As each day passes, we’re presented with new information that documents the decline of traditional media in favor of online counterparts and new media competitors. It seems that newspapers are among the hardest hit with circulation and print advertising down - forcing layoffs across the country.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) recently released a study showing newspaper Web sites attracted an average of about 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter, up about 12 percent over the same period a year ago.

The problem for publishers has been turning that online traffic growth into revenues. Online advertising at newspapers grew 18.8 percent last year, according to NAA figures, but that wasn’t enough to offset a 9.4 percent decline in print advertising. Total newspaper advertising last year, print and online, declined 7.9 percent.

Is Social Media to blame for the erosion in traditional media consumption and advertising revenues? Is the appeal of participating in news and relevant stories or the prospect of content creation more attractive to the thin attention span of today’s Web-savvy consumer?

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s for an original name - SocialMedia Networks - which is a new ad network for - yes, social media sites. People spend a lot of time on social networks and they tend to be younger and quite Internet savvy. However, they are a fickle group who don’t like overt marketing messages.

SocialMedia Networks says they’re the first ad network to focus 100 percent on social media. They have over three billion ad impressions to more than 15 million unique visitors per month. These ad impressions are delivered within 5,000+ applications and they’re appearing on Facebook, Bebo and MySpace.

I asked SocialMedia’s CEO Seth Goldstein a few questions about advertising on social networks with social apps.

Read the rest of this entry »

More bad news news about the economy and the newspaper industry. This is a particularly disturbing headline, especially if you’re in the newspaper industry. Plus, it’s an industry I’m fond of. Yes, that’s right - newspapers have had the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA), shows that total print advertising revenue fell 9.4% in 2007 compared to 2006. It now stands at $42 billion. That’s the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising revenue in 1950. The worst drop before that was in 2001 when revenue dropped 9%.

Read the rest of this entry »

Not sure if this old news or not but interesting all the same if you haven’t read about it yet. The NYTimes reported last month that 3 UK Internet providers (BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virginmedia) are teaming up to offer an advertising alternative to that offered by the big 3 search engines.

The 3 companies have allowed ad company, Phorm, to access customers browsing records in order to serve relevant ads to any website publisher wishing to join the scheme. The proceeds would then be shared between Phorm, the 3 Internet providers and the website publisher.

Read the rest of this entry »

The IAB conference just occurred, and John Battelle of Federated Media made the following comments about Wenda Harris Millard’s comments during her IAB speech:

I respect John Battelle and what he does with Federated a great deal, and there will ALWAYS be a place for custom ad campaigns (conversational marketing as they call it at Federated) that need to be based on human relationships and built for specific sites and audiences, but taking an “anti-algorithm” or “anti-ad exchange” stance when it comes to advertising is not really necessary. The fact that Millard even has to call it out like a battle cry is amusing to me because I don’t believe the algorithms and ad exchanges of the world are killing the premium advertising business. Nor will they ever do so.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago radio personality (and I use that word loosely) Don Imus was sued by an advertiser for voicing their adverts on air, but also making disparaging comments about the company too. It was widely reported in traditional media - indeed, I bumped into it on USA Today’s story - but I have seen almost no commentary about it here in the blogosphere.

The company suing Imus is Flatsigned Press Inc. and it is related to their promotion of The Warren Report on John F. Kennedy’s Assassination, written by, and signed by, former President Gerald R. Ford, who was one of the members of the original commission.

Read the rest of this entry »

Shocker—people don’t want to see ads.
As marketers, we hear people complain all the time about advertising. It comes as no surprise that BurstMedia’s recent survey found that people don’t like ads—but it’s probably something we should think about.

First, the good news: The survey of 2600 online adults focused specifically on online video and advertising in online video. As we all know, the medium is pretty darn popular—72.1% of respondents viewed video online at least monthly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ad executives are going to have to change the way they do business and include more progressive methods to reach customers. Marketers want more focus on other advertising like online video and social networking sites and less on traditional media alone. That’s according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

As the economy slows, more businesses are attracted to Internet advertising. Not only is it often less expensive, but it’s also easier to measure than tv and print ads.

Every prediction I’ve seen shows growth in this space outpacing growth in traditional advertising methods.

Read the rest of this entry »

At last, neuroscience is applying itself to understanding how that extremely artificial endeavor - advertising - engages our basic biological instincts.

Two pieces of science news will interest marketers. First, the more we can anthropomorphize products, the better we like them. Second, advertising can take the place of real memory in our beliefs about a product.

It seems that dancing raisins, talking cars and the Geico gekko - but probably not subservient chickens - can actually change consumers’ perceptions and attitudes, according to Pankaj Aggarwal (University of Toronto) and Ann L. McGill (University of Chicago).

This Science Daily story says that we’re more likely to positively evaluate an anthropomorphized item.
Read the rest of this entry »

The web has long been rich in social and viral marketing elements.

Email this to a friend, social bookmarking, blogging, etc. So many services have popped up that now there is a Social Media Firefox Extension and Andy Hagans is planning his fake review optimization service.

Ultimately the communities that are focused on a niche and editorially biased will be successful while aggregator websites that are nothing more than a feature that Google can add to their suite of services will die.

Google quitely launched a Digg clone, and is aiming to create the underlying platform that powers most social networks. And they might bid on wireless spectrum in the US and UK.

As the leading portals collect more data they will be able to add value to more transactions and disintermediate middlemen by employing creative individuals to do jobs that were once done in offices.

If people get paid for results then the quality of work goes up. Think of portals as television stations vying for a bite of your attention for as long as they possibly can, and looking to pay you for your attention with relevancy, and cash if you are really motivated.
Read the rest of this entry »