The 50 million Latinos in the United States have advertisers’ attention. This morning the NYT blogged about the sharp increase at this year’s upfront presentations in the number of broadcast networks and cable channels that aim their programming at Latino viewers.
There were nearly twice as many presentations by Spanish language networks as there were last year. We were there to see our client Univision present. They pulled out all the stops with great info, dancing, and even an appearance from Shakira.
Some key stats we picked up at the presentation, feel free to RT:
I talked last week at the annual conference of the Independent Publishers Guild. It was a beautiful spring day in the English Cotswolds, but this was an industry getting together in the eye of a storm. As one speaker said, ‘we’re not even sure whether we’re in intensive care or not.’
Famously, this is an old-fashioned, tweedy industry, yet the conference room last week was full of quiet radicals too. Most notably Faber and Faber, who are so digital (and ironic) these days that they’ve set up an ‘analogue group’ to make physical books extra-beautiful for those who don’t want the digital alternative.
The main issue for these, and all other publishers, is that digital is making traditional publishers irrelevant. Increasingly, writers don’t need them. In 2009, 76% of all books released were self-published. And readers don’t need them. In the old days, the publisher’s job was to get its books into bookshops. Nowadays, many of us by-pass the bookshops and buy online.
The only hope for publishers is to find a new way to be useful to both writers and readers. For writers, facing a world where in theory there are 5.7 billion readers, publishers need to be the online market-finder. Writers want to know: who shares my interests? and how could my stuff be better and reach more people? And for readers, facing a choice of 129 million books in the world (all of them, we’re promised, on Google Books by the end of the decade), publishers need to be the content-finder. Readers want to know: what’s out there that fits my particular interests? And what new interests can you point me at? For both writers and readers, publishers can be an invaluable guide.
Traditionally, publishers put all their energies into retailers (not readers). Now they know they must get interested in readers, and the talk at IPG was about building communities of readers. Which is right, to a point – and certainly special interest publishers (crafts, say, or sci-fi) can find communities of enthusiasts. But general publishers need to find something looser than a community, and the thing those people share is more likely to be an attitude than a specific hobby or interest.
So, if we were to create publishing 2.0 (or more appropriately, publishing: second edition), what would it look like?
Stand for a topic, attitude, or both.
First, the essence of a new-style publisher is that it stands for a topic, an attitude or both. And that it stands for the very best in that topic or attitude. Ideally a publisher should have an underlying sense of purpose, of the change it wants to make in the world. And this isn’t a new idea: back in 1935, Penguin was set up (explicitly as a brand) to make good reading affordable to the many.
Create useful content with a POV.
Second, a new-style publisher finds and creates useful content in many media, not just books, around that point of view. People want short films, longer films, audio, articles, interactive blogs… and, yes, books. All these items are very visibly branded, with the author brand (if there is one) but also the publisher brand. The image of a book cover on the Amazon iPhone app is just 1cm across – in that tiny image, the publisher brand should be easily visible. Again, the uniform covers from the early days of Penguin are also the future.
Build and nurture an ecosystem of partners.
Third, the new publisher links with other brands that share its point of view. It uses bigger brands to amplify its voice and multiply its reach. A good example is the small-ish publisher Anova linking up with a much bigger brand, National Trust.
Be a host.
And fourth, the new publisher sees itself not as broadcaster but as host. It hosts online forums, but also face-to-face events where readers get to meet the writers they like. And it may arrange for those writers to teach some of those readers how to write. Faber is in the lead here, with its Faber Social events and its Faber Academy schools.
In the world of content (horrible word), there’s still a place for taste, editing, curating, authority. Indeed, a need and a demand for them. The critical question for publishers is how to make money from that demand. My own publisher, Andrew Franklin of Profile, writing in the current issue of the Author. worries about the downward pressure on price, when so much content is now free. The best publishers will find new ways to be useful, and new ways (some already pioneered by Faber) to charge for that.
The Washington Post recently got its hands on captured documents from Osama bin Laden’s compound that will be publicly released shortly. It reports that near the end, bin Laden was apparently obsessed with “rebranding” al-Qaeda.
Bin Laden’s biggest concern was al-Qaeda’s media image among Muslims. He worried that it was so tarnished that, in a draft letter probably intended for [Atiyah Abd al-Rahman], he argued that the organization should find a new name.
The al-Qaeda brand had become a problem, Bin Laden explained, because Obama administration officials “have largely stopped using the phrase ‘the war on terror’ in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims,” and instead promoted a war against al-Qaeda. The organization’s full name was “Qaeda al-Jihad,” bin Laden noted, but in its shorthand version, “this name reduces the feeling of Muslims that we belong to them.” He proposed 10 alternatives “that would not easily be shortened to a word that does not represent us.” His first recommendation was “Taifat al-tawhid wal-jihad,” or Monotheism and Jihad Group.
Fascinating, but someone should have told him that brand is about what you stand for, not just your name.
Image via Al-Jazeera hat tip to Kevin Drum of Mother Jones
Once a goalpost for aspirational middle class bookcases everywhere, the Encylcopedia Britannica will soon cease to exist in print.
Being useful to customers is one of the most important requirements for any successful venture today. And while Britannica sales have slipped in the last 10 years, Wikipedia, the non-profit experiment in crowd-sourcing authority, has proved itself increasingly useful (even among academics and scholars). The shift reflects what people actually need in an increasingly collaborative world, where reality has to be continuously defined and updated from multiple points of view.
In an interview with the New York Times Media Decoder blog, Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., said “It’s a rite of passage in this new era…Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”
About half a million households still pay a $70 annual fee for an online subscription to Britannica. 15% of the company’s revenue comes from those subscriptions and about 85% comes from selling curriculum products to schools. Selling print copies now accounts for less than 1%.
Sales of the print sets peaked in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in America. But by 2010, that figure had dropped to only 8,000 sets sold! It makes a lot of sense for Britannica to now shift its focus to educational curriculum for schools (to best fit their resources to the wants of the world).
While Britannica changes its course, there’s still a public affection tied to the 244 year-old brand that 11 years of Wikipedia hasn’t fully squashed. Perhaps 2012 will be another record sales year, as nostalgics jump to purchase Britannica’s last-ever print copies.
We are reminded daily that fame doesn’t always come with praise, adoration or appreciation. It can highlight the disgust and contempt society has for a person, an idea, a company or cause.
As I’m writing this, you’ve no doubt already encountered the name Joseph Kony. The video above, campaigning to have him arrested, was posted on YouTube last Monday, went viral all over the world, was endorsed by George Clooney and has now been viewed close to 60 million times on YouTube alone.
Jason Russell, the young filmmaker who made the video and founder of Invisible Children, the organization behind Kony 2012, has been pretty explicit about his goal. The video’s description says it “aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.”
No one I know had heard of him a week ago, but thanks to Russell’s film and the power of share-happy internet society, Kony is on his way to becoming a household name. What made Russell’s message so sticky is the way in which he’s communicated it.
Though his production has been criticized by some as too slick and “Hollywood,” his video has certainly captured our attention and appealed to our emotions. For me, it was the introduction of Jacob Acaye, the young man Russell met on a visit to Uganda ten years ago, who inspired him to start Invisible Children. Acaye had been forced to watch his brother brutally murdered during one of Kony’s abductions. In the video, he tells Russell something truly unforgettable about the war. “It is better when you kill us…for us, we don’t want now to stay.” Heartbreaking.
In the age of digital activism, it’s easy to spread an idea and create awareness. If you can make it as simple and light touch as clicking share on Facebook or YouTube, which to many people on social media has become like an involuntary spasm, you are satiating their desire to feel good by spreading good. Though of course there’s debate on the real-life impact of internet-life action.
Twitter’s top trends more commonly include celebrities than fugitive militants. But by Wednesday, Uganda, Invisible Children and #stopkony were among the top 10 trending terms on Twitter (in the U.S. and in the world), ranking higher than New iPad or Peyton Manning.
The anger and outrage by millions of people has caused a groundswell. But as with anything that creates this much attention, criticism is sure to follow. In this case, people are concerned with Invisible Children’s tactics and oversimplification of the problem. Certainly, it’s important to approach genocide and child abductions with as much context as possible. But in defense of Invisible Children, they are upfront in their video that their mission is simply to make Joseph Kony famous and raise support for his arrest. In essence, Russell has created a brand—a purpose, a message, and a rich user experience—to achieve his goal.
At the moment, it’s hard to know if 60 million views will get Kony arrested or protect more children from experiences like Acaye’s. Still, havingreached an online population the size of the UK in less than a week, it’s fair to say something major has been accomplished.
Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is a partnership aimed at driving open source innovation in news. When it started in the spring of 2011 it had an initial set of news partners that included the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, the Boston Globe and Al Jazeera English. This morning I read that The New York Times, ProPublica, Speiegel Online, and Argentina’s La Nacion will also be joining.
It’s encouraging news for publishing, an industry this blog has repeatedly said needs its major players to embrace experimentation and co-creation if it’s going to develop new ideas for news presentation, delivery, and revenue-generation.
The formal announcement will be made at SXSW tomorrow, alongside a series of exhibits showcasing how open source projects are leading innovation in news, in areas like real-time visualizations, augmented video, data-journalism and HTML5 web tools.
One of OpenNews’s ambitions is to build bridges between journalists and hackers. It awards 8 fellowships annually and “embeds” each fellow at partner organizations, where they spend a year writing code in collaboration with reporters and newsroom developers. It’s fun, for example, to think about OpenNews fellow Cole Gillespie, a JavaScript developer born in the North Carolina Appalachians, becoming intimately familiar with the daily ebb and flow of Germany’s Zeit.
For participating newspapers, the project is an opportunity to try a different approach and expand their ecosystems (#boundaryless). For designers, developers and content creators, it’s about creating and supporting a community where the web is studied as it gets made. Since its creation, other groups like Hacks/Hackers have emerged that share a similar goal.
According to OpenNews’s site, they’ll soon be sponsoring “hackdays” where people can write code that helps to solve real-world journalistic problems. They’re also working on a site called “Source,” where free case studies, walkthroughs, tutorials, and code snippets will be available. We’ll keep an eye out for this and write about it when it exists.
Print newspaper ads have fallen by two-thirds from $60 billion in the late-1990s to $20 billion in 2011. $20 billion sounds big, but it isn’t enough for an industry built to support double or triple that. In the next few years we’ll see papers and magazines continue to invest in their websites.
In this atmosphere, with major players and large investments at stake, designers and design-minded leaders have an opportunity to win big by developing new ideas for news presentation and delivery. At Wolff Olins NY, Lisa Smith and Kate Nielsen recently blogged about the “Future of News” panel at NYC Advertising Week and their experiences “designing the news.”
Recently, while on vacation in New Orleans for Mardi Gras and visiting family, we stayed at my sister’s house. She was kind enough to let us have her place while she found accommodations elsewhere. She moved in to this place herself not too long ago and was proud to point out to us the brand new,…
The “Future of News” panel at NYC Advertising Week last Fall was polarized by blind optimism and Grinch-like misery and gloom. Spokespersons from CNN and Flipboard were ebullient – There has never been a better time to be in this business! Look at all the new and exciting things we are doing! Those from USA Today and AdWeek pointed out that until those new and exciting things generate ad revenue, there is nothing to shout about. Of course they are both right. And much discussion was dedicated to something they all agreed on: design will be increasingly important in adding value to the highly commoditized business of news delivery.
With major players and large investments at stake, designers have an opportunity to win big by developing new ideas for news presentation and delivery.Interaction design, visual storytelling and good-old fashion graphic design are all needed to add value and rebuild the dying business models of this centuries-old industry.
People are spending more time consuming news than ever before—70 mins per day, up 10 minutes per day in the past decade. Teenagers are becoming interested in news earlier in their lives and—presumably because news is so accessible online—spending more time with it than their counterparts of past decades.
As the world becomes increasingly connected we both want and need to know more about what is happening in other places. And a lot of the events that affect our everyday lives are increasingly complex. It’s no longer enough to write a 1,000 word feature to explain most current affairs topics. Storytelling needs to be multi-media and multi-layered, peppered with jump-off and drill-down points, while still maintaining a discernible and satisfying narrative.
Info-graphics and data visualization have shifted from the status of visual interest to necessary components for getting the story across. Many news organizations are building specialist departments and making extensive use of freelancers to improve their chops in this kind of visual storytelling. As an indication of the growing importance of this design discipline, in Fast Company’s list of the 50 most influential designers in America, five of them were experts in the once niche (and slightly nerdy) field of information graphics.
What’s more, the further news consumption shifts from the web to app-based tablets and smartphones, the more opportunities for change. Here we have a ‘lean back’ medium that is both mobile and highly interactive. The ubiquity of smartphones makes it likely that in the near future they will be the number one way in which news is consumed in many countries. At the moment, what makes the smartphone a preferred platform for news delivery is the fact that it is in your pocket rather than anything particularly great about the way the presentation is designed. As Martin Belam says in his excellent blog currybetdotnet ‘We are at the animated gif stage of design for the tablet and smart phone.”
While many are resigned to the fact that all print media is dying and that printed news is dying fastest, there are examples of design cleverness and innovation helping some papers put up a good fight. It requires more innovative thinking than just format size and price. Designers need to be looking at how printed news fits into a whole user-journey of news consumption throughout the day and across multiple platforms.
Two i covers.
i, the national newspaper in Portugal was born in May 2009, at the nadir of journal closures and debate around the death of printed news. Not structured like a normal newspaper, it starts with the assumption that most readers will already know a lot from other news sources and doesn’t try to cover all aspects of all stories. Its front section is dedicated to overviews of the past 24 hours, followed by some opinion and a dozen or so in-depth articles. Its design is bold and brash but draws heavily on the sort graphic design sophistication more often seen in high-end magazine or book design. The circulation numbers were promising from the beginning. And they are now building an impressive following online and looking to expand their readership internationally.
A 2011 Independent.
The mistake for newspapers is to think that a redesign just means a new masthead and grid, missing the opportunity to reinvent the whole product. The Independent in the UK has undertaken three redesigns in three years, with no effect on their circulation. In what only could be seen as a last ditch attempt to find a voice on it’s 25th Birthday, under their new editor, Chris Blackhurst, they set about creating a “faster, more accessible and urgent paper.” This October they have reveled a fourth redesign by Errea Communications, the agency behind i. Errea were briefed to turn the paper upside down, with no limits, looking at content structure and graphic design. It’s too early to comment on the results but the bravery and intent are to be applauded.
When approaching design for news in any media, designers need to focus on adding value and reinventing business models. Nuances of typefaces and grids may be important but only if they are executing on the answers to big questions around what, when and how people want news. And what added value will incite them to pay, either with their money or their attention?
Three Utko papers.
Jacek Utko, design director for Bonnier Business Press International and several-time winner of “World’s Best Designed Newspaper,” sums it up well in his 2009 TED talk. He describes a new role for designers in news media that takes responsibility for reinvention from beginning to end, “Design can change not just your product, it can change your workflow, actually it can change everything in your company, it can even change you. Give power to designers.”
The Jordan brand is absolutely massive. Led by a 71% share of the US basketball shoe market (according to SportsOneSource), the label brings in over $1 billion each year. In fact, the brand built around 14x all-star Michael Jordan is so huge that other NBA players like Dwayne Wade and Carmelo Anthony have actually signed deals to directly promote Jordan.
Think about how crazy that is: Nike has celebrity athletes boosting another celebrity athlete. Clearly, the Nike/Jordan relationship has grown way larger than the simple endorsement it began as (a 5 year, $2.5 million agreement, with royalties).
That’s what makes the lawsuit filed late last week by Jordan (the man) against Chinese sportswear company Qiaodan Sports (Chinese for “Jordan Sports”) so interesting. The hoops star has been called Qiaodan in China since he burst into the NBA in 1984. Now, Jordan’s claiming that this company has unfairly built their entire brand around his identity. In a video statement on his website he says ”no one should lose control of their own name…It’s not about the money. It’s about principle. Protecting my identity and my name.”
Though the name Qiaodan is a trademark registered by the company in accordance with Chinese laws, Jordan’s own personal brand has transcended nations and language. Jordan or Qiaodan, he seems to have a pretty strong case.
Hispanic Americans are the 14th largest consumer economy in the world. 1 trillion dollars a year. #univision
1 in 3 Hispanics in America are millennials. #youthculture. #univision upfront.
Brands should be spending 10-15% of media buy on Hispanic market. #univision upfront.
