So ITV’s director of television Simon Shaps has finally been forced to fall on his sword in a similar fashion to the departure of the broadcaster’s commercial director Ian McCulloch last year.
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Monthly Archives: February 2008
Publishers must be brave in a multi-platform world
The ABC has introduced a monthly multi-platform report that measures newspaper print circulations and website unique user figures in a single report.
This is to be welcomed and it's not before time. It means there is less need for separate ABC and ABCe organisations and it is surely inevitable that these two bodies will eventually merge.
It might go some way towards ending the playground-style arguments about which broadsheet newspaper has the biggest reach online (though somehow I doubt it).
So far, Associated Newspapers, Guardian News and Media, News Group Newspapers and Telegraph Media Group have bought into the multi-platform measurement system. But the Mirror, Express, Financial Times and Independent have yet to follow suit. Presumably, the Mirror doesn't want its traffic to be compared too closely with The Sun, The Independent with The Guardian, and the Express with, well, anyone really.
For a system such as this to work, however, everyone has to buy into it, even if it results in some initial embarrassment for those publishers that aren't necessarily at the cutting edge of digital developments. It costs £1 to 2k a month to get an online audit, so it won't break the banks of the newspaper companies, though of course every penny counts at the moment.
And now that newspapers are getting their act together, it is time for magazines to step up to the plate. At Media Week, we introduced an ABCe section in our magazines ABC supplement for the first time last week, and we will continue to highlight the overall reach of magazine properties in forthcoming editions. Clients and agencies want to buy into an overall audience and, to do that, they need to be given accurate data about audiences from media owners.
Some magazines are nervous about releasing their online figures, for fear of media buyers deserting their print products altogether and migrating that spend online instead. But, clinging on Canute-like to glories past is only going to suit publishers for so long. Eventually, the reality of modern media consumption will catch up with them and they have to be brave enough to put their wares on show for all to see, with full information.
The strong brands will continue to prosper, offline and online. The weak will wither and die anyway.
Mail uses search to chase Guardian
Latest ABCe figures show that the Daily Mail is continuing to exponentially increase the amount of traffic it attracts to its web site.
It now has 17.9m unique users, less than two million behind market leader The Guardian.
Global shifts offer new opportunities for UK media
The world's population is increasing at about 1% a year, which leads geographers to speculate that the number of human beings running around the globe will double in around 60 years.
Rude Tube success was depressing
Am I the only one who finds it thoroughly depressing that ITV's dual programming venture Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach was beaten in the ratings by Alex Zane's web clips compilation broadcast on C4 in the 9 o'clock slot last Friday night?
Better planning needed at NRS
The NRS figures released yesterday made for interesting reading, especially the observation that The Mail on Sunday, which has recently been relaunched, fell by five per cent to 5,775,000.
This was in total contradiction to the recently released ABC figures for January 2008, which showed that the Mail on Sunday had posted the biggest year-on-year circulation increase of any of the Sunday newspapers, up 1.2% from 2,303,472 in January 2007, to 2,330,366 in the same period this year.
Desmond’s Star is rising
Today’s ABC figures for July-December 2007 provided further evidence of the challenges facing magazine publishers but also provided some oases of good circulation news amongst the hard-luck stories.
Northern & Shell had a set of frankly astonishing ABC results, with OK! putting on almost 22% of readers compared to the previous period, and 11.3% year on year. It attributes its success to aggressive TV advertising, exclusive buy-ups such as Jordan’s baby and Ziggy and Chanelle and US brand extensions. In contrast, Hello was down by about 5% period on period and year on year.
Naked’s radical approach may still have mileage
The iconic communications planning agency Naked is set to embark on the next stage in its adventure, having been bought out by Australian marketing services group Photon last week for an initial payment of about £17m, plus deferred payments linked to future performance.The founders and key executives at Naked are tied in to four-year earn-out clauses, a relatively long period that signals the importance of the key people in delivering the essence of what Naked is all about.
Media Week’s agency of the year in 2002 and 2003 burst on the scene in 2000, threatening to completely reshape communications planning with its strictly media-neutral approach. It had a distinct impact on the way other agencies operate, but in recent years suffered familiar growing pains as a start-up business evolving to the next level without diluting its unique selling points.
Clients wowed by initial contact with inspirational characters inevitably grow disenchanted when they drop down the food chain as busy founders spread themselves more thinly. And a reliance on strategy and consultancy tends to result in more project work and fewer lucrative monthly retainers that are the meat and drink of traditional media agencies.
Times have changed since Naked emerged, and other agencies have caught on to the importance of Naked’s strategic approach and integrated it into their own offers. It was significant that Boots shifted its media planning from Naked into MediaCom last year, to add to the WPP agency’s existing media buying work. Boots seemingly no longer saw the need for a stand-alone comms planning partner, and was happy MediaCom could deliver on both counts.
Hence, the sale of Naked is not the greatest of surprises. It will allow the agency to invest and try to lever itself up to the next stage of its evolution. However, the identity of the purchasing company was somewhat unexpected. Photon has some presence in the UK, and was last week also being tipped to take a stake in Naked’s Farringdon direct marketing neighbour Kitcatt Nohr. It is the biggest indigenous marketing services group in Australia and is spreading its tentacles into Europe.
Naked’s founders are adamant that Photon shares the same radical, swashbuckling, independent philosophy as themselves. If this really is the case, maybe the acquired company can buck the lessons of history that suggest the media-neutral approach is on the verge of being consigned to the dustbin. But it won’t be easy.
Buscombe moves advertising onto front foot
Outgoing media minister James Purnell played a big part in influencing the Government's volte-face on extending the regulation of advertising of foods that are high in fat, salt or sugar to a blanket ban, but the role industry lobbying played should not be underestimated either.
Super Bowl Ads on MySpace
I'm in Seattle at the moment so caught the "Football" madness this evening on Fox….
The network teamed up with MySpace to show all the TV commercials that hit an audience of gazzilions!!
