PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

If any of you have saved an issue of say, Fast Company or Red Herring from late 1999 or early 2000 – my favorite issue contains an article on how Google is a completely silly name and that the company will go nowhere with it – you’ll notice how picking up the magazine may threaten to put your back out. (Best to leave it on the floor as a doorstop.) Today, only Vanity Fair, W, and Oprah seem to be infested with print ads in the way that tech publications used to be. Average issues of ComputerWorld or BIO-IT World seem as thin as the inserts that used to be tipped into the dotcom-era magazines of seven years ago.

Which is precisely why there may be more value than you think in print advertising right now. Prices, certainly, have never been more negotiable. As I mentioned in a previous post, one vendor offered to throw in the print program free if we bought the online program for a client. And though marketing may be a game of fishing where the fish are most of the time, success also is a function of standing out where your competitors aren’t. To quote my colleague Mike O’Toole, it’s all part of good marketing arbitrage.

No, print subscriptions aren’t what they used to be. Readership is down and advertising is down. But your target audience is still spending time with magazines and print publications. The eyeballs aren’t always online. And if you had the opportunity to be the only advertiser in a magazine along with Microsoft, IBM and SAP, wouldn’t you jump at the chance?

Any time a book or article predicts the end of something (the end of history, for example), people take notice. So it’s hard to ignore the new IBM report called The End of Advertising as We Know It.

You’ll note that the title hedges a bit: it’s not the end of advertising per se, just as we know it, so that in five years the ad environment will be virtually unrecognizable, and that things will change more by 2012 than they did between 1957 and 2007.

I have to say I have my doubts. Just as people sometimes like to knock analyst predictions by saying a new sub-niche of a sub-niche IT solutions offering will be “a $0 billion market by 2010,” pushing the accelerator all the way to an even split between user-generated and agency-generated ads seems a bit much. Sure, you can look at trend lines and CAGR rates and tell me that the TV and computer will meld (portable eBook reader, anyone?), but I have a hard time believing that mobile, interactive, in-game and Web will completely dominate and erase the newspaper, magazine and outdoor industries. Yes, Sao Paolo may have outlawed billboards (God bless them), but there’s simply too much skin in the game to replace what we’ve known and do it so quickly. I see it more as additive: more choices, more possibilites, more potential integration points.

Call me a dinosaur, but take off the Prada glasses first. The future may not be so far away after all. In the meantime, read the report. It’s good.

We’re in the thick of the fall season right now, which means a huge push of work that clients either want to see completed or signed by the the time everyone scatters for the holidays (one of our client’s marketing departments literally goes dark for the last two weeks of December). Add to this sales meetings preparation, closing out marketing budgets, and budget planning for 2008, and the atmosphere is often superheated. Not the best environment in which to make logical, even-handed decisions about marketing programs.

All of which explains why I love Elaine Fogel for writing the Marketing Profs piece “How to Influence Marketing Decisions When Your Boss or Client is Dead Wrong” (if you’re not a Marketing Profs subscriber, you can sign up for a two-day free trial to read the piece). Is there anyone in marketing who hasn’t walked out to their car gnashing their teeth at the short-sightedness or politically half-baked reasoning a client (or a boss) has taken in landing on a direction? We once had a client who wouldn’t let us share a PowerPoint presentation with his CMO because a few of the slides had 4 bullet points, and he only focused on slides with 3 or 5 bullets.

What I like about Fogel’s approach are her realism and her optimism.
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Like a lot of bloggers, I’m a polygamist. I write for one at PJA, and one for The Life Science Executive Exchange, about marketing to life scientists. I’ll confess that I used to worry that our estimates to set up a soup-to-nuts blog for a corporate client, complete with concept, design, editorial plan and upkeep, might seem a bit steep. That was before I realized how much you have to work at a blog to keep it not only relevant and populated, but connected to the rest of the world.

Visibility means ensuring that your blog is clearly linked to any other blogs you write for, as well as other blogs and sites that you feel complement it. Transparency is, after all, at the core of social media. Until all relationships are clearly demarcated, your blog doesn’t look legit, or as legit as it could. Content is one thing you can control on your blog. Look and feel is another. But links are a third thing, and they’re every bit as important as the other two.

Reciprocity is another important component of the social media world. If you link to another site, they should know about it. If they like what you produce, they should link back to you. When we asked the president of BioInformatics if we could link his site to our blog, he not only agreed, he gave us two free banners to promote it, one on his Executive Exchange home page and one on his HTML newsletter. Content is king in social media, or to quote one of my favorite clients, “You’ve got to feed the beast.” Anyway, you’ll never know how much you’ll get unless you ask.

Tony Hung has more some tips on blog promotion at his ProBlogger site. Okay, he has 41 tips, which is 39 more than I do. In fact, I think it’s time for me to print out his list and hunt down my interactive department colleagues. They’ve been positively ignoring me, and my blogs. I just hope I can afford them.