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Swag for Cred

Mothers writing on the Internet about products they like tend to be trusted by other mothers. That’s why marketing and PR agencies try mightily to convert these key influencers into becoming “brand ambassadors” with product samples, contests and the like.

Flattered or grateful, many blogging mommies will go so far as to place advertisers’ banner ads for free on their sites. But because they want to be paid for such activites, some bloggers are becoming more vocal about the stupidity of their fellow bloggers getting nothing but swag or links in exchange for promotional posts. [PRNewser, 5/13/10].

Mom Central CEO Stacy DeBroff says moms blogging for free stuff was not as common as people may think. But she told PR Newser, “The minute you become too commercial, you lose your audience, and when you lose your audience you lose your influence.”

Giving Offense, Getting Noticed

I used to work as a public affairs director at a large mental health organization. Not the kind of place that would get a kick out of a recent Burger King commercial.

A man in a surreally oversized plastic “king” head with a creepy grin is running through an office building pursued by a man dressed in a white lab coat who yells, “Stop that King, he’s crazy!”

It seems the meat sovereign is insane to be “giving away” sandwiches for $3.99.

There is so much stigma assigned to mental illness that this kind of stuff puts people on edge. But as advertising, it works. I remembered it, and it garnered a lot of press notice.

When Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s hot-tempered chief of staff, criticized somebody’s stupid move as “retarded,” the uproar commenced. Sarah Palin, who has a young son with Down’s Syndrome, seized the opportunity to call for Emmanual’s dismissal. Proving once again that one person’s/organization’s bad P.R. is another’s opportunity.

Media Roil Call

These are perilous times for traditional media.

Things are changing so rapidly that Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone predicts “there won’t be any newspapers in two years,” according to BusinessWeek magazine (Poynter.org, 4/27/10).  Never one to resist a dig at rivals, the cantankerous Redstone says his rival Rupert Murdoch “lives in ink, and I live in movies and television. Ink is going to go away, and movies and television will be here forever, like me.”

If one thing is clear, however, there’s no such thing as forever when it comes to technology.

Consider that some 800,000 U.S. households cut the cord to cable and satellite TV in favor of such alternatives as Hulu, Netflix, broadcaster Websites, or Apple’s iTunes in the past two years, according to the Convergence Consulting Group, which predicts the number to reach 1.6 million by the end of 2011. [TechCrunch, 4/13/10, http://tcrn.ch/cordcutters]

Last year, 12 percent of the total weekly viewing audience watched at least one or two episodes of a full-length TV show online; this year the number is 17 percent and next year it’s expected to be 21 percent. There are clearly changes in store for the $84 billion cable/satellite TV access industry, although there are forces at work to slow the progression of programming to the web (such as the $34 billion that cable companies paid last year in programming fees).

Meanwhile, newsprint, as Redstone gleefully noted, is fast dissolving into memory. Newspaper companies are falling into bankruptcy (13 major ones at last count), while commentators of all stripes welcome the destruction of old media fortresses; leftists slam them for their “reactionary” institutional and corporate bias and right-wingers for the perceived “liberalism” of their staff. The more politically agnostic simply feel newspapers just don’t “get it” — that is, they don’t know how to price their products correctly and stay ahead of technology. The current consensus of the technorati seems to be that online newspapers should be either free or, if they go to the paywall model, unbundle their content – following the Internet or Apple’s revolutionizing the music business.

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ADDENDUM: Happy to see that the NY Times paywall seems to be working … it would seem that some people ARE indeed willing to pay something for that priceless (yet costly to produce) product called journalism.

Music Marketing Mayhem

“For the first time in 50 years characters in rock and roll really don’t stand for anything. Music has become more manufactured than a Ford Focus. The biggest movement out of youth culture today is the campaign against drinking bottled water. That’s a sign of a society that has too much free time. Or maybe too much water.” – Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, in Forbes online (5/03/10)

Guccione’s Spin

The controversial founder of Spin magazine says most magazines today are “garbage” and the business is in the midst of a “Darwinian culling.”

“They are generic, lifeless, gutless titles embracing mindless voyeurism of vapid celebrity lifestyles,” Bob Guccione Jr., told Dirk Smillie of Forbes (5/03/10). He believes magazines aren’t attracting ads because their journalism isn’t risky enough. “What’s the point of media if you’re not rocking the boat?”

He doesn’t have much respect for the digital side either. “Most blogs are produced at a sixth-grade writing level,” he opines. “There are no Mark Twains out there.”

Publishers should focus on risk taking and reader loyalty, he thinks. “There’s too much obsessing about Web traffic,” he says. “Who cares if a website has 3 million monthly uniques if people aren’t engaged with the site? I’ll bet you Wine Spectator hasn’t grown that much over the years, but who wouldn’t want to own it? By doing this, we condition people to feel that fidelity is unimportant on the Web.

“In magazines, loyalty is a natural by-product. It becomes part of the identity of the magazine. I don’t feel that on the Web. I like the New York Times online, for example, but as much as I’m a fan, I’m not loyal to it in that medium. If they start charging for it, I’ll look elsewhere.”