Gear up for the New Media explosion

“Watch out! The New Media is seeing a spectacular rise!” That message has been loud and clear in several posts of this blog.

The New Media explosion is round the corner, if the NRS findings are any indication.

”NRS revealed that the number of homes taking up cable and satellite connections is on the rise,” agencyfaqs reports. “For instance, the number of C&S households has increased to 6.8 crore from 6.1 crore last year. The connectivity in homes are also on the rise, be it in the form of computers, laptops, mobile phones or Internet. In fact, today there are more than 2.62 crore homes with mobile owners, which is a huge number compared to 0.66 crore last year.

“An important inference, therefore, is that consumers today access content from whichever medium that is available to them in the depth they need and at the time, manner and place they want. Media consumption habits have also changed over time. Readership of dailies, viewership of television, listenership of radio and mobile usage are all on the rise, whereas cinema viewing and magazine readership have declined across India over the last year.

“Looking at the overall mass media reach, it appears that the reach of conventional media such as press and television is narrowing down and other media (mobile, Internet, and radio) reach is on the surge.

”Another interesting aspect was NSRC and AC Nielsen’s finding on media reach in various age groups in SEC AB: the most active media consumers are individuals in the 20-24 age group. They have identified five segments within SEC AB 20-24 individuals based on their varied media habits and affluence – Hi flying Metrosexual, Effervescent Info seeker, Me Too Cult, New Age Woman and Small Town Conservative. And among this segment of consumers, it is seen that the reach of other media is almost close to 90 per cent.”

Professionals in the media and communications sectors should watch these developments closely and gear up for the challenges before it is too late. As for public relations, the focus will be on New PR.

Power of new PR

From the West to the East to the Middle East…, the prophecies are getting bolder. The New Media will rule the roost, several experts have been predicting.

“People are talking about New PR,” says Alexander McNabb in CampaignME. “And no, it's not a reaffirmation of PR with added truth or something daft like that. New PR is about using the new communications techniques of today's world, the web and mail, RSS, blogs and wikis.”

Make no mistake. As we have been discussing in this blog, technology is bringing about radical changes in message delivery and reception. Unless we wake up now, our message will have no medium.

Mobile offices set to take off

The Hindu Business Line reports:

Mobile devices have become more than mere voice and data enablers.
With enterprises encouraging workforce on the move to access information anywhere, anytime, several industry segments are taking to mobile devices that have turned them to extended office sites.

The President of Enterprise and HNI Business Unit, Tata Teleservices Ltd, Vinayak Despande, said the company has partnered with the likes of Qualcomm and MobileOne, to offer a host of enterprise mobility.

Citing a Gartner report, Mr Deshpande said about 60 per cent of people would not be coming to office to do their work as work flexibility is gaining importance.

Addressing an interactive session to familiarise the corporates on how mobility solutions could potentially transform and streamline their businesses, Deshpande said sales executives are demanding customer relation management features on handheld devices and logistics and supply chain areas are witness to rapid adoption of these solutions.

Describing workforce on the move as Road Warriors, the telecom solutions provider sought to offer mobility solutions that could provide competitive advantage.
Be it through a data card that can convert the laptop into a mobile office, or a smart phone that can handle most of the work that a desktop could potentially offer, the demand is increasing.

The Vice-President of Tata Teleservices, Mr Uttam Kumar Soni, said enterprise mobility solutions have the capability to improve efficiencies and empower people on the move. In areas such as logistics, courier companies, airlines, banks and media companies, these solutions will have wide range of applications.

Pharma major Ranbaxy uses it for its field staff and Tata Teleservices has had enquiries from a leading coffee company for an online application that can track overall daily consumption.

Who killed the newspaper?

The Economist reports:

“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart.

Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.

Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.

Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.

Blogs, communications and corporations

Stephen Armstrong reports in the New Statesman

Towards the end of last month a posting appeared on a web site called "Blog Republic - By the Bloggers. For the Bloggers". "Blog Republic is looking for bloggers who are interested in being paid per post," it said. "We're looking for motivated bloggers in the following areas: cellphones, broadband, travel, gadgets, health, stocks and blogging. We're looking for quality bloggers who can make insightful posts. The more you post, the more you earn."

This plea caused quite a flurry in the online world. After all, if blog culture has been about anything, it has been about sticking it to large corporations rather than taking their advertising dollars. Last year, for instance, Dell would not replace a faulty computer owned by the influential blogger Jeff Jarvis. He started chronicling the company's poor service on his blog buzzmachine.com under the heading "Dell Hell". His postings hit such a nerve that Jarvis was soon receiving 10,000 visits a day.

Sites attacking McDonald's, Starbucks, Nestlé, Nike and just about every oil company proliferate around the net. With a successful legal action against these vociferous individuals costing more in legal fees and bad publicity than the victory would be worth, blogs have been seen as an extension of consumer activism.

A poll conducted by NOP World Consumer in March last year found that 50 per cent of bloggers express opinions about a company or product at least once a week, while another survey, for Hostway, showed that 77 per cent of online consumers viewed blogs as a useful way to get insights into the products they were looking to buy. With all these opinions reaching their customers, companies felt like a boxer attacked by thousands of children -- staggering from tiny blow to tiny blow, unable to hit back but sure that, at some point, damage was being done.

This summer, however, something changed. In June, a disgruntled Land Rover customer called Adrian Melrose set up a site called haveyoursay.com to track the company's lack of progress in dealing with a complaint about his new Discovery. Melrose was soon attracting 700 visitors a day, which placed him at the top of a Google search if you typed in "Land-Rover Discovery". In July, the company caved in and sorted out his problem but then struck a deal to turn haveyoursay.com into a Land-Rover customer feedback forum.

Suddenly corporations are all over the blogosphere. Last year, BusinessWeek ran a feature, "Six tips for corporate bloggers", which highlighted a deal between the web services company Marqui and 20 bloggers who were offered $2,400 each to write about the company once a week for three months. At the end of June this year, the idea went pro with payperpost.com, a site set up by Ted Murphy, chief executive of the advertising firm MindComet….

Until now, the founders of the blogosphere have protected their online world. This was easy when blogging was a difficult and complicated business, requiring at least some working knowledge of computer code. Early blogs tended to be written by the highly motivated and technologically literate. They often argued that this was a new paradigm - "citizen-generated media", free from the restrictions of top-down "old media".

With the expansion in open-source software over the past 18 months, however, anyone can get involved. Many new bloggers are school or college kids just trying to get laid. For them, the purity of the blogosphere is irrelevant. The idea of getting paid to chat about a soft drink seems absolutely fine. Nicole Discon, a high-school senior from New Orleans, was paid by 7-Up to plug a new milk drink called Raging Cow on her blog Sparkley.net. She said the commercial connection didn't bother her and "now that I've delved into the whole advertising thing, it's something I really love doing". For youth brands, this teenage ambivalence is great news. After all, online is where their customers are.

Steve Henry, executive creative director at TBWA and the adman behind the "You've been Tangoed" and Pot Noodle campaigns, believes that in the next four to five years the accepted model of advertising will change completely. "You're only going to be able to sell in an opt-in environment like a shop or web site, somewhere people choose to be," he believes. "To get a customer there, you need to surround them - PR, stunts, ambient media, the works. Blogs allow your brand to become part of the culture, to become something that's talked about."

In June, the ad agency Starcom MediaVest recommended that its clients use conversation as an advertising medium. "Traditional advertising is not as effective as it used to be," says Starcom's research director, Jim Kite. "Word of mouth becomes more important, but we didn't realise how important it is. We are telling our clients that they should make word of mouth the focus of their ad campaigns."

Companies such as Procter & Gamble have started recruiting "brand ambassadors" - key social figures in a neighbourhood or community who will get paid to drop brand references into conversations or hold barbecues where they pepper the talk with praise for dusters or aftershave….

This month, the fledgling industry created its own trade body - the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. Now the hidden persuaders could be anywhere. You may not want to read ILikeCokeBlogger's views on soft drinks, but it's hard to turn away if your best friend recommends a soap powder. What's the price of free speech when opinions are suddenly for sale?

Study shows blogs increase web traffic, media attention

ODwyer’s reports:

Three-quarters of companies responding to a Cymfony and
Porter Novelli study said they noticed an increase in web traffic or media attention after starting blogs.

The study was conducted by Russell Research among people responsible for maintaining or monitoring blogs at companies.

However, despite the apparent success, 71 per cent said they were not happy with the level of interaction on their blogs.

Sixty-three per cent of the respondents said they started a blog because they felt a need to participate in the medium, rather than to satisfy a specific need.

Sir Martin Sorrell bullish on online advertising

Diane Francis reports in The New York Sun:

Online advertising will double within a handful of years, the founder and CEO of global powerhouse WPP Group, Sir Martin Sorrell, said.

Some $1.5 billion of WPP's 2005 revenues of $10 billion are Internet-related. "About 15% of our business is Internet, and this will be 30% in 10 years," he said.

Online advertising in America as a whole jumped 30% in 2005, but still represented only 5% of total expenditures on advertising.

Teens spend 600% more time online: McKinsey study

Abbey Klaassen reports in AdvertisingAge:

A McKinsey & Co. study predicts that by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.

That shocking statistic, delivered to the company's Fortune 100 clients in a report on media proliferation, assumes a 15% decrease in buying power driving by cost-per-thousand rate increases; a 23% decline in ads viewed due to switching off; a 9% loss of attention to ads due to increased multitasking and a 37% decrease in message impact due to saturation.

"You've also got pronounced changes in consumer behavior while they're consuming media," said Tom French, Director, McKinsey. "And ad spending is decreasingly reflecting consumer behavior."

Thank a combination of older technologies such as cable, PC computers, cellphones, CD players, VCRs, game consoles and the Internet, along with more recent ones -- PDAs, broadband Internet, digital cable, home wireless networks, MP3 players, DVRs and VOD-- for those changes. And teens foretell an even more radical shift in future media consumption, the report points out: They spend less than half as much time watching TV as typical adults do. Teens also spend 600% more time online, surfing the web.

According to Forrester Research's most recent North American Consumer Technology Adoption Study, people ages 18 to 26 spend more time online than watching TV and are adopting new technology faster than any other generation. Because of that, they tend to be more receptive to blog, podcast and mobile-web ads.

That leads one to wonder whether consumer marketing mixes should change to reflect consumer behavior.

The answer is not quite -- yet, at least. The Catch-22 is a "chaos scenario" that smart marketers have read about in these pages: a dearth of online-ad supply and the web's generally fragmented nature will keep TV in booming business for the next several years.

"Should everybody shift 30% of their dollars to the web?" asked Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, senior practice knowledge specialist in McKinsey's San Francisco office. "No. There wouldn't be room today if everybody wanted to shift online. Last year [online media] was $12.5 billion, by end of 2007 digital advertising will be $18 to $25 billion. ... So we're seeing a lot of growth, but if you want to match up share of attention and share of dollars it couldn't happen for that reason." The TV ad industry is a $68 billion one.

So what's a marketer to do? Read AdvertisingAge for more details.

Sify’s performance will speak for itself

R Ravichandran interviews Raju Vegesna, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Sify, in The Financial Express:

My mandate will be to unlock the greater value of Sify’s multiple businesses such as broadband, enterprise solutions and portals through strategic investments, technology and processes…

We will continue to focus on growing each of our businesses in India. These include the Internet access -- cyber cafes and broadband-to-home initiatives....
Our portal initiatives are rapidly gaining momentum. Efforts will also be made to grow the enterprise and managed services business. A key strategic thrust will be on our international services that include e-learning and infrastructure-managed services. To meet growing demand, we recently opened our third data centre in Bangalore…

Sify is, has been, and will be one of India’s finest companies in data connectivity services for enterprise and consumers. This has been well recognised both in India and abroad. It will continue to focus on its customers, growth and profitability from its businesses in India and overseas in the years ahead. Going forward, I am sure our performance will speak for itself.

400% online revenue growth

Manasvi Mehta interviews Haresh Chawla, CEO of TV18 in Business Standard:

Going forward, we expect the TV–Internet combination to be an effective tool for building communities and for offering solutions to advertisers. I would not be surprised if, one year down the line, we are known as much for our Internet properties as we are today for our TV properties.

We’ve done over $1mn in revenues from our Internet businesses in the last two quarters. The revenue stream, though only comprising about 10 per cent of our topline, has grown by over 400 per cent since last year.

We expect this kind of momentum to continue. Our spends on these businesses is marginal compared to competition since we have a large television franchise and thus our customer acquisition costs are minimal.

meebo: ‘very efficient’ instant messenger

CNN Money has featured David Kirkpatrick’s report:

A tiny software company called Meebo has opened a new channel of communication on the Web. Now, if you have a Web page your visitors can talk to you using instant messaging, even if you're away from your home computer. (That includes all you MySpace users.)

If this doesn't sound interesting, you are probably over the age of 25. The founders of meebo are, but just barely.

"Like Hotmail put e-mail into the Web, we put IM into the Web," says meebo CEO Seth Sternberg, who is 28.

meebo got its start when its three founders, Sternberg and Elaine Wherry, 27, and Sandy Jen, 25, were all meeting repeatedly at one another's houses in Silicon Valley trying to come up with ideas for a consumer Web company.

As a company history on meebo.com explains, "Sandy kept having this problem where she couldn't easily IM her friends from Seth's and Elaine's houses. Hence, meebo!"

That was meebo's first innovation - a very efficient and rapid Web-based IM service, which enables you to combine your AIM, ICQ, Yahoo or MSN instant message accounts in one place.

Meebo wasn't first to offer Web-based instant messaging - but it is, by most accounts, the most efficient and easiest.