This blog comes to you from the WAN-IFRA Digital Media Latinoamerica conference in Bogota. For those that don’t know it, WAN-IFRA is the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. It’s genuinely been fascinating to hear from senior managers, journalists and editors how they see the future of their medium. It makes a refreshing change to hear a perspective different from ad buyers and sellers, to get back to hearing from those who create the medium.
Out and About
28 October 2013
In case you’re wondering where we’ve got to….the next two Cog Blogs are planned to come from two important conferences: this week’s Latin American WAN-IFRA event on Digital Newspapers, in Bogota, Colombia. And next week’s 2013 European Television Symposium, organised by asi and taking place in Venice, Italy.
I say ‘planned’ as we are rather at the mercy of the two hotels’ online connectivity. If the technology lets us down then we’ll post once back here.
So – hopefully see you here, from there.
Communicating the Communicators
25 October 2013
One of the hoary old clichés about advertising agencies is how poor they are at defining and communicating their own values to prospective clients and to the business community at large. This certainly used to be true – anyone aside from those working there like to articulate the difference between McCann and JWT? – although I am not convinced that it ever really mattered all that much as a route to new business.
Publishers Advance
22 October 2013
Interest alert: I am a Founding Director of Enreach, an online audience measurement business selling services to many premium publishers. www.enreach.me.
The newspaper publishing industry is, it is well known going through a process of reinvention. The issues are simple to state, rather harder to solve. As consumers discover they can get their written news for free they stop buying papers. Fewer sales equals smaller cover-price revenues; and ultimately less ad revenue too. Newspapers’ digital versions, online, on mobile, on tablet build readership but revenue always lags – subscriptions (where they exist) build slowly and digital ad space is simply not worth as much relatively, the industry has decreed, as printed ad space.
Market Research – Who’s Asking?
18 October 2013
The market research business seems to be in the middle of one of its periodic periods of self-flagellation. They’re right to be self-critical; their relevance, indeed their future existence, at least in their current guise does look more than a bit dodgy.
Traders 0; Ideas 1
14 October 2013
The time has come to ask what is becoming something of an ‘elephant-in-the-room’ question. What business are the media agencies (and more specifically their sibling trading desk partners) in? Are they in the advertising business; or are they in the online trading business? The two are looking increasingly incompatible.
Kissing Frogs
10 October 2013
Today we’re going to consider what would appear, at least within our industry to be something of an outmoded topic. Today’s Cog Blog is all about courtesy.
Mail and Farewell
07 October 2013
Over the last week or so a row has broken out between Associated Newspapers and its two titles The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, and Ed Miliband the leader of the Labour Party. For those of you outside the UK the start of the argument was The Daily Mail writing a piece in which they claimed that Miliband’s father Ralph ‘hated Britain.’ Ralph Miliband (who died in 1994) was a well-known and respected sociologist and academic who held Marxist views. He fled to Britain in 1940 from his native Belgium when the Nazis invaded, and subsequently fought for the country in the Royal Navy during the Second World War.
The Future in Short (This piece originally appeared last month in the UK title ‘Media Week’)
03 October 2013
Recent Cog Blogs have explored the future for media agencies. A UK trade title, ‘Media Week’ asked me to precis these several blogs into one. So what follows has appeared before albeit in not quite this form and on a UK-specific site.
Media agencies are split organisations. On the one hand they initiate original research into how consumers use and are influenced by the many communication channels out there. They develop tools and techniques to allow them to create plans that meet their clients’ business needs. They help measure effect. They use lessons learned to inform future planning. This is the public stuff; the stuff of conference papers and awards.