as little as one-quarter or less of local businesses are newspaper advertisers. The latter figure is the result of most newspapers 1) not having ad programs that are affordable and effective for very small businesses, and 2) newspapers not bothering to court the smallest businesses in their communities. Continued

As a strategy to grow your news website, developing and deploying smartly designed widgets is an important one. This year you’ll see me write and hear me talk a lot about widgets and the overall concept of spreading your content far and wide online. News publishers by now should have deep-sixed the old notion that their content is sacred and should be restricted to viewing only on their websites. They must get used to the idea that their content can be just about anywhere — and that’s a good thing. Continued

The guys over at Evomo must be ecstatic about this. They make stylish mountain biking apparel (including some branded t-shirts commissioned by my former company, the Enthusiast Group), and one of their fans asked if he could get a tattoo using Evomo’s “Braincase” design. The answer from Evomo head honcho Bryan Thombs: “Hell-yeeeaaaah!”

So here’s the pic. The crazy mountain biker didn’t go so far as to brand Evomo’s name on his skin, but that’s still a pretty nice bit of free customer marketing for the company. He’s a walking billboard for Evomo, since everyone’s going to ask him about it.

That is a pretty cool design. If I were younger, I might wear that t-shirt; it doesn’t really fit my 51-year-old sensibilities. Tattoo? Probably not.

I’ve said here that I’m a (qualified) fan of the “social ads” concept that Facebook is implementing. But I’m only a fan as far as the concept goes; Facebook’s implementation still has major problems.

Example: In my Facebook News Feed this afternoon was this social ad, which appeared because someone on my friends list allowed it to be published:

Now that sucks. It’s a stupid way to advertise, because it gives the appearance that David Henderson is spamming my Facebook account with an ad from Blockbuster Video — which is not what he intended, I’m sure.

But if this was done right, it could be a great and cool form of advertising. If Dave had just rented the movie Rent — or had just rated it 4 stars on Blockbuster.com — then I’d be fine with receiving that information in my News Feed. If Dave was (because he agreed to) sending all his Facebook friends a $1 off coupon for Blockbuster, that would be fine. But the ad above is stupid and counterproductive on Blockbuster’s part.

The best way to handle this ad would be to 1) have the News Feed ad above be something like “David Henderson gave Rent 4 stars on Blockbuster.com” (relevant personal information about a Facebook friend’s activities, approved for publication by him in an opt-in manner), and 2) use the ad banner space in the left side of the Facebook News Feed page for a more conventional ad (like “One month free trial…”).

The social ad that showed up in my News Feed is dumb. If Facebook pumps that kind of crap onto user News Feed pages, the Beacon and Social Ad programs will fail.

Done right, they will represent a major positive innovation in online advertising.

WSJ.com’s Kara Swisher interviews Facebook’s Owen Van Natta about the whole social ads things. Yeah, Facebook’s had some privacy problems and it screwed up at first with the implementation of social ads, but this is so innovative. We’ve come a long way from banner ads!

I really like the concept behind Facebook’s Beacon program, which sends information about your purchases to the people in your Facebook friends network. That is, I like it as long as I as an online shopper am in control.

Having online shoppers opt in to having purchase information broadcast to their friends is, of course, the way this program should have been set up in the first place. Instead, Facebook tried to make the program opt-out — and then was surprised (d’uh!) to face a massive public backlash and even a MoveOn.org campaign aimed at getting them to scrap or change the program.

So yesterday, Facebook relented and made the program opt-in. I’m glad company executives listened to reason. How a company as smart as Facebook could misread privacy concerns so badly is hard to comprehend.

Now that it’s settled, though, Facebook has a great program that pushes the envelope for online advertising.