Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

By Simon van Wyk

I have a background in marketing, but my understanding of branding seems at odds with the 2010 opinions I see from social media commentators, marketing and advertising agencies.

I read LoveMarks, but I don’t love brands. I read the definition which says: “Lovemarks reach your heart as well as your mind, creating an intimate, emotional connection that you just can’t live without. Ever.” I don’t actually feel this way about any brand. My life is busy and I reserve that level of investment for the important people in my life, not the stuff I buy. I assumed other people felt the same.

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By Simon van Wyk

They’re unpredictable, opinionated, and, particularly in Australia, they’re doing it part-time. So why should companies care about engaging with bloggers?

Jason Preston, a US-based social media strategist, writes that more companies these days are turning from blogs to focus on social networking sites. “If you can generate good word of mouth and drive sales from efforts in sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace, why bother to court the hard-to-reach and often hard-to-impress blogerati?

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By Simon van Wyk

Bob Garfield may be the most high-profile advertising sceptic at the moment, but he’s by no means the only one.

Guess who said this? “The advertising business is going down the drain. It’s being pulled down by the people who create it, who don’t know how to sell anything, who have never sold anything in their lives …. who despise selling, whose mission in life is to be clever show-offs and con clients into giving them money to display originality and genius.” read more

By Simon van Wyk

Following on from this month’s podcast, I decided to look at the arguments for and against the death of advertising. This week’s post looks at the evidence that advertising is not in its death throes.

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“The Chaos Scenario” had its genesis in a presentation Bob made to colleagues at an Ad Age editorial conference. Fuelled, he says, by a night of heavy drinking at the conference, he had an epiphany while preparing his presentation.

After years of observing the rise of the digital media and the reaction to it by traditional media and advertising, he realised that “If these trends continue, it’s not just a disruption, but the doom of the industry.

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By Simon van Wyk

In this month’s HotHouse podcast, iPrime executive director Tony Surtees makes the point that the predictions of the demise of traditional media and traditional advertising are premature. Decline, yes, but demise, no.

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Back in the 1980s, when the development of personal computers and desktop publishing software made it easy to change page layouts without expensive typesetting, it was said that anyone could become a publisher. Yes, it did increase the flexibility and reduce the cost of putting out a publication, but you still had to sell enough copies to pay the printer, the truck driver and the distributor – there was still a sizable cost risk for independent publishers.

But today, with the advent of the Internet and free blogging tools, the phrase “everyone’s a publisher” has now come to fruition. Millions of individuals and small independent publishers create their own news, comment and videos to share with friends, family and the rest of the world.

Not surprisingly, this has had a devastating effect on traditional media outlets. With people splitting their time between TV, radio, magazines, newspapers and now millions of websites (not to mention the reduced spare time all these self-publishers have to consume media), TV audiences are splintered, radio is slumping, and print circulations are steadily dropping. Newspapers have been particularly affected as one of their major sources of revenue – classified advertising – migrates to the web at a cracking pace.

Australia  - hanging onto eyeballs

But, as with the global financial crisis, the situation for the traditional media is not as bad in Australia as it is in the rest of the developed world. Consumption of traditional media and associated revenue, while dropping across the board, hasn’t fallen off a cliff the way it has in the US and Europe, with newspaper and magazine closures tossing more than 25,000 journalists out of work in the past two years.

And while media proprietors in those countries decry the rise of the Internet, Australian media companies are making the transition to integrating their online and offline presences with a fair degree of success. Take a look at these traffic figures for page impressions (PIs) on Australian media websites, compiled recently by News Limited:

Network     PIs June 2008; PIs June 2009; Change
Fairfax          593,081,202    745,199,109           +26%
News           377,282,786    510,713,402           +35%
NineMSN    378,976,447    465,449,832           +23%

That’s nearly 2 billion page impressions per month to the top three media web portals, up more than 30% from 12 months ago. And while I have my own questions about the measures used to compile these numbers, and the revenue from those impressive statistics still doesn’t compare to the rivers of gold from their traditional activities, at least the Australian media giants are maintaining some semblance of reader loyalty.

So what’s different about the Australian market? I asked Andrew Jaspan, former editor of The Age, when interviewing him for our most recent HotHouse podcast.

Andrew puts it down to geography. Our continental isolation historically kept publications from outside our borders gaining a foothold in Australia, while the distance between our major cities limited our choices for local news.

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In February this year, Google parted with US$23 million in exchange for the AdScape ad network which specialises in in-game advertising. In April, Google bought Doubleclick for US$3.1 billion. Also in April, Yahoo bought RightMedia for $680 million. Then in May WPP Group acquired 24/7 Real Media for $649 million and later that month Microsoft purchased aQuantive for a massive $6 billion.

Simon van Wyk discusses the frenzy of global media acquisitions with Tony Surtees, CEO of iPrime which is part of the Prime Media Group. Journalist, Linda Smith, facilitates the conversation to find out just what’s going on and what it all means.

Listen to the Media Acquisition Frenzy podcast here.