Ethnique Media :: Le Blog

Today I don’t feel like talking about marketing.

Instead I want to tell you about a good friend of ours, who is an amazing photographer and is now offering baby, maternity and newborn photography services. Pepita Photography is the project of Mariana Dankova, a creative graphic-design artist and photographer, with which Ethnique Media Inc has been working for years.

Pepita Photography specializes in the photography of kids, newborns and babies as well as of expecting moms. You can see ample samples of her quality work online: just visit the link for her babies gallery or her children gallery.

With the advent of digital photography, parents all too often snap hundreds of pictures of their babies or kids, thinking that it is enough in order to immortalize this all-so important period in their children lives. What a mistake; because nothing can replace the services of a professional photographer. If you don’t believe me, just visit Pepita Photography’s galleries and you’ll be convinced.

You can also follow Mariana on her photography blog, where she regularly discusses and posts examples of her work.

These beautiful photos could be of you or your baby. Just contact Pepita Photography.

Une chose est certaine, le journal La Presse n’est certainement pas du calibre de The Economist, ni même de The Globe and Mail, deux journaux que j’apprécie lire et que je cite fréquemment.

Malheureusement, hier, La Presse a publiée un article sur les medias ethniques. Il n’y a rien d’intéressant ou de nouveau dans cet article, mais ce qui me choque c’est qu’il a même des erreurs. D’âpres les deux “chercheurs” citées par le journaliste:

Mon intuition, c’est que cette diversité va prendre sa place dans les médias sociaux, qui deviendront le nouveau lieu d’échange communautaire.

Donc d’âpres ces “académiciens” des medias ethniques, les medias sociaux ne sont pas encore devenus le nouveau lieu d’échange communautaire. Doit-on comprendre que les media sociaux et le Web 2.0 est pour le moment le domaine exclusif des communautés “non-culturelles”, c’est à dire les communautés de “souche”, et que les communautés culturelles n’ont pas encore pris leur place dans le Web 2.0? Cette affirmation est complètement fausse, peut-être même insultante. Mais surtout cette conclusion me fait rire et démontre que les auteurs de ces “recherches” ne sont probablement pas présents sur le Web 2.0 eux-mêmes, et ne comprennent rien du tout a la consommation des medias fait par les membres des communautés culturelles au Québec.

I just read an interesting article in The Economist (Volume 394 Number 8664, January 9th-15th 2010) about the US census of 2010. In it, the authors explain why the census is so important to businesses across the US, the main reason being that it will provide them with free and up-to-the-minute data on the distribution of population, which will then influence retailing decisions and other business strategies. There is also an explanation on the impact that the 2010 census will have on marketing:

The census will reveal the extent of several well-documented trends, such as the growth of America’s Hispanic population [...]. Cesar Conde, president of Univision Networks, a Spanish-language media company, says it will be a “wake-up to marketers”. Once the results are in, firms are likely to invest more in marketing to minorities, to develop more products to appeal specifically to them, to advertise in languages other than English and to hire more racially diverse models.

Basically, this new census will further cement the importance of ethnic-oriented marketing.

And hand-in-hand with this switch in marketing, comes the even bigger change: the move to hyper-targeting that marketing is experiencing, through ethnic and community media, to specialty media and content-targeted Internet advertisement:

Peter Francese, a demographer at Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising agency, thinks the 2010 census will permanently change marketing. When companies analyse the census data, they will see that cities, and even some neighbourhoods, are so diverse now that broad advertising campaigns are no longer suitable. Mass-market advertising, he says, will become “extinct”. Marketers will instead have to focus on reaching specific households—just as the Census Bureau is preparing to do.

To follow up on my last blog post, I came up another article in The Globe and Mail, where author John Barber basically dismisses the iPhone app for GQ magazine as a failure, saying that it destroys the experience of what a glossy print magazine is all about:

The print-edition cover is a classic example of men’s-mag know-how: a gorgeous woman (singer Rihanna), pretty much naked, printed so vividly you can count the lashes on the big brown eyes that reach deep into your soul and beg you to buy. But on the iPhone, poor Rihanna stares dimly from a tiny screen like a little mouse.

and

Reading GQ on a phone is like browsing the Internet, following a succession of disembodied pages who knows where, with pop-up ads ambushing every path. The pages are not much more than snapshots of the print edition rather than proper Web pages.

Clearly making the jump to the digital world isn’t that straight forward. The print magazine is tightly coupled to its technology and platform (quality large print on quality paper) and when transfered to the digital world, if not done so properly, looses these main selling points and distinguishing characteristics. Because the reality is that people that purchase these 10$ glossy magazines do so for the glosiness and the quality of photos and easy of flip-through. The value of magazines isn’t only in their text stories and gossip. These are already available in large quantities and free on the Internet, and if this textual content was the sole value-added of magazines, they would have long ago disappeared in favor of free web-based blogs and sites like TMZ.

The key for magazine publishers is not to emulate the web and make small-rez and hardly-navigable textual versions of their magazines available online. The key is to identify the main differentiating points of glossy magazines, discover what makes them unique and sellable, and somehow replicate or add to this experience with digital tools.

I know, it’s easier said than done.

The Globe and Mail published an interesting article titled The Future of the Magazine, on glossy magazine’s foray into the digital world of the Internet.

I don’t want to paraphrase the article, you should read it instead. Obviously, the main question that the article explores, and drives magazine publishers mad, is “how to make money online”. An interesting approach is to include the digital views in the base advertisement rates: that is count the eyes viewing the digital magazine and include these in the ad-viewership number, which eventually determines ad rates.

A complementary approach is to create what I would call “digitally augmented ads”, that is, ads that provide digital features and charge extra fees for these features. For example, embed in the digital version of the ad a video that users can click on and view or embed a website links such that users can be drawn to visit the site of the advertiser. It seems like this idea is actually already gained ground:

Advertisers can pay extra for digital features, such as a tag the user taps to go to the product website or to watch a video ad. Out of approximately 180 ad pages in the December GQ, more than three-quarters included one of these extras.

The big plus of the Internet is that all these new techniques can actually be precisely measured and monitored. It’s easy to measure the viewership numbers, and it’s easy to measure the number of viewers interacting with these digitally augmented ads. This is one of the biggest strengths of the Internet vs traditional print media, and it is one of the foundations of the business model of Internet advertisement giants, such as Google.

These digital augmented ads are nice and dandy for publishing giants such as Conde Nast, News Corp or our local Rogers, Transco and Quebecor, but what about small independent publishers that don’t have the technical or financial means to implement such online advertisement strategies?

It’s a tough question to answer, and I want to keep that for another post.

It’s now official: as of today, in the UK only, more money is being spent on online advertisements than on TV advertisement. See BBC’s article Online advertising ‘overtakes TV’.

As the article points out, many different marketing tools are bundled together under the umbrella of “online advertisement”. That makes the comparison between online and TV ads a bit unfair, as online ads include direct advertisement by email, contextual search ads and display ads, whereas TV ads are usually only display (unless you have an interactive TV from the future, but I am not sure they are producing those yet).

What’s more, the reality is that the distinction between “online” and other medias such as TV is getting blurrier by the minute. For example, more and more people actually consume TV on the Web, radio is also being massively consumed online and everyone reads their news on the Web.

Still, the reality is that this milestone is important, and is clearly showing that the Internet has now become an advertisements juggernaut.

And this trend is only set to accelerate, especially as “online” and other medias converge further into one massive soup of professional, interactive and user submitted content super-media.

I don’t understand Japanese, and I know nothing of Naver.jp, except that it is a search engine.

But the layout of the landing page is great, the color scheme is simple but beautiful, and the video ad is amazingly well shot, with a refreshing analog feel to the recording. And the concept of humans holding of the search text-bar throughout the video is a great idea.

Here it is, enjoy some fresh web marketing directly from the land of the rising sun.

The Economist (May 16th-22nd 2009) published an article titled Clock-watchers no more, about Coke moving away from the traditional billable hour compensation model for advertisement agencies and instead using a by performance payment model:

“Coke, however, thinks it can do just that [assessing a campaign’s value]. Its new model guarantees to cover advertising agencies’ costs, plus a bonus of up to 30%. The bonus depends on a number of metrics, including the agency’s overall performance, and the sales and market share of the products being advertised. Coke insists that its aim is not to cut costs but to inspire creativity and efficiency.”

Now, I am no expert, and the article is fairly basic and is not delving much into the details of this “by performance” payment model. But to me this sounds like a bad offering, that is, seen from an advertisement agency point of view obviously.

First, a traditional brand-marketing campaign is not like an online contextual advertisement campaign: it is hard to obtain complete viewership information and there is no direct consumer action that can be recorded (there is no URL link to click on in a newspaper or on the TV).

Second, this scheme that Coke (and others are pushing) is simply an attempt to spread out the risk involved in product development, such that the advertisement agencies involved also bear some of this risk. This practice is unfair in my opinion. Would a subcontractor building car parts accept to share the risk in making the car, by getting paid only cost for producing the parts and hoping for a return if car sales are successful? I highly doubt it: large corporations can not expect the double whammy benefit of outsourcing (and saving on costs) and spreading the risk to those they outsource (and thus saving on product development cost too).

Thirdly, there is already a mechanism in the advertisement world that ensures that risk is somewhat spread to advertisement agencies: it is called bidding for a contract. Bidding can involve hours of work that are not billed by a large number of agencies, and the client is given the opportunity to pick the best campaign. I do not see why, once the client has made a decision, the selected advertisement agency has to further pick-up the tab for clients; and all the loosing agencies are left with nothing but a financial loss.

Fourthly, a client builds and sells a product, whereas the advertisement agency simply promotes and pushes this product. If the client fails at making a great product, which is then unsuccessful in its sales, there is absolutely no reason to punish the advertisement agency that created the product’s campaign. Again, I repeat that this is nothing but a spread of the risk and losses away from the client and towards the agency.

Finally, a trial involving lawyers not billing by the hour but instead billing according to the outcome of the case is a completely different situation than a marketing campaign. In a trial, the service (the product) is entirely provided (produced) by the lawyers, it’s not the defendant that argues their cases. In other words, in a trial it is the lawyer who produces the product being sold. In an advertisement campaign, the product is made by the client and not by the marketing agency, so the analogy to layers can not hold in any way.

I could go on and on about why this is a bad idea.

It could also be a good idea, but only if this risk taking by advertisement agencies is also accompanied by a higher rewards. Unfortunately, a 30 % bonus does not qualify as a higher reward.

To continue on the design push, I want to share a great link: The Book Cover Archive is a site dedicated to collecting and displaying the best designed book covers.

Books, magazines and newspapers are all different incarnations of the same medium, and I re-iterate my view that newspaper design can be treated more like magazine design, especially when it comes to the front page (and actually other key pages too).

This is where newspaper designers can take cue from book covers; very often, book covers are the only heavily design oriented portion of a book. And they are a central part of its sales-appeal, they are often the last message publishers can throw at potential customers in order to close a sale. The same could be said of newspapers.

There is a small controversy brewing as we speak. Yesterday, AP announced that it will seeking to protect its content from online sites that use it’s headlines, basically threatening to sue aggregators showing its headlines. Aggregators are sites, like Google News or the Drudge Report that simply show (aggregate) a set of popular/relevant headlines. This behavior on the part of AP is ridiculous, as all legal aggregator sites always link to the original version of the story, basically driving billions of visitors to the websites of newspapers around the world.

Today, the CEO of Google gave the closing keynote speech at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual conference, attempting to address the issues that newspapers execs have.

Read the story, but I believe that newspaper execs are barking at the wrong dog, and are miserably failing to understand that the issue lies with their content and their online pricing strategy, not with Google or other news aggregators.

Newspapers need to reinvent themselves and their pricing strategy on the Internet. Apple’s iTunes has showed that people are ready to pay for a good service on the Web, now it is time for newspapers to follow suit. Newspapers need to concentrate on creating creative and original content, not just reprint AP and other wire stories.

Once the creative content is there, you can charge customers to access this original material online. If no one else can provide for free the same quality and content of coverage on a certain topic, then customers will pay to read online. Opinion stories, rich editorials, investigative journalism, local coverage, community (or ethnic) coverage: all these could be original and unique content that readers would pay for.

And it doesn’t need to cost a lot, because a million readers at a certain price, the money adds up very quickly.