In the film Silence of the Lambs, FBI agent Clarice Starling picks the psychotic brain of imprisoned murderer Hannibal Lecter to help find another serial killer still on the loose:
"Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, his man you seek?," Lecter says.
"He kills women."
"No. That is incidental."
I thought of this exchange, oddly enough, when I read this post over at Spin Sucks about personal branding, and how people and organizations can stay relevant in a world of rapid change. The writer, Steve Kaplan, points to the example of Blockbuster, struggling to regain its market position after having its business model vaporized by Netflix:
Blockbuster lost sight of what the marketplace was doing, partially because they were tied up in real estate with their stores and couldn’t fathom people not showing up at their doors. By the time they embraced the online purchasing frenzy, Netflix was annihilating them, with others soon to follow.
The Blockbuster brand image was that of an old brand behind the times, tarnished almost beyond repair. While they have somewhat clawed back, it came at a heavy price, and in no way are they back to where they were before the switch to online rentals. Perhaps if they would have made staying relevant a priority, they might have seen things coming a little sooner and been able to salvage more of their brand image.
The problem with Blockbuster, however, was not that it clung too long to an outdated business model; that, as Dr. Lecter would say, is incidental. The problem was that Blockbuster didn't understand exactly what its business was in the first place. Remember what we've said here about newspapers? Like the railroad companies that thought they were in the railroad business, but were really in the transportation business, newspapers believed they were in the newspaper business but are really in the business of journalism. The delivery method should be -- you guessed it-- incidental.
Blockbuster is an entertainment company. They may not produce it, but they deliver it, and their mistake was getting too invested in one particular method of delivery. Walt Disney understood that his company was an entertainment business, not a movie studio, which was why he so easily transitioned to television when his competitors were crusading against it.
Netflix, for all its well-documented troubles, seems to understand that it isn't a business that sends DVDs through the mail, or streams them online, but that delivers entertainment in whatever format its customers demand at that particular moment in time. The lesson for all our organizations is to understand our nature, what it is we really do -- and not that which is merely incidental.
Showing posts with label newspapers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label newspapers. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Friday, October 21, 2011
OK, so maybe it was a good idea
The New York Times's paywall seems to be yielding some success, contrary to what some people thought might happen.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
May I have your attention?
I mentioned recently that I'm reading The Idea Writers which is a guide for advertising copywriters in the digital age but which is applicable to any kind of content creation. Case in point:
"today, as a copywriter or other brand creativity maestro, you're not just making something that will compete with other brands and other messages created by brands. You're making something to compete with every other piece of content, every other media experience that a person has during her waking hours."
Years ago I did some freelance writing for an excellent magazine editor named Robert Mendelson, who at the time was the editor of Pitt Magazine. (Today he's the editor of Carnegie Mellon Today.) Robert told me that Pitt Magazine wasn't competing with other alumni magazines. (Most people only get one, anyway.) Instead, it was competing with everything thing else that Pitt alumni had to read, everything that arrived every day in their mail box. So it better be a damn good magazine that anyone would want to read, whether or not they knew the first thing about the University of Pittsburgh. Now that I supervise the publication of the alumni magazine at Robert Morris, I've adopted that same attitude.
In other words, the competition for attention that we face as content creators didn't begin with the Internet or social media, though those things certainly intensified that competition, increased it geometrically. Each new medium threatens to steal the audience of the media that preceded it. The creatives who survive and thrive are those who refuse to be chained to any single discipline. In the 1950s, Disney was the first film studio to embrace television, because Walt Disney didn't see himself as being in the movie business; he saw himself as being in the entertainment business. Many newspapers have been flailing because they think they are in the newspaper business, and forget they are in the journalism business.
It's also worth noting that audience control over content didn't begin with the Internet -- it really began with the TV remote and the VCR. The remote control freed us from our own laziness at having to get up and walk to the TV to change the channel when we were bored with what we were watching. Not only did it impact advertisers, since we could avoid commercials, but the producers of TV programs could not longer take us for granted. They had to grab our interest and hold it if they wanted us to keep watching.
As for the VCR, it may be clumsy and primitive compared to a DVR, but remember how liberating it felt to be able to record a program when you were out, or watch one program and record another. I remember as a kid, the final episode of M*A*S*H aired the same night -- in 1983 -- as a Cub Scout banquet. The pack leaders had to promise everyone the event would end in time to get home to watch the show. Now, the only thing you have to worry about is reading a spoiler on Facebook or Twitter.
For those daunted by the jumbled and fragmented media landscape we face today as content creators, it's helpful to realize these changes are evolutionary, not necessarily revolutionary, in character. Sometimes, though, evolution takes a great leap forward. This is one of those times.
"today, as a copywriter or other brand creativity maestro, you're not just making something that will compete with other brands and other messages created by brands. You're making something to compete with every other piece of content, every other media experience that a person has during her waking hours."
Years ago I did some freelance writing for an excellent magazine editor named Robert Mendelson, who at the time was the editor of Pitt Magazine. (Today he's the editor of Carnegie Mellon Today.) Robert told me that Pitt Magazine wasn't competing with other alumni magazines. (Most people only get one, anyway.) Instead, it was competing with everything thing else that Pitt alumni had to read, everything that arrived every day in their mail box. So it better be a damn good magazine that anyone would want to read, whether or not they knew the first thing about the University of Pittsburgh. Now that I supervise the publication of the alumni magazine at Robert Morris, I've adopted that same attitude.
In other words, the competition for attention that we face as content creators didn't begin with the Internet or social media, though those things certainly intensified that competition, increased it geometrically. Each new medium threatens to steal the audience of the media that preceded it. The creatives who survive and thrive are those who refuse to be chained to any single discipline. In the 1950s, Disney was the first film studio to embrace television, because Walt Disney didn't see himself as being in the movie business; he saw himself as being in the entertainment business. Many newspapers have been flailing because they think they are in the newspaper business, and forget they are in the journalism business.
It's also worth noting that audience control over content didn't begin with the Internet -- it really began with the TV remote and the VCR. The remote control freed us from our own laziness at having to get up and walk to the TV to change the channel when we were bored with what we were watching. Not only did it impact advertisers, since we could avoid commercials, but the producers of TV programs could not longer take us for granted. They had to grab our interest and hold it if they wanted us to keep watching.
As for the VCR, it may be clumsy and primitive compared to a DVR, but remember how liberating it felt to be able to record a program when you were out, or watch one program and record another. I remember as a kid, the final episode of M*A*S*H aired the same night -- in 1983 -- as a Cub Scout banquet. The pack leaders had to promise everyone the event would end in time to get home to watch the show. Now, the only thing you have to worry about is reading a spoiler on Facebook or Twitter.
For those daunted by the jumbled and fragmented media landscape we face today as content creators, it's helpful to realize these changes are evolutionary, not necessarily revolutionary, in character. Sometimes, though, evolution takes a great leap forward. This is one of those times.
Monday, March 28, 2011
All the News That's Fit to Pay For
I don't like to veer into media criticism at this blog; as a PR guy, it's bad for business. But I can't help but respond to snarky this Advertising Age blog post in defense of the New York Times' soon to debut paywall. The author, Simon Dumenco, argues that no one should blanche at paying for content from the New York Times because the Times is one of the few organizations left that publishes high-quality reporting and employees journalists willing to risk their lives to report important stories.
Fair enough. But as I noted recently on Twitter, this is an argument for news as philanthropy: Because the Times and similar news outlets publish something of value to society, they deserve your financial support, whether you think you derive a direct benefit or not. Or you could look at it from the NPR perspective: Because you enjoy it so much, you should feel duty-bound to pay for it. That's a reasonable assertion, but it's no defense of the Times' business model, nor is it quite the indictment of bloggers and news aggregators that Dumenco seems to think it is.
These discussions often start with a false premise: that the Internet has destroyed the mainstream media's business model by allowing people to access its content for free. But news organizations have essentially been giving away their content for decades, long before the Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eye. The money you pay for a subscription to a newspaper or magazine -- save those that deliberately eschew advertising -- doesn't come close to covering the true cost of producing that publication. Look at a magazine like Vanity Fair, which costs $15 a year for a subscription. It has some of the best magazine journalism out there, with a stable of the world's best writers and photographers. It also is chock full of ads for luxury products, which pay its way.
As Walter Lippmann wrote way back in 1922 in his seminal tome Public Opinion, news organizations do not sell news; they sell their audience to advertisers. No one is willing to pay for news, Lippmann wrote, and the same is largely true today. It is lamentable but it's not something that we can blame on Google. Besides, no one forced the New York Times to give away its content. To its credit, the newspaper was one of the first to have a decent web site, but it started free out of the gate, if my faulty memory is correct. Same with a lot of newspapers. It's understandable; the web seemed so ephemeral back in those early days. How could you charge for something you couldn't hold in your hands?
But what these news organizations did was implicitly affirm that their product was not worth paying for. Look at the music industry. We can all agree that technology has turned it upside down, but not without one hell of a fight. Record companies took anyone to court it could get an IP address for to stop them from illegally downloading music. The result was innovations like iTunes and Amazon's MP3 music store, which satisfies consumer demand for easily downloadable music without turning them into criminals.
What the Internet has really destroyed for news organizations is their advertising model. A print publication can base its ad rates on the number of paid subscribers it can claim. But an advertiser has no guarantee that all those people will actually pay attention to their ad. On the Internet, the eyeballs mean little, it's the clicks that matter, and there is only so much you can do to game those. So by charging for its online content, news organizations are trying to get its audience to make up for the loss of ad revenues that result when you can only charge by the click.
All that said, I certainly hope that news organizations like the Times survive, because they do provide a service of great value to me as an individual and to society at large. (Not to mention that they are invaluable to my profession.) And I give the Times credit for crafting a payment system that spares casual readers -- and allows the Times' content to be accesed through aggregators and social media networks, which, after all, deliver eyeballs and clicks -- while ensuring that the people most likely to pay are probably those most willing to pay. The Times and its peers have had about 15 years to solve this problem. Here's hoping they finally get it right.
Fair enough. But as I noted recently on Twitter, this is an argument for news as philanthropy: Because the Times and similar news outlets publish something of value to society, they deserve your financial support, whether you think you derive a direct benefit or not. Or you could look at it from the NPR perspective: Because you enjoy it so much, you should feel duty-bound to pay for it. That's a reasonable assertion, but it's no defense of the Times' business model, nor is it quite the indictment of bloggers and news aggregators that Dumenco seems to think it is.
These discussions often start with a false premise: that the Internet has destroyed the mainstream media's business model by allowing people to access its content for free. But news organizations have essentially been giving away their content for decades, long before the Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eye. The money you pay for a subscription to a newspaper or magazine -- save those that deliberately eschew advertising -- doesn't come close to covering the true cost of producing that publication. Look at a magazine like Vanity Fair, which costs $15 a year for a subscription. It has some of the best magazine journalism out there, with a stable of the world's best writers and photographers. It also is chock full of ads for luxury products, which pay its way.
As Walter Lippmann wrote way back in 1922 in his seminal tome Public Opinion, news organizations do not sell news; they sell their audience to advertisers. No one is willing to pay for news, Lippmann wrote, and the same is largely true today. It is lamentable but it's not something that we can blame on Google. Besides, no one forced the New York Times to give away its content. To its credit, the newspaper was one of the first to have a decent web site, but it started free out of the gate, if my faulty memory is correct. Same with a lot of newspapers. It's understandable; the web seemed so ephemeral back in those early days. How could you charge for something you couldn't hold in your hands?
But what these news organizations did was implicitly affirm that their product was not worth paying for. Look at the music industry. We can all agree that technology has turned it upside down, but not without one hell of a fight. Record companies took anyone to court it could get an IP address for to stop them from illegally downloading music. The result was innovations like iTunes and Amazon's MP3 music store, which satisfies consumer demand for easily downloadable music without turning them into criminals.
What the Internet has really destroyed for news organizations is their advertising model. A print publication can base its ad rates on the number of paid subscribers it can claim. But an advertiser has no guarantee that all those people will actually pay attention to their ad. On the Internet, the eyeballs mean little, it's the clicks that matter, and there is only so much you can do to game those. So by charging for its online content, news organizations are trying to get its audience to make up for the loss of ad revenues that result when you can only charge by the click.
All that said, I certainly hope that news organizations like the Times survive, because they do provide a service of great value to me as an individual and to society at large. (Not to mention that they are invaluable to my profession.) And I give the Times credit for crafting a payment system that spares casual readers -- and allows the Times' content to be accesed through aggregators and social media networks, which, after all, deliver eyeballs and clicks -- while ensuring that the people most likely to pay are probably those most willing to pay. The Times and its peers have had about 15 years to solve this problem. Here's hoping they finally get it right.
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