Dr Joe's Printing Industry Blog

The Big News... and The Last Blog Post.... Here Anyway....

2007-03-01T08:10:00.000-05:00

The announcement of WhatTheyThink's purchase of the assets of Global Forecast Group and my becoming the Director of WTT's brand new Center for Economics and Research is on PrintCEOblog this morning.
http://printceoblog.wordpress.com/2007/02/28/whattheythinkcom-to-launch-economic-and-research-center-dr-joe-webb-to-direct/

You can access the audio of my recent interview of Randy Davidson where we talk about WhatTheyThink's acquisition of Electronic Publishing, PrintPlanet... and my new role.
http://members.whattheythink.com/home/wttnews070305.cfm

My industry blogging will move over to PrintCEOblog.com and also a special blog being set up on the WTT page that will be devoted to the new Center.

I will still keep this blog site for personal blogging which will be somewhat infrequent, about things that don't fit the scope of the WTT sites. I'm still working on my karate and prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain blog and will post some things there this spring. It's not likely that WhatTheyThink will start covering my study of Okinawan Karate any time soon. :)

This is quite an exciting time for WTT. For years, I believe, what has been going on there has been underestimated by the industry old guard, and it's building up quite a brand, reputation and business. I have been pleased and honored to be part of that, first with "Fridays with Dr. Joe", since moved to Mondays, the economic webinars, and the GraphExpo and Print events. I was dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet by my then business partner Jim Whittington, and I have to say... he was more right than he even suspected at the time. Now that WTT's base is over 50,000, it's quite the industry heavyweight. I'm excited to be part of it.

Photoshop: Online!; Navigating the Media Divide; Media Deprivation; Other Stuff

2007-02-28T18:13:00.000-05:00

Adobe offering Photoshop online in 3-6 months
http://news.com.com/Adobe+to+take+Photoshop+online/2100-7345_3-6163015.html?tag=nl.e498
The network is the computer is becoming more true every day

IBM has posted an essential report called "Navigating the Media Divide"
executive summary http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/pdf/g510-6551-02-mediadivide.pdf
full report http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/pdf/g510-6579-03-mediadivide.pdf
press release http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=219579
blog posting that has some good insights http://colincrawford.typepad.com/idg/2007/02/the_user_revolu.html
From the press release: ...IBM conducted a comprehensive study that included interviews with leaders of media companies and an in-depth analysis of the factors that are shaping the industry outlook. The IBM report shows that new forms of media will grow at 23 percent compound annual rate in the next four years, nearly five times that of traditional media businesses. The report also estimates that the music industry lost between $90-160 Billion in its transition to digital and finds that future implications are even greater for television and film if companies do not systematically navigate the media divide... IBM sees a clear delineation between the old and new worlds of media. In the traditional world, content produced by professionals and distributed through proprietary platforms still dominates. But in the new world, content is often user-created and accessed through open platforms. These polarized tendencies mark the clear and present conflict between incumbents and new entrants. A second conflict is emerging among existing players -- between traditional content owners (studios, game publishers and music labels) and media distributors (television affiliates, retailers, motion picture exhibitors, cable and satellite providers). This media divide is pitting partner against partner in a struggle for growth.

Piper Jaffray has released a new Internet report. Here is the press release
http://www.piperjaffray.com/1col.aspx?id=287&releaseid=966627

Vista activation problems: when the geeks who work at the various PC magazines have problems, they're not afraid to write about it... because it slows down their own work as well.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=221&tag=nl.e539

E-paper used as a keypad
http://www.prlog.org/10009300-sipix-imaging-announces-the-world-first-paper-based-keypad-solution.html

Students demand to get out of a week-long test of media deprivation, lasting only 4 days
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003574760_solitude16m.html
...even four days was too much — each of the students cheated, some more than others.
Which perhaps proves professor Mara Adelman's point: The art of alone time is increasingly lost in our hectic, frazzled, wired lives.
My son has an English teacher who has "hell week" when they read Walden. The kids do make it, and they have to write about it. The kids actually love it. The tough one is instant messaging, but they do make it through the week... or at least most of them do. It's a reminder to everyone that much as we love using media, taking a news break or a media break once a week can certainly be the pause that refreshes.

Important breaking news tomorrow!

Dr Joe Part 2; Greenspan's Forecast; Agency Clients Unhappy; Meetings Make Us Dumber; Dell to Start Selling Linux

2007-02-27T16:32:00.000-05:00

Part 2 of Margie Dana's interview of me has now appeared
http://www.bostonprintbuyers.com/printtips/07-02-26.html

Alan Greenspan expects a recession in 2008
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070226/hong_kong_us_greenspan.html?.v=4
"When you get this far away from a recession invariably forces build up for the next recession, and indeed we are beginning to see that sign," Greenspan said via satellite link to a business conference in Hong Kong. "For example in the U.S., profit margins ... have begun to stabilize, which is an early sign we are in the later stages of a cycle. While, yes, it is possible we can get a recession in the latter months of 2007, most forecasters are not making that judgment and indeed are projecting forward into 2008 ... with some slowdown," he said. Greenspan said that while it would be "very precarious" to try to forecast that far into the future, he could not rule out the possibility of a recession late this year.
There's only one good thing about this. Despite his reputation, Greenspan's record as a forecaster was actually quite horrible. Bernanke has had a much better record, though obviously much shorter. The comments about profits are very funny. Since the media portray profits as "bad" perhaps they'll start reporting profits declines as "good" news? :)

Agency clients are more unhappy than anyone imagined, according to a new Forrester study
http://adage.com/article?article_id=115171
...a whopping 76% of marketers had no way to determine their return on investment from their lead agencies. Sixty-nine percent said ROI is too difficult to measure.

Spectacular print ads get spectacular results
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=55984&Nid=27713&p=204904
... when the results are measured as recall. Sales are the best results. Recall is not always what it's cracked up to be. Remember how Alka Seltzer had its famous "I can't believe I ate the whole thing"? The ad was very memorable and won Clio awards, but Alka Seltzer sales went down, and the campaign was pulled (and the Clio rules were changed). Recall is used because the direct attribution of sales to an ad campaign is difficult. This is why there is continually growing emphasis on the use of direct marketing techniques.

Alka Seltzer redid the ad three decades later with Peter Boyle
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2691910
Boyle died a few months ago, and will always be near and dear to the Webbs because he was "the monster" in Young Frankenstein, the movie we saw on our first date.

There's always David Letterman's famous "Alka Selter suit" from 1984... he stopped being funny a couple of years after that...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZoIFGxh9IhA

Meetings make us dumber
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17279961/
We knew that all along because of this famous Despair.com poster
http://despair.com/meetings.html

Dell will soon start selling Linux notebooks!
http://www.pcworld.com/article/129363-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws
The general expectation is that notebooks will be a lot cheaper. Sorry! Vista's OEM price as preloaded is dirt cheap, perhaps $50-75. The notebooks will be cheaper mainly because they can be configured with less horsepower than running Vista requires. As a special feature, look for Dell to offer dual-boot (Windows and Linux) systems. Dell already offers Red Hat Linux for servers, so it is quite possible that will be their main offering. Some postings on their customer blog indicate that they will probably offer Novell's SuSE Linux and Ubuntu as well once the program starts. Linux is gaining steam, but it's not about to unseat Vista. It will be nice to finally have a choice, however. If Linux does start becoming a good portion of business, I wonder how HP, Toshiba, and Gateway will react. (Gateway is the big PC disappointment... boy, did success and an IPO really ruin that company!). And... will Apple react in any special way? I bet if Linux starts doing well that Apple will start to finally license its OS as well.

Google Solves Everything; Double-Opt-In is Not Always the Answer; Bosacks Column; IAB has a Print Mag; Newspapers Okay?; Other Stuff

2007-02-24T17:10:00.000-05:00

Advertise all the time... according to Google...
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=115115
Google's VP-advertising sales, Tim Armstrong, touted his company's ability to court brand advertisers... He talked of a Long Tail of products, explaining that previously, by using traditional media, marketers could only advertise one or two products at a time because of how long it would take to create and execute the advertising. With services like Google's, however, he said, brand marketers are advertising all of their products, all the time... "Most marketers are used to advertising just a fraction of their products due to that human scale required to advertise them"... Five years ago, he said, Hewlett Packard was running only two or three of their products on search. Today they're running thousands. "Consumers are on 24 hours a day, you should have all your products available to them." ... the company has led road shows to reach out to chief marketing officers and creative agencies to get them to think of Google products for other uses. One oft-cited example is how Saturn used Google Earth and Google Video to create an online ad application where customers "fly" around Google Earth, then through the doors of their local dealership and watch a video of the actual sales manager welcoming them into the dealership.

Double opt-in registration is supposed to be the cure for spam and ensuring deliverability of e-mail messages, especially marketing messages. Here's a new wrinkle... and another reason why brand and product support still needs direct mail and space advertising.
http://directmag.com/disciplines/email/opt-in_list_spam/
Anti-spammers and others promote double opt-in as the only fail-safe way to build a permission-based e-mail marketing list. But one e-mail service provider recently found its messages blocked by a major Internet service provider because of the very confirmation process designed to prevent spam. The problem: A so-called spambot—a program designed to collect e-mail addresses off the Internet—repeatedly registered an e-mail address on the e-mail service provider’s Web site. But the e-mail address was a spam trap and every time a confirmation e-mail was sent to the address, the ISP considered the message spam. As a result, the ISP repeatedly blocked the e-mail service provider’s e-mail, said the company’s ISP relations executive, who asked that all names in the story be withheld.... So what’s the lesson for everyone else? For one thing, a good ISP relations program is crucial, said the executive. “To me, it means really get in close contact with whoever is blocking you, and talk to human beings on the other end of the phone.” The executive added that the spambot still hits the company’s site about once a quarter. “All we can do is send a pre-emptive email to the ISP telling them: ‘It's back, please don't block us again,’” the executive said. Meanwhile, the only foolproof way to guard against this spambot’s actions would be use a CAPTCHA—an acronym for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart—requiring subscribers to type in the letters of a distorted image. “Convincing people to switch to double opt-in is hard enough,” said the executive. “Double opt-in plus CAPTCHAS and you might as well ask them to do calculus.”

Publishing guru Bob Sacks (Bosacks or "Capt. Bo" among his acquaintances) has written an excellent piece in Production Executive magazine. I know it's excellent because he mentions me.... :) Seriously, Bob and I come from totally different directions about the publishing business and our experiences, but somehow we keep ending up at the same place...
http://www.pubexec.com/story/story.bsp?sid=47352&var=story&publication=Publishing%20Executive&publicationDate=2/1/07&slug=PE_0207_BOSACKS&category=Management§ion=Unknown&page=1
The Interactive Advertising Bureau is starting a print publication
http://www.iab.net/news/pr_2007_02_21.asp
IAB has one of the best e-mail newsletters around. This is in conjunction with AdWeek so there's nothing really nefarious here about IAB resorting to print. They know just as well as anyone, especially now, that your brand has to be everywhere. After all, the former head of IAB was one of the authors of What Sticks. Now that there's a new executive director there, what's the first job of any trade association leader? That's right... non-dues revenue! It'a a 16-page magazine with about half of it as ads... mission accomplished.
The magazine is available as a web site/digital magazine at http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/vnu/adweek021907/index.php
It's rather cool. You can save it as a separate executable file, and it opens quickly and is easy to navigate. It seems faster than Zinio, using the NXTBook software
http://www.nxtbookmedia.com/

Newspapers are doing just fine... according to this article... and the biggest pain is in the big dailies... they're big so they get all the press.
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_9914.asp
(Which reminds me of an old line for some reason: never tick off someone who has a warehouse full of paper and truckloads of ink)

I was interviewed by Margie Dana of the Boston Print Buyers... Here's the link to Part 1
http://www.bostonprintbuyers.com/printtips/print/07-02-19.html

Big announcement coming next week... it'll be posted here first...

Oldest Newspaper is Now Digital; Newspapers Video; Electronics Requires Energy!; RFID & WiFi Disappointment; Various Computer Stuff

2007-02-21T17:21:00.000-05:00

Meant to post this a while ago-- the world's oldest newspaper has now gone digital.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003541952
For centuries, readers thumbed through the crackling pages of Sweden's Post-och Inrikes Tidningar newspaper. No longer. The world's oldest paper still in circulation has dropped its paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace.The newspaper, founded in 1645 by Sweden's Queen Kristina, became a Web-only publication on Jan. 1... The paper edition was certainly not some mass-market tabloid. It had a meagre circulation of only 1,000 or so, although the Web site is expected to attract more readers, Vikstrom said.

Another story about how newspapers are doing website video well
http://nymag.com/news/imperialcity/28152/index.html

How a Norwegian newspaper has found a way to thrive online: branding
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/18/business/papers.php

On-line coupons finally starting to move. Newspaper inserts have been holding up well, considering what has happened to other print products. This will change, of course, but it will be a big market for quite a while.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/technology/19ecom.html?ref=technology

HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa http://www.technewsworld.com/story/OZrdfAWVDUDCnR/Study-Data-Center-Power-Usage-Exploding.xhtml Data centers in the United States are consuming 5 million kilowatts of energy per year, an amount equal to the power consumption of the entire state of Mississippi, according to a report released Thursday. These stories always make me laugh because there is the implicit assumption that if data are stored or shared electronically, the amount of energy used in chopping and crushing and cooking and flattening trees will disappear. Data need electrons! Otherwise, they would not exist! A stored book requires no energy. A stored file needs a hard drive to be constantly accessible. That hard drive needs to be powered.

Wal-Mart's RFID program is nowhere near where they expected it to be.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117150681979009405-search.html?KEYWORDS=RFID&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month
Two thoughts:
1) suppliers are really miffed, and this is the dark underside of "getting close to your customers."
2) four years ago people thought I was dumb when I minimized the effect of RFID on print and packaging. I said "the only ones who will make money are the people who sell the hardware"
Score another one for Dr. Joe. But now it seems those hardware sellers had better pare back their forecasts, too.

SanFran's WiFi program isn't going well.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-wifi19feb19,1,2811102.story?coll=la-headlines-technology

IBM makes a breakthrough in computer speed
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/technology/14chip.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&ref=technology&adxnnlx=1171461994-ejRvb1aSNAaUmkKTHWSEjA&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

File this under "don't use it, you lose it." Google ran tests on its hard drives and found that its results were counterintuitive. Drives that are not used often break sooner. Heat did less to affect drives than anticipated. It's always funny how real world experience can vary so much from testing labs. Remember that Google built its initial infrastructure from equipment garnered from dot-bomb bankruptcies.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6376021.stm?ls
Just had to replace a hard drive in my "old time radio" computer where I store my collection of shows from the 30s to the 60s. It started to display annoying problems, such as refusing to copy certain files. Good thing I had backup. A 500GB external drive is now down around $175. Certainly worth purchasing at that price. We have file backups of all of the family systems on one drive.

MSFT Vista causing problems for gamers
http://www.pcworld.com/article/128961-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws
Experts blame still-flaky software drivers, Vista's complexity and a dearth of new video cards optimized for Vista's new rendering technology, DirectX 10. That's despite promises from Microsoft that Vista is backwards-compatible with XP's graphic engine, DirectX 9, and that it will support existing games.
Meanwhile, games written to take advantage of DirectX 10 have been slow to emerge. And one Nvidia executive predicts that gamers may not routinely see games optimized for DirectX 10 until mid-2008.
It's not that bad, says Microsoft. Chris Donahue, manager of Microsoft's Games for Windows group, says the company has tested 1,000 popular games from the past five years. Most work well with Vista, he said, declining to elaborate how many had problems and why.
My favorite line in the MSFT Knowledge Base is "engineers are aware of the problem and will post a solution when available." Of course, I was searching for something about Office 2003.

Vista's trial/activation period can be extended to 120 days
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129148-page,1/article.html
How to do it is on Brian Livingston's Windows Secrets site
http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070215#story1

MSFT is underplaying how a Vista system needs to be configured.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011523&intsrc=hm_list
They say that it will run with 512MB, but most people claim 1GB is needed, and others say 2GB is the "sweet spot." This article says 4GB is best.
Hardware vendors, of course, will offer systems built on Microsoft's minimum hardware requirements called "Windows Vista Capable," configured with 512MB of system memory and a processor that is at least 800MHz. But their heart may not really be in it. For instance, Dell offers a Windows Vista Capable configuration that isn't capable of much, according to what Dell says about it on its Web site: "Great for ... Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games." Dell recommends 2GB of system memory. Microsoft may be using PCs loaded with 4GB of RAM for some of its customer demos; At least that's what Ann Westerheim, president of Ekaru LLC, reports. A Microsoft representative recently demonstrated Vista on a system with 4GB of system memory to some of its customers, and the performance was so impressive that it drew some "ohs and ahs" from the audience, said Westerheim. The Westford, Mass.-based company provides technology services for small and mid-sized business.

The software in which this blog is created is Google's Blogger. I have tried different blogging software, and without a doubt, I can say that I think Blogger is stored on punched cards that have been folded, spindled, and mutilated. WordPress and TypePad are quite superior. Here's an article about Blogger's problems.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/128766-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws
"We know how important a service Blogger is to our users, so the highest priority for the Blogger team right now is monitoring the migration to the new platform, listening to feedback from people who've migrated, and tackling as fast as we can the little bugs that inevitably pop up here and there in a new product," says Courtney Hohne, a Google spokeswoman.
Bloggers are having all kinds of problems, including disappearing posts. In the prior version, my favorite problem was that graphics could only be posted in Firefox. Yeah, that's the solution the engineers came up with after weeks of complaints from users.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/128766-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Steve Jobs blasts teachers' unions... and also campaigns for a textbook-free future. The audience gasps... not because there will be no textbooks...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129214/article.html

Recording industry is cracking down at colleges for music piracy. Perhaps if they offered music worth paying for things would be different.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/4568903.html

Yahoo! is thinking of dropping music copy protection.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-yahoo16feb16,1,7452706.story?coll=la-headlines-technology&ctrack=1&cset=true

Dell customers cast votes for them to offer Linux and OpenOffice. Sure, there may be some ballot stuffing going on... I wonder what computer manufacturer/retailer will be the first to break and start offering Linux on computers other than servers. Dell currently sells servers with RedHat Linux.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/g0KzNaPMJq4HBi/Dell-Users-Seek-Linux-OpenOffice.xhtml

Another story about the $100 I mean $150 I mean $100 two years from now and $50 five years from now Laptop
http://www.pcworld.com/article/129201-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Why is it that spammers want to sell me authentic prescription medicines at the same time they want to sell me fake "replica" watches?

XRX Buyback, Publishers Step on Agency Turf, Newspapers Sue Google, Non-Print Revenues Ain't So New, Don't Feel Sorry for MSFT

2007-02-19T20:42:00.000-05:00

I said it for Heidelberg, and now I'll say it for Xerox: stock buybacks are a bad idea. If you have that much cash that you can't figure out what to do with, give it directly to the stockholders. Buybacks are too often a sign that a company no longer has a clue where to invest its cash. Keeping your powder dry for for future opportunities is also a good idea: one never knows when some opportunity may come your way, and it would be nice to fund things from your own cash. This is disappointing. Doesn't Xerox still have debt to pay down? Sure they do, $7.7 billion woth. Is there no further restructuring that needs to be done? Is there no technology or acquisition that could sweeten the company's current offerings. Right across town in Rochester, Kodak did a buyback a few years ago at $52. I bet they wish they had that money back right now. Instead, the money evaporated as Kodak's fortunes dived, and the stockholders got nothing. I hope Xerox never finds itself in that position. The company has gone through such a marvelous and well-orchestrated turnaround, with some occasional pain, of course, that a special dividend would have had, I believe, a bigger effect on reminding investors about how far Xerox has come. Now, stockholders should legitimately wonder if the company will do things like this to inflate their earnings per share. The goal should be to create more stockholder wealth through their newly retuned operations. I hope that this is a sign that Xerox' big financial rebound is now over and that management has no more major initiatives to build EPS organically. Ann Mulcahy (more powerful than "The Oprah") resisted the advice to declare bankruptcy a few years ago after the company manipulated the structure of its debt to inflate its earnings and stock price. It would be a shame if this buyback started with pressure from institutional shareholders who did not have the company's, employees, or individual shareholder's interests at heart.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070215/xerox_buyback.html?.v=1
(Disclosure: I do not own any Xerox stock, but owned shares a few years ago in a retirement account.)

Magazine publishers are getting into traditional ad agency turf as Meredith acquires some agencies. Part of this is funny because ad agencies started when publishers were not able to assist advertisers in creating ads, more than 100 years ago. Finally, the publishers wised up! Seriously, it is common for small, especially local, magazines and non-daily newspapers to work on ad campaigns for their smaller customers. This takes that trend to a higher level.
http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070212/FREE/70209025/1108
Meredith Corp.'s acquisition last month of two marketing communications agencies is the latest sign that publishers are offering more integrated marketing services to clients as well as building out divisions that can help them diversify to create new revenue opportunities.Last month, Meredith announced the acquisition of Genex, an interactive marketing agency, and New Media Strategies, an interactive word-of-mouth marketing company. Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed.The acquisitions follow the media company's purchase last year of O'Grady Meyers, an interactive marketing services firm, and will strengthen its Meredith Integrated Marketing division, which provides custom publishing and online communications services to clients... Other b-to-b publishers, including Hanley Wood and Meister Media, have created marketing services divisions through acquisitions, offering services such as Web site design, custom publishing, creative development and public relations.

There's a disagreement over the new NAA campaign to promote newspapers.
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2007/02/wrong-number-et.html
But perhaps he should look at the latest data about visits to newspaper web sites
http://naa.org/sitecore/content/Global/PressCenter/2007/Online-Newspaper-Viewership-Experiences-Record-Fourth-Quarter.aspx?lg=naaorg
The press release about the campaign is at
http://www.naa.org/sitecore/content/Global/PressCenter/2007/NAA-INTRODUCES-2007-NEWSPAPER-VALUE-CAMPAIGN.aspx?lg=naaorg
The research about consumer media use behind campaign is at
http://www.naa.org/upload/attitudes-toward-media-2006.pdf

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of the NYT took back his remarks about not knowing if the NYT would be in print in five years.
http://www.observer.com/20070219/20070219_Tom_Scocca_pageone_newsstory5.asp
He had it right the first time. Then somebody reminded him they own paper mills, that probably dropped in value to a potential buyer just minutes after he said that.

Some Belgian newspapers have successfully sued Google for copyright infringement because... Google links to their stories! How dumb! I'd be thankful for the hits and that people can actually find my newspaper. So very strange... and this in an age when a newspaper story gets linked on the Drudge Report that newspapers hate it because their site traffic goes through the roof and can shut down their servers! Wonder if Matt Drudge would ever link to a Belgian paper now :)
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=114979

2/3 of Internet users surf while watching TV
http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/21077/

PIA's report about "navigating print markets" is at
http://www.gain.net/eweb/upload/2007-2008%20Navigating%20Print%20Markets%20Report.pdf
There's still this myth in the industry about "ancillary services." I took the list and identified what each item "used to be" in the "old days" (the 1980s!). This ancillary thing is really a bunch of hogwash. Printers have ALWAYS sold other services, and it always has been some more than others.

Microsoft is saying that forecasts for Vista revenues are too aggressive
http://www.pcworld.com/article/129105-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws
Translated: it didn't take off the way they wanted.
In a conference call Thursday with financial analysts Ballmer said lower selling prices, limited new corporate sales, and software piracy may combine to temper Vista sales forecasts.
"I'm really excited about how enthusiastic everybody is about Vista," he said. "But people have to understand that some of the revenue forecasts I've seen out there for Windows Vista in fiscal year 2008 are overly aggressive."
Ummmm... gee, he doesn't mention how the new EULA puts people off, or how in order to get the software to run well you have to upgrade RAM or other components, or just the high cost of Vista.
If someone in your family just needs a computer to do small tasks like an occasional letter, e-mails, and general surfing, look for a closeout Windows XP computer. If someone can help them with basic things, Ubuntu would work, too.
But don't feel bad for Microsoft... when people replace their computers, Vista will be pre-loaded.

Tools

2007-02-14T13:25:00.000-05:00

Blogger Adam DeWitz has asked others what tools they use. I first saw his request on Steve Duncan's Lornitropia and I responded there. But I have copied my comments from there and added hot links, and added a few other comments as well.

Steve Duncan http://www.lornitropia.net/archives/2007/02/06/tools/
Adam DeWitz http://printmode.net/blog/archives/2007/02/03/tools
Peter Muir http://bizucate.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/tools.html

On my desktop (Windows) I use StarOffice (the paid version of OpenOffice). I use Excel only when I have to make charts. I use 2 free browsers developed by Anderson Che. The one that sits on top of IE is Avant Browser which adds all kinds of goodies like ad blocking and a variety of creature comforts that IE does not have. I have been experimenting with his Orca Browser, still in beta, that sits on top of Firefox. I have no clue when he will release Orca for real. I use Eudora as my mail program on my business account. Eudora was just released to the open source community by Qualcomm, and I expect that some of its features will be come part of Thunderbird at some point. Next time I set up a computer from scratch, I’ll probably use Thunderbird. For instant messaging, I use Gaim, which is open source and consolidates all of my instant messaging into one clean nice window from all of the services. For VOIP I use Skype and I have had fun using Pamela for Skype which has allowed me to record interviews that I do for my podcast quite nicely. Pamela is free but there are paid upgrades available. When I need to write something quick, I use the open source word processor AbiWord. It loads faster than Word or OpenOffice and gets the job done. It has minimal features, but when you're just dumping text, it's a got all you need.

I have a Logitech iFeel mouse, one of the most unsuccessful pointing gadgets (from a sales perspective) that has been a joy to use. Unfortunately its driver conflicts with all versions of MSWord starting with XP. That’s OK because I have grown to hate using MSWord. For PDF making I use the open source PDF Creator when I am not using StarOffice, which has PDF making built in. For PDF reading I use FoxIt Reader which is much faster that Acrobat Reader. For system maintenance I use SystemSuite Professional, which is far less annoying than Norton Systemworks. I also use PowerDesk for my file management. For audio recording and editing I use the open source Audacity.

On my notebook, I have a dual boot system with Windows and Ubuntu 6.10. I have grown to love working with Ubuntu and I expect that the new release in April of version 7.04 will throw me over the edge to put it onto my desktop. In Ubuntu, I have experimented with the beta of CrossOver Office from CodeWeavers and loaded MSOffice2000 and worked with it with absolutely no problems at all. It was amazing to be thinking that MSOffice runs faster in Linux with an emulator. I have decided that once 7.04 comes out I will buy a new notebook that will be solely Linux-based.

In Ubuntu, I have all of my favorite software as part of the package: OpenOffice, Gaim, Audacity, Skype, AbiWord, Firefox, and others. I also like using Gnumeric, an open source spreadsheet. My biggest problem going "all-Linux" is replacing the charting capabilities of Excel. But I will be able to use CrossOver Office to handle what is absolutely necessary.

For e-mail I use Yahoo for personal stuff and newsletters, and I use GMail for all of my news alerts, and also
for my blog e-mail. Gmail’s spam filtering seems to work incredibly well.

My blogs are in Blogger, but I am quite impressed with WordPress and will be switching to it soon.

Newspapers, Print Media Ahead of Broadcast in Online Video, Super Bowl ads and other stuff

2007-02-13T12:55:00.000-05:00

Margie Dana of the Boston Print Buyers has posted her "Print Tips" archives
http://www.bostonprintbuyers.com/printtips-archives.html

The NYTimes staff is probably upset that its owner said this!
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/822775.html
"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," he says.
Oh yes, and the Internet is not affecting the use of printing.... please, someone tell the Sulzbergers and their staffers.

Newspapers outside North America and Europe are doing well
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/article/060207/world_association_of_newspapers_booming_circulation
Of course, it's a low base... these newspapers are starting off really low. But increased incomes and prosperity increases the use of media overall. Remember, many of these countries also have low broadband penetration. Since newspapers in many countries also had low advertising revenues (there was nothing to advertise because they were undeveloped countries) this will increase as well. It will be quite interesting to see how print and Internet are jointly developed rather than having the Internet be a displacement medium.

Print media that are shifting over to the Internet have often realized that they are on the outskirts of the broadcast media.
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6415922.html?display=Breaking+News
Local online video advertising is shaping into a battle between traditional print and television news providers, according to a new report from Borrell Associates. The growing advertising category has benefited publishers and broadcasters moving online, but initially has been embraced much more quickly by print. In 2006 newspapers sold approximately $81 million in local online video commercials in comparison to $32 million sold by TV broadcasters.

The economy is collapsing because we don't save enough. As usual, the Associated Press does little to inform its readers. IRAs, 401k and pension plan capital gains, and interest, are excluded from the calculation. The same holds true for increases in the value of real estate.
http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/02/04/news/business/45-savings.txt
Here's an ominous quote:
During the Depression, when as many as one in four people were out of work, households were exhausting savings in order to pay the rent and buy food.
I suspect the Depression was a slightly different time than we have today. The report goes on to discuss how hard it is for young people to make ends meet. Of course it is... they're young! The have little job experience. The have comparatively low education because... they're young! The assumption is that all dollars are just consumed, but that's not true. If I earn $30,000, but I buy a house that costs $100,000, as far as the savings calculation goes, I have overpaid by -$70,000. Yet the purchase of an asset is treated as it was a latte or a beer. The same goes for me if I am young and have borrowed to go to college. A college education nets, on average, on an inflation-adjusted basis, an additional $1,000,000 over a lifetime, in earnings. But no, if I spend $120,000 on college, it might as well be a hot dog or a taco. How the press can continue this economic reporting malpractice is beyond me. Luckily, I saw a few more stories about how bad the savings rate data are this time around, but they are still few and far between.
The most important measure? The Federal Reserve's calculation of household wealth. It set another record recently. Declines in housing were offset by rises in asset values of.... you guessed it... savings in stocks, bonds, and other instruments.

Sun sponsored a panel of college students about how they use technology
http://news.com.com/College+students+find+existence+online/2100-1025-6157405.html?part=dht&tag=nl.e703
Despite the fears that kids are leaving permanent digital footprints when they post personal information online, college students think it would be even weirder if someone didn't exist on the Web.

Nice commentary from Clickability about how new technology in publishing needs buy-in from publishers, advertisers, and readers, and often the readers are the ones most overlooked. The main lesson is to avoid replicating the older medium attempting to be replaced.
http://www.clickability.com/press/eap/5549046.html
I overhead someone at a conference recently describing the Zinio approach as "like pointing a tv camera at a radio," and I think that pretty well sums up the problem.

Someone... please tell these folks that the Internet is not having any effect on print!
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/02/07/most_advertisers_now_spending_on_new_media_survey/
Nearly 90 percent of all U.S. companies polled in a new study will use part of their marketing budgets to advertise in new media like video games or virtual communities.
The survey by the American Advertising Federation underscores the shift in advertising spending away from television, magazines and, particularly, newspapers, which have suffered badly from declining circulation as more media choices have become available.
Concluding that "traditionally staid media categories are in need of innovation if they are to remain competitive," the study found that 73 percent of the executives interviewed planned to spend up to one-fifth of their budgets on new media.
More than 12 percent of respondents said they would spend as much as 40 percent of their budget on experimentation and new media, according to the survey released this week, which polled nearly 1,000 advertising executives.

We spend more than 3500 hours a year consuming media
http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2007-02-06-voa28.cfm

Kodak has announced that it has plans to lay off another 5000-7000 workers. This is why their ranting old man lunatic executive YouTube video is such poor strategy. Every time they want to talk about the "new Kodak" something like this is announced. When I heard the story about the layoffs, I thought of the line from the now-edited graphic division version... now adapted for this news "think of this as a big fat makeready for the 2010s." What's really hard is when you are working in a division that is doing well and all of the bad news is coming from other divisions. It's not like you can control them. It's one of the fallacies about "conglomerates" being stronger companies, when historically, they underperform, and the diverse businesses do not limit risk but actually increase it because none of them have the full range of resources they need for long term investments.
I've spent parts of four decades in marketing, teaching it, and doing it, and it still is fascinating how "inside-out" thinking pervades marketing and advertising, and that "outside-in" does not. The difference is discussed by Trout and Ries in their book, Positioning, long since updated by Jack Trout since Al Ries has gone on his own a few years ago. The worst advertising campaign I have seen this year is the one where they brought Orville Redenbacher back. I blogged about that on 1/22. http://drjoewebb.blogspot.com/2007/01/yahoo-and-newspapers-new-rules-of-pr.html
Kodak layoff http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/kodak-ups-estimates-job-cuts/story.aspx?guid=%7B2B5147F5%2D59E1%2D419C%2D8552%2DA942DEE633DB%7D&siteid=yhoo&dist=yhoo
Kodak's YouTube video has been viewed more than 200,000 times... this is the consumer division video
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Sz6XjXu-oT8

Speaking of YouTube, 7 of its top 10 videos for a few days were Super Bowl ads. Advertising Age had a story about how advertisers are not taking full advantage of the post-event buzz.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=114893
My favorite ads from this year's Super Bowl?
Blockbuster http://www.superbowl-ads.com/2007/2007_winners/blockbuster_mouse.htm only because I'm a part-time computer geek.
eTrade http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whxc9to-1qs I really miss their "money out the wazoo" ad from years ago, but luckily, it's on YouTube http://youtube.com/watch?v=E0_tfoTTGOQ
Sprint http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNT1Y2sLLKU&NR "connectile dysfunction"
My favorite all-time Super Bowl ad is FedEx' sendup of the movie Castaway http://youtube.com/watch?v=XvX7ovvf-LI

The $100 laptop program has addressed security issues in a unique way... and they are discussed in this article
http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=20&tag=nl.e539

Marketers and Blogging, Time and Print, Tax Revenues, More PC Stuff

2007-02-04T18:15:00.000-05:00

Marketers having trouble figuring how blogs fit into their marketing
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/bloggers---fifth-estate-journalism/story.aspx?guid=%7B94D2F69D%2D3F0A%2D4D80%2D87FB%2DD75345D4E464%7D
Their spontaneous, unedited, sometimes emotional "first takes" on new products are substantially impacting business, according to Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a 100-person division which monitors the blogosphere. He calls bloggers "a kind of Fifth Estate or journalism."
Blackshaw says bloggers are everywhere, using laptops, video cameras, and digital recorders to publish their comments, reactions, and criticisms. Nowhere was this more evident than earlier this month when the Detroit Auto Show, the Consumer Electronics Show, and MacWorld were vying for attention.
Wikipedia had an iPhone entry within minutes of Steve Jobs' announcement of the product, and YouTube had more iPhone-related clips than it did for Gucci or the Pope.
"Bloggers have become the ultimate news aggregators," Blackshaw said. Major media reporters monitor blogs for tips as well as informed perspective on product features. A swarm of bloggers posting about new products, often positively, ends up in search engines. "That comes back as search results when consumers do research; the bloggers enthusiasm turns into advertising," Blackshaw said.
Ad agencies and media buyers are trying to gauge what to do about bloggers and other online media. Since bloggers are looking for Web links to include in their reports, marketers are weighing whether to spend all their money in traditional media or to take some to build a fuller Web site for the brand.
Blackshaw cited Apple Computer for coordinating its online assets for the iPhone introduction. Product photos, specifications, and narrative about the product were available immediately at Apple.com. Blackshaw says advertisers in this weekend's Super Bowl should be following the same road, to build interest in their ads.
So it's no accident that Bowl ads for Doritos are already online. Don't waste money on a Super Bowl ad unless you have these other pieces of the mix in place. You can't just buy media in a vacuum, Blackshaw said. "You have to think about how others pieces of the marketing mix reinforce, amplify and ultimately drive more return on that investment."

Please... someone tell Time that the Internet is not affecting print volume
http://www.forbes.com/business/businesstech/2007/01/30/time-advertising-web-tech-media-cx_lh_0130time.html
Time Inc. is trying to figure out how to capture readers and ad dollars that are leaving print media for the Web. Time magazine decided last year to shift its publication date from Monday to Friday. The company said earlier this month that it is eliminating 289 jobs, including 172 editorial jobs, bringing its employee head count down to about 11,000. And last week, the company announced the sale of 18 smaller magazines, including Popular Science and Field & Stream, to Bonnier Magazine Group of Sweden.
Interesting point in the article:
In 2006 Sports Illustrated generated about $118 in revenue for every person who paid for the print magazine, compared to $5 per online reader.
This is like comparing Apples and Intels... ummmm, like comparing apples and lawnmowers. The $118 in revenue includes postage, printing, and other distribution costs. The $5 probably has a superb gross margin, but one wonders if it's being charged all of its costs, especially for repurposing print content. Time really needs to increase its online audience for its properties and claims it will not charge for it until the size of its audience grows significantly. One has to marvel at the way Dow Jones structured its Wall Street Journal online business. It charged from the day it started, and has never had to worry about converting from free to paid. Time and its properties do... and I suspect that the change of its businesses will continue to be quite painful and that these layoffs are nothing like what is bound to come 12-18 months from now.

FedEx Kinko's says low margins are just fine for them... good thing they have lots of shipping revenue that goes through the stores to make up for it... all printers should sign up with UPS and DHL, I guess.
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/17/news/companies/pluggedin_boyle_fedex.fortune/index.htm

Tax revenues are increasing again! According to the 1/29/07 Wall Street Journal quoted Congressional Budget Office data:
Data released last week from the Congressional Budget Office confirm that the tax cuts of 2003 keep soaking the rich, especially on their capital gains. CBO and Congress's Joint Tax Committee originally estimated that reducing the capital gains rate to 15% from 20% would cost the Treasury $5.4 billion from 2003-2006.
Whoops. Actual revenues exceeded expectations by 68%, creating a $133 billion revenue bonanza for the feds. CBO's original forecast for 2006 was for $57 billion in capital gains revenues, but actual receipts were $110 billion. This surprise windfall is one reason the budget deficit is also far lower than CBO predicted.
The problem is that the CBO, by law, cannot assume that tax policy affects people's behavior. "Dynamic scoring" is a no-no as far as the CBO is concerned. Therefore, they would have to assume, that if tax rates were doubled, tax revenues would double, too. If they were tripled, revenues would triple. The last time this happened was with the Clinton tax increases early in his administration, which only delivered half of what the CBO said. But Clinton and Robert Rubin were smart enough to cut the capital gains rate a few years later and created a capital gains windfall, that combined with a Congress that believed in spending restraint, resulted in budget surpluses. Milton Friedman hated surpluses, and he was right... they slow an economy down, and they did. Better to reduce the tax rates... again, until the reduction is at some kind of equilibrium where their reduction can't throw off more yet more revenues. The Laffer Curve (Laffer was a Clinton supporter, and not many people know that for some reason) is a curve, and it looks like a bell curve. The CBO insists that there is no such thing, by law, and that everything is a straight line. This is the reason why "pay-go" or "pay as you go" legislation does not work. Luckily, Congress will be gridlocked over the next year or so. But it is probably the case that at this time that tax rates will be the lowest they will be for quite some time, perhaps a generation. Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush43 all knew the power of lower taxes to stimulate investment. Johnson, Nixon, and Bush41, never learned the lessons.

Comcast states that streaming video is boosting its broadband subscriptions
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/earnings-comcasts-roberts-4-percent-of-comcast-hsd-traffic-connected-to-you/#When:04:37:00Z

Perhaps Santa can come early... what a cool Linux computer. It's (in round numbers) only 7x7x2" --- you could lose it on your desk!
http://system76.com/index.php/cPath/2_52?osCsid=9ac85ecb37260c403ecb05f215fcf8bc

Microsoft Vista won't allow clean re-installs... ugh!!
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=5887
Sometimes, you computer needs a totally clean re-install where you reformat the hard drive, etc... and what if your hard drive gets fried? Looks like a real annoyance. The next Ubuntu release is in April... perhaps that's the time I can end my Microsoft ties for most of my work?

There are some people, however, who think Microsoft is evil, just like all corporations, and Vista is a conspiracy against computer users?
http://badvista.fsf.org/
Puh...leeeeez.... Last I saw, computing was a competitive market and we have more choices than most people know about. There are two major PC operating systems, of course, Apple and Windows, but even that is changing. Linux is starting to expand from Geekdom (had the DOJ not inserted itself into the market by suing MSFT, I still believe that the uprise in negative MSFT sentiment would have sent millions of dollars into the development of alternatives; instead, the market relied on the DOJ getting MSFT to "play nice" and that took the wind out of any rising OS enmity). Palm, Windows Mobile, and Linux are on PDA's. I think we're on the verge of thin clients that rely on browsers. When Gartner Group said that this was the last major PC OS release, I thought that they were dead on. But some of the anti-MSFT folks are wackos... MSFT has outwitted and outmarketed its competitors... and it plays hardball... so? I just want to get away from buggy software with horrid EULAs.

OpenOffice is the leading free alternative to MSOffice. A blog that has good tips about using the program and its hidden features is at http://www.linuxjournal.com/blog/800902

Printing Shipments Up 8 Consecutive Months: Strong December

2007-02-02T11:10:00.000-05:00

Text and chart of the analysis is at the www.PrintCEOBlog.com -- the link below goes directly to the entry.

http://printceoblog.wordpress.com/2007/02/02/us-commercial-printing-shipments-up-8-consecutive-months/

Media Job Cuts Distorted, In Search of Stupidity (good book!), It's 1998 Again, Oil Prices, Mises and the $100 Laptop, I'm a Locksmith...

2007-01-29T16:42:00.000-05:00

An outrageously misleading headline came out last week. It was about media industry layoffs.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070125/bs_nm/usa_economy_jobs_media_dc
"Planned media job cuts up 88 pct in 2006" it said, and the first two paragraphs were
The number of planned job cuts in the U.S. media sector surged 88 percent last year and that trend will likely continue as readers shift from print to online services, a study on Thursday showed.
For all of last year, the media industry announced 17,809 job cuts, up sizably from the 9,453 cuts announced the prior year, according to the job outplacement tracking firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
It is horribly out of context. First of all, CG&C is a famous outplacement firm that handles top executives, and all they track is announced corporate layoffs. It brings them great publicity, and they use it very well. Occasionally, however, some context is needed, which is why Dr. Joe is sometimes so sorely needed.
Non-newspaper publishing employment is up by 12,000, according to the BLS. Publishing overall, including newspapers is flat, only up 500-800 employees. Seems like lots of these people are finding jobs in their own industry. One company's layoff is someone else's new hire. Remember, these employees either exit the workforce, change industries, but usually work for a smaller and more nimble company in the same or related industry. Ad agency employment, for example, is up by more than 10,000. Why is it that Dr. Doom is the optimist for once?

I just finished reading the second edition of In Search of Stupidity, which is subtitled "Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters." The author is Merill Chapman, an expert in software marketing. The book is well-done and has some of the best software anecdotes... and discussions of marketing... that I have read in quite some time. I'm only including some quotes here because people may have heard me chuckling about them when I was on the plane reading this... I recommend it highly for both entertainment and for marketing insights.

"Please to remove the solid drive to check to the connection orifice for proper adherence." (p8 footnote, this is the advice that was spoken to him over the phone by Dell tech support; his call had been transferred to an overseas call center... makes you wonder if they were using Google's translator! You kind of know what they are saying: take out the hard drive and see if it's connected properly. One can only wonder what kind of document they were working from)

p267 had an interesting writeup about the WGA-- Windows Genuine Advantage -- program that verifies your MSFT software, similar to something I've already posted.
WGA was misidentifying hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of legitimate installs as “non-genuine.” Exactly how many was somewhat mysterious, since Microsoft was not very forthcoming on the issue. The company did say that of the 60 million checks it had run, 80 percent of the machines tattled on by WGA were using invalid keys. That left about 12 million “others.” High levels of complaints were coming from a wide spectrum of users, particularly people who'd had Windows preinstalled on their laptops.

On p269-270 there was a quote from a Microsoft employee that is actually good advice
I recommend to my friends that they always keep a copy of OpenOffice on their systems in the event that MSOffice's activation system locks up the software when they're not expecting it and they can't reach a phone or the Internet to reactivate it. Interoperability is excellent and you can usually get something done. It's good protection against our copy protection.
It's not just copy protection -- ANY software can stop working properly for any reason, such as corrupt files anywhere in the OS or in the program itself. OpenOffice has bailed me out on a number of occasions, but admittedly MSOffice has too... and also WordPerfect Office. Since I'm relatively fluent in all of these, I know which software to grab when I need something done quickly or what to do when I encounter a problem file.

The Boston Print Buyers newsletter had a report about the printing economy, in 2 parts.
http://www.bostonprintbuyers.com/printtips/07-01-22.html
http://www.bostonprintbuyers.com/printtips/07-01-29.html
Funny... the title is "What Lies Ahead for the US Print Market?" may actually be a warning... emphasis on the word "lies" and perhaps making it an exclamation "What Lies!... for the US Print Market"
"...while so much printed material has migrated to the Web, [interviewee... name withheld] does not consider the WWW [worldwide web] a major threat to the industry. Indeed, the Internet has created additional need for print materials, if only to support e-firms."
I had some other people read it to make sure that I was not living 1998 all over again. I'll never forget the paper distributors meeting I spoke at around that time when I was hit by that comment. I refuted it and lost the entire audience's friendship in a matter of a couple of minutes. Nonetheless, here we are almost 10 yeasr later with $30 billion less in annual print volume, and 150,000 fewer employees in the industry and this kind of sentiment isn't dead yet? The Internet is a baby. There's lots more Internet effect to come.

Margie Dana, who runs the print buyers group has a marvelous "Margie's Print Tips" newsletter, and everyone should get it. The site is at http://www.bostonprintbuyers.com/index.html and you can sign up on the home page... in the upper right hand corner. I just sent her some notes based on some questions she sent me a week or so ago that will appear as an article sometime soon. It's an excellent organization, and its reach is beyond Boston.

Speaking of the Internet, the # of PDFs online using my Google search keeps jumping around. It's now at 266 million. Google supposedly has been tweaking their search engine, and you don't always get the same number of hits even within the same day. Ask.com gets 87 million. Yahoo.com gets 400,ooo. MSN.com gets 86 million. Clusty.com gets 197 million. Adobe claims 200 million. I have gotten counts as high as 400+ million.

The next computer screen technology... about 5-7 years away, perhaps... but I want one now :)
The company is "Perceptive Pixel" and it has a touch screen like you have never seen before.
Video http://fastcompany.com/video/general/perceptivepixel.html
Articles
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/112/open_features-canttouchthis.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18079/

Great chart about oil prices from brokerage firm Raymond James
http://www.raymondjames.com/images/inv_strat/inv_strat_070122_1lrg.gif
It's amazing to see what happens when prices are inflation adjusted, and how the prices we are seeing are nothing new at all.

The free market economists at the Mises Institute have taken on the $100 laptop.
http://mises.org/story/2455
Just so people are clear... as the article says, the countries that these are going to have far bigger problems than any nearly-free laptop could hope to cure. My only interest in it is that as these countries grow, items like the $100 laptop mean that they have the opportunity to grow without print. In any of these countries, if the choice is sanitation or immunization or a $100 laptop.... the laptop doesn't even make the list. Give me sanitation first. Good article.

Windows Vista is out today.
PC World article explains why you should not buy it http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128645/article.html
PC World reports that the first service pack is in the works... already
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,128645/article.html
In some ways it's unfair to fault them for preparing for the eventual service pack because you cannot always use what happens in alphas, betas, or early users until a product is in the full marketplace. I'm not running out to get it... my next computer will be Linux from the ground up. But the best way to get Vista is to not upgrade at all, and that's to get a new computer with it preloaded.

Finally, after all these years, the six episodes of Police Squad! are on DVD.
Wikipedia entries
Show background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Squad!
Running gags: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Police_Squad!
The DVD has the shows and some additional features that are pretty unremarkable. They have some shows with "commentary" and all that commentary consists of is the directors and producers or writers sitting around a table watching the episode and making comments. You get to learn silly and trivial things like the number of garbage cans or other items Lt. Drebin drives into is the same as the episode number in the series. There's a rambling interview with Leslie Nielsen that is not all that satisfying, and the same goes for the outtakes. The series hit its stride in the Naked Gun movies, that were outrageously successful, and benefitted from the big-screen treatment. The shows and its sight gags and double entendres of the original series are what really matter, and they're all there in the DVD as we remembered them, the few of us, who saw them when they were first aired back in 1982.
Drebin, posing as a locksmith, enters a man's office and is greeted by the resident with "Who are you and how did you get in here?" to which Drebin replies, "I'm a locksmith ... and I'm a locksmith."

Preference for Print, Data Quality, Scripps, Newspaper Adaptation, Ubuntu, Vista

2007-01-24T07:42:00.000-05:00

Folio: article about the preference for print among B2B communicators
http://www.foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=1000741
The report is at http://www.usachicago.com/whitepapers/pdf/usawhitepaper.pdf and is yet another report that points to the authority that print conveys. I wonder though if a more thorough examination of the age of respondents would yield different results.

Lack of high quality data is still a problem for marketers, and constrains the market for VDP and many digital initiatives.
http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=30478

Ad Age article on Scripps Howard and their embracing of new technologies... so much so that they may sell their newspapers. The excerpt below makes one wonder why Time Warner could not have done the same thing. Scripps makes AOL Time Warner look really incompetent.
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=114430
Owning its content has allowed Scripps to move quickly in the digital-distribution space, while its broadcast and cable rivals have been bogged down with rights issues. In the past year, Scripps has used its 27,000 hours of archived content to launch broadband vertical sites focused on key HGTV areas such as kitchen and bath and a woodworking channel born out of DIY. Scripps plans to at least double its broadband verticals in 2007.

An old newspaper guy writes about adapting to the new media age... quite good
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/06-4NRwinter/p07-0604-cullen.html

E&P article about the revenue tradeoffs and transitions that newspapers are grappling with
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003535689

The Ubuntu Linux project has taken yet another step toward ease of use for non-geeks. You can now do an install from inside Windows!
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS4611592451.html

When the new release comes out in April, Ubuntu will have a special multimedia version. The release of 7.04 (codenamed "Feisty Fawn" is much anticipated [btw the number stands for 2007.April, so therefore the 7.04])
http://ubuntustudio.org/

Computer expert Kim Komando recently wrote in her recent USA Today column that Vista was worth upgrading to... but from the reasons she lists, you really do have to wonder if she really meant it. They sound like they are so minor in most people's lives that you're really paying for an expensive bug fix with a horrible license agreement.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kimkomando/2007-01-18-vista-improvements_x.htm

Yahoo and Newspapers, New Rules of PR, Time Magazine and Orville Deadenbacher

2007-01-22T10:53:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! and its deals with newspapers according to BusinessWeek
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_05/b4019029.htm
You can argue that newspapers are dealing with a sworn enemy here, but the reality is more nuanced. The big online players have a horrible record in tailoring products to local markets. ... it's not hard to find examples of some newspaper companies welcoming arrangements that were once deemed unthinkable. MediaNews Group, which publishes more than 50 papers including The Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News, will soon open a combined print and online national sales office in New York—and is currently discussing involving Yahoo, as well. ... souring revenue scenarios—for both Yahoo and newspaper companies—spur creativity. Yahoo seeks a fix appropriate to its content-centric ways... The world's No. 1 portal is betting that, like Microsoft, it can't do local by itself... It's also betting there is huge upside in the local space for the kinds of display ads in which it still outshines Google. And it's a nod to the reality that advertisers remain more comfortable having their ads around tamer and more traditional media rather than, say, user-generated videos.

Download this eBook "New Rules of PR"
http://www.prweb.com/destination.php?awsrc=dmseb_fp
The Internet has made public relations a far more powerful tool than it ever has been. But it's not just an Internet thing... this has been going on for more than a decade. Al Ries (co-author of Positioning: the Battle for Your Mind) has been writing about this for years. The decline in space advertising is not solely Internet related at all. The availability of data bases, new broadcast outlets, the rise of events, promotions, and others are all part of the rise of PR.

The recent layoffs at Time got a lot of media coverage. Here's the letter sent to employees.
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/magazines/memo_john_huey_on_time_incs_layoffs_51373.asp
NY Post story http://www.nypost.com/seven/01182007/business/time_inc_s_bloody_thursday_targets_250_business_keith_j__kelly.htm Ad Age story that explains the $100 million shifted by automakers away from print is a main culprit
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=114419
This is more a story about the old guard, with tired mastheads and annoying content, and their huge fixed costs and bureaucracies, not adjusting to the marketplace. Employment in non-newspaper publishing businesses is up 12,000 this year. The Time folks will get jobs elsewhere. The current Time employees have a lot more to worry about: their business has to transition. It's easier to start from scratch.
What's even stranger is the leg up that Time and its other properties had online. Remember when "content is king" was the mantra? Nope. Distribution is king. Ubiquity is queen. The botched ownership of/by AOL is a story of failed cross media. Easy to do technically, but entrenched camps of legal issues (music), bureaucracy (bonuses based on print performance, not on destroying old media), and really bad customer relationships (AOL was a horror to deal with, and could not make its own transition to broadband). Time is part of a larger organizational cancer of structural incompetence.

Speaking of transitions, there has been much disgust about the new ad with the dead Orville Redenbacher. His image was created digitally and he appears in a new commercial. As one reviewer put it, he looks like Dana Carvey in bad make-up... come to think of it, that would have been better. One reviewer calls him "Deadenbacher." Ad Age's Bob Garfield has some good insights into why the ad is so disturbing... and why it doesn't work, in his article "Return of the Popcorn-Shilling Zombie."
http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=114421
This was a bit of a casting coup, as Redenbacher died in 1995 -- although apparently not of anything serious. Otherwise, how could he be standing there -- in his trademark horn-rims, vest and bow tie-pitching from the Great Beyond? "These MP3 players get lighter every day," he says, in a geriatric cracker-barrel twang. "Would you believe this little baby holds 30 gigs? But if you want light and fluffy, you've got to try my famous gourmet popping corn." ... Orville Redenbacher is Madison Avenue's first pitchzombie, plodding clumsily forward, not quite dead and not quite alive, like Ashwatthama, of Hindu mythology; Drekavak, the Slavic precursor of Count Dracula; and the Bush administration. ...Big Boss spokesmen have had a rough go of it. Pete Coors got pinched for DUI. Dr. Z flopped for Chrysler. And Bill Ford told the world about the bright Ford future only to draw attention to the miserable Ford present. Even the legendary Lee Iacocca made an ass of himself pitching his old company in a bizarre pairing with Jason Alexander. See the pattern? Those men all have something in common, something that must have contributed to their various spectacular failures. Yes, that's right. They're alive. Why torture those poor bastards when some lucky stiff can do a better job without even, you know, respiring? ... The problem is, the stunt is wrong on at least three levels. It's not only a bit grotesque for the audience but also unforgivably disrespectful of the deceased. It's also not all that well done. Yes, Orville looks marginally more lifelike than the technically undeceased Peter Graves in his spot for Geico, but for all the time and money Crispin Porter& Bogusky spent e-resurrecting Orville, he still looks more like an animatronic Epcot exhibit than a live human being. The lipsyncing is awkward, and (for those of us old enough to remember) the voice is all wrong. For those of us not old enough to remember, it just looks like an ultracheesy commercial with a creepy nerd puppet. Then there's that unbelievably lame opening digression about MP3 players. We're assuming this drivel was meant to embrace the tactic used by kidnappers, who photograph hostages holding the day's newspaper to establish a time frame. Orville's iPod buds prove this is not just some vintage ad footage digitally remastered. They needn't have worried. No commercial from those days was this drop-dead bad.

Agencies, Mobile Media, Index of Economic Freedom, IT, MSFT, Excel Error Again

2007-01-17T15:00:00.000-05:00

Why do businesses use the ad agencies they do? The latest poll explains. I'll never forget the time our company (when I had a real job) selected an agency and then the account execs came in... and knew nothing about us. Gee, the presentation went well when they pitched the job...
http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=30402
BtoB also asked marketers to name their No. 1 criterion in selecting an ad agency partner, in current or past searches. The overwhelming response was understanding the client's business (cited by 64.7% of respondents), followed by good chemistry with the agency (17.9%) and outstanding creative (15.0%). Only 2.4% of marketers said price was the No. 1 criterion in selecting an agency partner. B-to-b marketers that have conducted ad agency reviews in the past year agree it's critical that a potential agency partner understand their business and the b-to-b environment overall.

Good article about how technology has changed advertising
http://www.entrepreneur.com/advertising/adcolumnistroyhwilliams/article170166.html

Mobile media had already started to gain steam before the iPhone was introduced by Apple. A site, perooz.com, is already on the case.
http://www.perooz.com/index.html

The annual Index of Economic Freedom has been published by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal. For anyone needing snapshot data and insights into the inner dynamics of world economies (including black market activities), this report is an essential resource, and we strongly recommend it. The report is available as an interactive web site, a PDF download, or as a hard copy purchase.

The top ten countries, and their scores (100 is best) are:
Hong Kong 89.3
Singapore 85.7
Australia 82.7
United States 82
New Zealand 81.6
United Kingdom 81.6
Ireland 81.3
Luxembourg 79.3
Switzerland 79.1
Canada 78.7

According to the report:
The average economic freedom score is 60.6 percent, the second highest level since the Index began in 1995 and down by 0.3 percentage point from last year. Each region has experienced an increase in economic freedom during the past decade... Economic freedom is strongly related to good economic performance. The world's freest countries have twice the average per capita income of the second quintile of countries and over five times the average income of the fifth quintile of countries. The freest economies also have lower rates of unemployment and lower inflation. These relationships hold across each quintile, meaning that every quintile of less free economies has worse average rates of inflation and unemployment than the preceding quintile has....Among specific economies during the past year, the scores of 65 countries are now higher, and the scores of 92 countries are worse. The variation in freedom among all of these countries declined again for the sixth year in a row...
The report ranks economies based on measures of ten factors: business freedom, trade freedom, fiscal freedom, freedom from government, monetary freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, property rights, freedom from corruption, labor freedom.
Download http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/downloads.cfm

Steve Duncan of the blog Lornitropia has a great post about technology, business, and our industry... and mentions yours truly.
http://www.lornitropia.net/archives/2007/01/16/the-business-suppression-unit/

One of the most reliable and impeccably honest co-workers I know is having problems with their computer. It turns out that MSFT's software for verifying whether or not Windows is legitimate or not keeps saying that it a counterfeit copy is being run. It's an HP computer, purchased factory sealed from HP. It turns out that the detection software has an error rate of more than 40%, based on MSFT's own tracking data.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=142

Speaking of Microsoft I have re-posted that Excel file that miscalculates a basic formula... unless you open it it Quattro Pro, Lotus 1-2-3, or OpenOffice Calc.
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=5A42D5EA243D9A31

Kodak Video is Back (kind of), XRX-EK?, H'berg, Scripps Out of Newspapers?, HVP RIP?

2007-01-12T13:06:00.000-05:00

The Kodak video is back
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz6XjXu-oT8&eurl
Not really, but it's new video about consumer photography, and this one does not insult the people let go in their various downsizings. It's the same ranting old man blabbering about how they're not the same anymore. If he jumps around anymore his Depends will get tied up in a knot. But do we really want someone saying "freakin' " in a Kodak video, especially an "old man"? I know that part of the reason they're doing this is to appear more hip to a younger audience, but it will take a lot more than this to do it. You still want the brand, you don't want the baggage. This doesn't do it. How about compelling products and applications instead? No one will take Kodak seriously until they start making money consistently.

There were rumors last week that Kodak could take over Xerox
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/08/AR2007010800968.html
If they took over XRX and installed Ann Mulcahy, a woman ranked by Forbes as more powerful than "The Oprah," that might make sense. It can't happen. XRX is more likely to buy EK, but that would make us question Ann Mulcahy's judgment. The rumors of HP buying XRX still persist, and regularly ebb and flow. XRX is still not where it was, but at least there's honest accounting and a legitimate upside potential to it.

Speaking of takeovers, Heidelberg's stock buybacks has not done anything to help their situation.
http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/z?s=HDD.F&t=1y&q=l&l=on&z=m&c=%5EGDAXI&a=v&p=s
The stock can't keep up with the DAX index since the buyback was announced.
Morgan Stanley recently sold its shares, and as an investment banker, if they suspected something was up with a takeover or a potential deal that they could be part of, they would have stuck with it.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=asRY3iX1DwkY&refer=germany (reference is at the bottom of the article)
Another article characterizes the buybacks as a defensive measure against takeover
http://www.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct=us/0-0&fp=45a7a2c2e12bdea8&ei=882nRdCmAYqWswHv2aydDQ&url=http%3A//www.forbes.com/home/feeds/afx/2006/12/18/afx3262379.html&cid=0
Buybacks rarely work... if you have the money, give it to the shareholders if you can't figure out what to do with it. These buybacks are being implemented to protect the vested interests of big shareholders and executive jobs. Shareholders should have the opportunity to have bidders come forward. This does not appear to be playing out the way it was intended.

Publishers are improving their web sites
http://www.foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=1000704

Publishers are still fighting over postal reform
http://www.foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=1000716
Small publishers are claiming that large publishers have rigged the system in their favor when it comes to discounts. This is, essentially, B2B publishers claiming that the big consumer publishers are not playing fair. The two trade associations are duking it out.

Scripps may sell its newspaper properties to focus on cable, Internet
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aZKSqu24ldUY&refer=home

The industry grapevine says that High Volume Printing magazine is no more. That's sad... the magazine had the perfect demographic for the long-term future of the traditional printing business. Over the years, its bimonthly schedule worked against it, as it did not have the frequency needed to really build its brand when the "the big 3" were all monthlies, and it had no Internet strategy in the least. Remember, 70% of all capital investment in the printing business is made in the top 2500 establishments... and that's probably less than 500 firms.

Good graduate student paper on the adoption of Linux by governments... and that it seems to be coming to a tipping point. I'm still using Ubuntu on my notebook and will soon be making my transition on my desktop.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT8673493458.html

Consumer as Agency of the Year, Jobs, Trade, and a Terabyte disk for only $400?

2007-01-08T19:09:00.000-05:00

Advertising Age picked "the consumer" as the agency of the year, pulling the same weasel act as Time magazine did for their person of the year.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=114132
...big agencies -- great companies that once cast long shadows over corporate America -- are losing more of their control within a marketing process that for decades they have dominated. They're already being squeezed by procurement departments and jostled by media companies and nibbled at by a host of other kinds of agencies that grew in importance as TV ceased to be the only game in town. "Traditional agencies have never had to think about distribution because they'd been told what media to color in," says Nick Law, North American chief creative officer at digital shop R/GA, New York. "Creatively, it's all been about creating punch lines. For years, there's been a guild mentality. Clients came because agencies created the magic behind the screen. The new environment has blown open the idea of being an expert, so you can be very good and working in a bedroom in Dundee, and the world can be seeing your work."

Excellent jobs report Friday, confounding the experts. ADP had issued a report earlier in the week that payrolls would be down by 40,000. So the fact that this was good must be really confusing to them. :)
1) October and November revisions added 29,000 payroll jobs
2) December payroll jobs were up 167,000
3) The household survey was up by 303,000
4) The civilian employed workforce is at a record 152.7 million+
The unemployment rate stayed at 4.5%. Why? Because 23,000 more people decided to join the employable work force. Because unemployment is calculated on the basis of people who are seeking jobs, when the economy grows the unemployment rate can actually go up because more workers are attracted to the workforce, increasing the denominator of the formula. When the economy declines, the unemployment rate can actually improve as workers shun the workplace and no longer seek jobs, decreasing the denominator of the formula. So the fact that it stayed at 4.5% is good news in light of new workers being willing to enter the workforce. It's amazing how little news coverage this report is getting, but why should we be surprised. The newspaper business is downsizing, so in their minds, a good employment report must be a lie.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

Economist Gene Epstein ("Econospinning" is his excellent book) had a good article in Barrons about the jobs report
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB116804502334668820.html?mod=9_0031_b_this_weeks_magazine_columns
What's amazing to me is how few people actually read the jobs report. Economists who should know better often complain about the unemployment report not counting certain discouraged workers and others who are no longer part of the work force... but they do. Epstein explains...
The fall in the labor-force participation rate -- the share of the eligible population either working or looking for work -- has spawned a cottage industry of critics who cite it as "proof" that the unemployment rate is no longer a reliable measure of either the economy's ability to use its workers or workers' ability to get jobs. The participation rate ran 66.2% in 2006, down from its peak of 67.1% from 1997 through 2000.
Critics figure this extra 1% that used to participate in the labor force would be doing so if only the jobs were available. From there it is an easy leap to say that the unemployment rate is seriously understating the extent of unemployment... But the critics ignore overwhelming evidence to the contrary. In fact, the BLS has kept comprehensive data on the "hidden unemployed" that are meant to address this very issue. Are people not looking for work for "reasons of discouragement"? Are they not looking for work because they might have difficulty getting child-care or adequate transportation? Are there people who work part time and therefore would be counted in the labor force, but would like full-time work and can't get it (the "involuntary part time")? ... The agency uses these categories to supplement its count of the official unemployed. People are considered unemployed if they did not work in the past week and made at least some effort to look work over the past month. But the hidden unemployed have always been present in large numbers -- even in 2000, when the official unemployment rate was at a 30-year low, and jobs were going begging. Were they present in unusual numbers over the past few years? No... The BLS keeps three other measures of the unemployment rate that incorporate the "discouraged," "marginally attached," and the "involuntary part time." All three confirm that hidden unemployment has been no greater over the past few years than it was in the late-Nineties.

Speaking of Epstein, he was on booktv.org (division of C-Span) this weekend. I taped it and found it to be good. But then, I'm an economics geek. I was surprised to see someone still using transparencies and not projectors, etc. Struck me as odd. Epstein is astoundingly well-read is the impression I got. I enjoyed the book and have linked to it many times.

Magazine consultant Marty Walker has some insights into the magazine market in this interview
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_9302.asp

Hitachi's terabyte drive: $400. Watch for a number of product intros in this area. Terabyte drives are already available. Note also that there are people selling Linux O/S with applications on USB flash drives. It will not be long before your desktop computer will have only flash memory for the O/S and applications.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/128400-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

The stock market does better when Congress is not in session; a funny, but true article
http://www.clubforgrowth.org/2007/01/the_dc_effect_on_the_stock_mar.php

"Letter to Lou Dobbs" in the Christian Science Monitor explains the purpose of trade... but Lou's not about to listen. Maybe we should have him read the jobs report above.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0104/p09s02-coop.html?s=hns
If you're still skeptical that America's trade deficit is no cause for concern, perhaps you'll be persuaded by Adam Smith, who wrote that "Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade."... Smith correctly understood that with free trade, the economy becomes larger than any one nation - a fact that brings more human creativity, more savings, more capital, more specialization, more opportunity, more competition, and a higher standard of living to all those who can freely trade.

While everyone is focusing on Bob Nardelli's severence from Home Depot, WSJ looks at it also as a blemish on the "Six Sigma" quality improvement movement
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116787666577566679.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
It's a reminder that companies can make themselves very efficient at the wrong things

Industry editor Earl Wilken died on January 4, 2007. I first knew Earl when he was at Graphic Arts Monthly as their technology editor, and would see him at NYU Graphics Center events. He worked in the industry well into his 70s. I remember Dick Vinocur telling me how he "discovered" Earl laboring in obscurity at Datamation and brought him over to GAM. Both were part of Technical Publishing, owned by D&B at the time. My comments are at the article on WhatTheyThink.
http://members.whattheythink.com/news/newslink.cfm?id=25542

Printing Shipments: Stunning! ... and other stuff...

2007-01-04T11:17:00.000-05:00

Printing shipments in November were stunning, up a strong +$504 million or 6.2%, and October's shipments were revised up a little, too. This is seven straight months of positive comparisons. On an inflation-adjusted basis, it was the fourth consecutive month of real growth, up +$355 million, or 4.6% compared to 2005.

The WSJ has changed its format and is saving $18 million in newsprint and distribution costs in the process. But there's more to it that that, as noted in an Advertising Age article
http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=114062
As an editor who wrestles daily with the wholesale shift that's taken place in readers' business-news consumption habits, I think the redesign ticks just about every box you'd expect it to tick. In giving over 80% of the paper to analyzing what the news means, the Journal has accepted that news is a 24/7 online commodity and that the only way for a print publication to retain value in that environment is the kind of analysis that leaves readers feeling smarter. This might be obvious to those who live their lives in the blogosphere, but it still takes a brave newspaper publisher to tackle the shift head on -- we can all name a couple of obvious examples of papers that are still a long way from accepting that reality.

Plastic Logic has built an e-paper plant in Germany that will output a million screens a year
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070103005271&newsLang=en

Magazine forecast from MediaWeek
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/print/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003526043

A new $100 laptop story... well, it's actually a $150 laptop... but this has user reactions, and discusses what countries are in and what countries are not...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,240701,00.html

WiFi in cars through a company called Autonet Mobile. I can't wait for the "surfing while driving" complaints
NYT story http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/technology/02avis.html?adxnnl=1&ref=technology&adxnnlx=1167829302-L46wmv3KkRMvfqafPCP84w
Company press release http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070102005095&newsLang=en

Google hint: when you order something online and they give you a UPS tracking code, put the code in Google rather than going to the UPS.com site. It's a lot faster.

Forecasts, Agencies, Newspapers, Sydney vs. Sidney, and more

2007-01-02T18:11:00.000-05:00

MediaWeek has forecasts for 2007
Interactive media http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003526032 Newspapers http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003526031

Ad agencies are changing dramatically, and printers should look at the same dynamics as a way of positioning their businesses.
http://www.azcentral.com/abgnews/articles/1228abg-adtrends1228.html
Phoenix agencies that want to grow their businesses and attract national clients, must evolve and respond to changes brought by the Internet, third screen and mobile technology, shifting demographics and tech-savvy consumers... "The traditional ad agency model is broken and dead," said Dan Santy, principal of Santy in Phoenix. "What clients need to know is about how to successfully navigate the shifts in marketing and how to solve their business problems," he said. "As agencies, we need to prepare them on how to navigate that shift."

eMarketer has interesting predictions for 2007

Online Ad Spending Will Hit $20 Billion
Some Money and Lots of Hype for Online Video Advertising
Social Networks Are Set for a $1 Billion Windfall
Downloadable Games Will Get Hotter
Thirty-Seven Million Strong: A 'Minority' Bigger than Canada
Mobile TV Arrives
US B2C E-Commerce Will Cruise Past $200 Billion
The Retail Power of Word-of-Mouth
Broadband Services Will Matter as Much as Speed
DVRs Pump Up TV Viewing

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004418

NYT's David Carr writes about the generational differences in newspaper use, recent newspaper deals, and the future of the newspaper.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/business/media/01carr.html

Good editorial in WSJ where economist and gadfly George Gilder explains why "economics is not for actuaries." It's a discussion about Social Security. I can't think of a single circumstance where any SS forecast has been correct. Gee, it's just as accurate when they try to forecast deficits, tax revenues, etc.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116768413349764065.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

China's Internet users are increasing dramatically
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6216231.stm
The number of people using the internet in China grew by 30% over the last year to 132 million... the number of people with access to broadband rose to 52 million... China already has the world's second largest population of internet users after the United States...

E-commerce isn't for everyone. Here's the story of a German vacationer who wanted to go to Sydney but booked a flight to Sidney, Montana instead... and didn't realize it until he arrived there.
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/_a/confused-tourist-lands-in-us-not/20061229081109990011?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Barron's economist Gene Epstein discusses research that shows corporate giving increases profits
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB116744548699563183.html?mod=9_0031_b_this_weeks_magazine_main
This was something that Friedman disagreed with... but Epstein explains why it works

General Mills reduced sugar cereals have flopped. Some market trends are not worth following. The real marketing lesson: new trends require new brands.
http://adage.com/article.php?article_id=114025

Convergence is something I have written about, as people mistake entrepreneurial and free market decision for convergence. This is a great comic from WSJ. A child opens a Christmas present and says "What good is a camera if you can't use it as a phone?"
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/ED-AF143_804jan_20061224152816.gif

Personalization in e-mail is discussed in a Responsys survey of marketers. Personalization technology is underused, according to the report. What's so "funny," is that personalization in e-mail is "cheap," a matter of manipulating data bases. Personalization is really overrated, and has little staying power. If it did, personalization beyond mailing and salutations, would be rampant. The fact is that the medium used has little staying power. In a multiple media marketplace, personalization is a tactic, not a strategy.
http://www.responsys.com/press/index.asp?page=pr_236
According to the survey, 44% of marketers already personalize some aspect of email campaigns and 89% plan to increase their use of personalization in future efforts. However, survey data also revealed that nearly 40% of marketers restrict their personalization efforts to the salutation. Only 10% individualize all aspects of their email campaigns, including salutation, images, timing and promotion. The biggest roadblock to more personalization is lack of time and resources, as cited by 64% of respondents. Other major obstacles include limited information about customers and lack of integrated customer data.

Your English is awesome!... Lake Superior State University's annual list of banished words, or at least words that should be banished.
http://www.lssu.edu/whats_new/articles.php?articleid=1188

One of those end-user stories that makes one just love MSFT... another Ubuntu shift. Another example of how assuming every customer is a thief makes for annoyances for honest ones.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36635

MSFT has created a stir by giving free computers to bloggers. The Acer notebooks were for evaluation of Vista, and could be kept by the recipients.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/01/business/blog.php
I'd erase Vista and start doing Linux tests :)

More Mergers, Vistaprint Gets a Web (of the Internet Kind), and a Software Lament

2006-12-27T17:50:00.000-05:00

Cadmus was bought by Cenveo. More to come, I'm sure, and I suspect Cadmus was looking for a deal. Well, so much for getting into packaging as a refuge for the problems in the printing business.

Mergers & acquisitions in a mature business is the last refuge of big companies who have trouble adapting to the new marketplace. It's also a great place to make money if you're an investment banker. It's not the stocks, it's the fees.

Remember, more than half of all acquisitions fail to deliver on the expectations held at the time of the deal. Markets change, management has to deal with unexpected events, and management cultures and styles take two or three times as long as expected to mesh. These transition costs are almost always underestimated, and don't always appear as lines on financial statements. They're often work undone, customers ignored, new inititatives that are delayed, executives unavailable to direct their workers because they are doing transitional "things."

And don't forget the upheaval among the employees... many of them leave and go to smaller companies and often do well there, bringing a level of experience that the smaller companies could not normally attract. Because management can't give them a straight answer about the viability of their jobs, they start looking elsewhere. It's not that management doesn't want to give a straight yes or no answer about the jobs of their underlings... it's that there is rampant uncertainty for all jobs, including the managers themselves.

That uncertainty also weighs on the customers. It's hard to have demovitated employees working with wary or confused customers. It's not the kind of situation that breeds confidence. What's worse, customers may lose printing company employees they like working with in the process.

As in most markets, their vibrance and innovation comes from the upstarts. In the printing industry's case, the upstarts are not necessarily other printers but purveyors of media alternatives who are competing for the same dollars.

Note that these recent mergers are defensive, they are not to create new markets or new opportunities or to ride new waves of demographic, economic, or technological change. They are a search for ways to adapt the same old tools to new problems. Most times they not work out anywhere close to what they hope. When they do, they are financially successful, but not strategically. There is a point where all the financial clean-up and straightening out has significant rewards and is complete. Then there's the next step: facing a changing marketplace with a winning long-term strategy. That's normally two years or so into a merger that it gets properly addressed, and often the company gets sold again to someone else who can supply that when the financial gurus can't.

Biggest issue? Starting out with a vision for what that newly merged company looks like in a marketplace at least five years from now and the working the reorganization toward that. If cuts are coming, better to make them swift and hard so that the new business gains a footing, even an uncertain one, early. There's nothing worse than a constant parade of "black Fridays" where people look in their check envelopes for the legendary pink slip.

And, just a reminder of what not to do... Radio Shack's mishandled dismissal by e-mail of this year:
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/08/30/D8JQV30O1.html

John Harland, check printer, is being bought by Ron Perleman's investment group.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2006-12-20T145009Z_01_BNG8323_RTRIDST_0_JOHNHHARLAND-TAKEOVER-MANDFWORLDWIDE-UPDATE-1.XML
Near and dear to my childhood heart is Marvel Comics. Perelman bought that business and killed it, or at least he almost did. It's detailed in a good book called Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled over the Marvel Comics Empire -- And Both Lost.
Review http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2006-12-20T145009Z_01_BNG8323_RTRIDST_0_JOHNHHARLAND-TAKEOVER-MANDFWORLDWIDE-UPDATE-1.XML
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0785116060?ie=UTF8&tag=drjoewebbcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0785116060

3Q-06 GDP was revised down to 2.0%, as was expected. My expectation was based on the ISM manufacturing index heading down. Latest reports are that retail sales have started to surge the past few days... makes me wonder if 4Q-GDP may hit 3.0% which would be quite a surprise and would support the Fed's sense that the economy is still quite strong. Based on the heavy discounting going on, I would suspect that the inflation numbers would look pretty good.

What was really funny the past two days was the reports from MasterCard and Visa about how retail sales were down so much from last year. Ugh!!! When you adjust for inflation, this year was about the same as last year! Inflation is 1.8 percentage points lower than last year's increase, so you have to add that to the percentage increase to get a similar comparison. On top of that, I can't remember any year when retailers weren't complaining about holiday season sales not being what they expected. Of course, Amazon broke records again, and that's why the MasterCard and Visa numbers are so important, because they include e-commerce.

How did this slip away from me? A few months ago, VistaPrint announced it was working on some web site products for small business. http://www.vistaprint.com/vp/about/list_press_detail.aspx?pid=294

Then, today, this e-mail shows up:

Are these folks reading Dr. Joe? Seems like that :) What's next for them? I suspect it will be direct mail campaigns as is being marketed by InfoUSA http://www.zipmailusa.com/ and perhaps a business like www.constantcontact.com

When you get a file and it has an unfamiliar file entension, sometimes operating systems can't detect what program should open them. Those mysterious extensions can be deciphered or narrowed-down at http://filext.com/
I ran across a floppy disk that had a ".pre" file on it. The site reminded me that it was a Lotus Freelance file. Gosh, it's been 12 years since I used Lotus Freelance? Amazing... and yet again, another great Lotus product left to die, just like my once-beloved word processor, Lotus Manuscript. Equally amazing is that the files (DOS) can still be downloaded http://www2.support.lotus.com/ftp/pub/desktop/Manuscript/ . Lotus killed Manuscript and bought Ami from Samna Corporation, and it would later become WordPro (which had something akin to the "ribbon" that MSFT is making such a big deal about... except WordPro had it in 1995. Manuscript never made it to Windows. There are still features in there I miss.
Yes, there are others who lament the demise of Manuscript.
http://www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/orms-6-06/forum.html
Lotus Manuscript was a desktop computer tool way ahead of its time. It was the first desktop-based word processor that catered to the needs of technical documents. In an age when MS Word and Word Perfect were mere document-creating tools, Lotus Manuscript went beyond simplicity. It offered excellent technical word processing capability never before seen at the desktop computer level. The software was so far advanced ahead of its peers that it failed miserably in the market. Its demise after Version 2.0 in 1987 probably fueled the need for its competitors (Word and WordPerfect) to scramble to incorporate technical word processing capabilities... Some of the technically oriented functions offered by Manuscript in 1987 included Screen Capture, Keyboard Stroke Capture, Versatile Common-Language Thesaurus and Embedded Graphics. Most word-processing users of that era did not need those types of capabilities. So, the software mostly languished on the shelves of software stores. The software, however, found ready users among technical professionals — engineers, scientists and researchers. For the few years that it lasted, Manuscript was the word processor of choice for university professors in engineering and science. The technical orientation of the software made it complicated to learn and use. Even trainers cursed the software as they struggled to learn it well enough to teach it to others.
Lotus was a very sad story. They believed that IBM would have the stamina to stick with OS/2 against MSFT Windows, and they didn't. So Lotus Freelance, which was years ahead of Powerpoint, died from neglect, as did Lotus Organizer, which was killed by MSFT Outlook and Palm Pilots.

Media Mix, Electronic Billboard, E-Paper, You Are a Fool and an Imbecile, and Other Stuff

2006-12-20T16:45:00.000-05:00

Direct marketing agency/printer Wilde reports a small survey that print is more effective than the Internet. When you read it in more detail, it's a mix of media that they are using.
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20061218005592&newsLang=en

Who says cholesterol is bad? Not if it's used to create electronic billboards
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/business/worldbusiness/18junk.html
The company is Maginx of Israel http://www.magink.com/index.php

e-paper story about Hearst newspapers interest in the technology
http://www.designnews.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleid=CA6399263

Time magazine's selection of "You" as person of the year is not going over well. One of the better comments about the topic is called "The Blog Mob" with the subtitle "Written by fools to be read by imbeciles." The commentary was probably written before the Time selection but is consistent with some of the other comments I have read the past couple of days.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009409
The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps... Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling... Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion.
Yeah, what he said...

Dell Computer has named former American Airlines CEO Donald Carty as their CFO. You'd think Carty's name would be mud. He's the guy who negotiated with the unions claiming poverty, then when the deal was signed gave huge bonuses to himself and upper execs. The outrage was so strong that he was forced to resign. Why would Dell even want him on their Board?
http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?view=CN&storyID=2006-12-19T222855Z_01_WNAS6068_RTRIDST_0_DELL-CFO-URGENT.XML&rpc=66&type=qcna

This is not meant to pick on NAPL, because I've had my share of gaffes... On the web page that promotes a seminar about "decommoditizing the printing business", there is this sentence in the opening paragraph:
NAPL members enjoy deep discounts on a wide array of events...
http://www.napl.org/news.events.aspx
Ummmm... maybe attending a "decommoditizing the seminar business" seminar would help?
In today's world everything is a commodity, it seems, because of the near-perfect information that buyers have. But "commodity" has a real dictionary meaning, and it is constantly abused in common language. "Print is NOT a Commodity" was the posting on 5/11/2006 in PrintForecast Perspective and it's worth reading, if I may say so myself, based on the comments I received about it.
http://pfcperspective.blogspot.com/2006/05/surprise-print-is-not-commodity.html

A note to those for whom statins have had serious side effects, such as yours truly. My side effects led me to my low carb diet and karate. But the side effects are a sign that your liver may be sensitive to other things. The FDA today has asked for new warnings on products like Tylenol and other products that contain acetaminophen.
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2006/NEW01533.html
They are concerned about the combination of acetaminophen and alcohol, since both are metabolized in the liver. Because of my statin history, it was suggested that I not use acetaminophen, though there are no studies about the topic, just that if I had liver toxicity (with statins and niacin as well), it was probably wise to be judicious. As far as the warning about ibuprofen in the same release, that is less of an issue, especially if taken after eating something. At my age, taking karate with 20-year olds and 30-year olds, sometimes you just need what we 50-year olds call "vitamin I".

PPI Malarchy, Iraq's Economy, MSFT Hates Open Source

2006-12-19T11:00:00.000-05:00

Talk about making a big deal out of nothing... the Producer Price Index went up and everyone is having apoplexy. Yet, when you look at the real data, which no one seems to do, on a year over year basis, the PPI is up 0.8%. Ugh!

The PPI is an index, and November 2006 was 159.7. In August, the reading was 162.1. So, since then the PPI has dropped by -1.5%. Seven of the previous 10 months were higher than November's 159.7.

It's just another reminder of these headlines that you'll never see because they won't sell papers and won't get people to tune into the 11pm news:

No Inflation
Full Employment
Wages Up
Household Weath Rising
Britney Spears Renounces Her Past

All of them are true except the last one. And that would be a big story because the newspapers would consider it to be bad news. Because if it was true, they'd actually have to do some real journalism.

Iraq's economy is booming! Starting from nothing creates high growth rates, but it shows that even a smidgen of economic freedom can go a long way.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16241340/site/newsweek/

Microsoft identifies open source software as a significant business threat
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar06/staticversion/10k_fr_bus_07.html
Our business model has been based upon customers paying a fee to license software that we developed and distributed.
Very few people realize this, but when you buy WIndows or Office, you technically do not own it, and MSFT has every intent of reminding you of that as often as possible with Vista and Office 2007.
Under this license-based software model, software developers bear the costs of converting original ideas into software products through investments in research and development, offsetting these costs with the revenue received from the distribution of their products. We believe the license-based software model has had substantial benefits for users of software, allowing them to rely on our expertise and the expertise of other software developers that have powerful incentives to develop innovative software that is useful, reliable, andcompatible with other software and hardware.
Then why does my computer crash or software lock up so often? Is that a feature?
In recent years certain “open source” software business models have evolved into a growing challenge to our license-based software model. Open source commonly refers to software whose source code is subject to a license allowing it to be modified, combined with other software and redistributed, subject to restrictions set forth in the license. A number of commercial firms compete with us using an open source business model by modifying and then distributing open source software to end users at nominal cost and earning revenue on complementary services and products. These firms do not have to bear the full costs of research and development for the software.
Liar liar pants on fire. OpenOffice is a good example. Sun Microsystems has put big money behind OOo, and in return, gets to sell it as StarOffice. They have R&D costs. Just because they found a unique way to get more out of them, last I heard, was called "innovation."
A prominent example of open source software is the Linux operating system. While we believe our products provide customers with significant advantages in security and productivity, and generally have a lower total cost of ownership than open source software, the popularization of the open source software model continues to pose a significant challenge to our business model, including continuing efforts by proponents of open source software to convince governments worldwide to mandate the use of open source software in their purchase and deployment of software products. To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, sales of our products may decline, we may have to reduce the prices we charge for our products, and revenue and operating margins may consequently decline.
Consumers have not really seen reduced prices unless they buy MSFT software as part of a new computer, where the OEM licenses are comparatively cheap. But there, there is no competition for that market. Just try to buy a Linux computer from a major PC manufacturer. You have to go to one of the small custom builders to get that. A consumer building a computer on their own will end up paying $700-800 for Vista and Office2007, often more than the components they will use to build a decent computer itself.
Buying software except for the most narrow of specialty applications is starting to become dumb.

You are the Person of the Year; Online Retail Up; Santa Cookie Document; Reynolds Explains Income

2006-12-18T18:16:00.000-05:00

Think the Internet's role in life hasn't changed? Then you'll hate Time magazine's person of the year cover story
Reuters http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061217/tc_nm/time_dc
Time http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
Information consumers are in charge, and they use the 'net in more and different ways than before. It there ever was a time to understand what marketing is, it's now. "We're in the publishing business" used to mean print, always. "We're in the content-creation business" doesn't even capture the sea change. I still think of publishing today as the content deployment business.

Online retail sales are very strong
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2006-12-17-online-retail-usat_x.htm

How radio broadcasters are coping with the Internet
http://www.radioandrecords.com/radiomonitor/news/business/top_news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003522664

Skype founders using their money on Internet TV
http://news.com.com/Skype+founders+to+launch+Web+TV+service/2100-1038_3-6144389.html
This will undermine broadcasters, of course, and open up significant new markets for micro audiences and microsegmentation of markets

Essential legal document if you are leaving any cookies for Santa
http://www.consumerfreedom.com/downloads/pro/docs/061217_christmas.pdf

Commentator Rich Lowery talks about Lou Dobbs
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/12/the_apocalyptic_centrism_of_lo.html
"Ninety-six percent of our clothing is imported. This nation cannot even clothe itself." But if we literally couldn't clothe ourselves, we'd be naked. Dobbs' line is like saying we can't feed ourselves because we buy groceries from supermarkets. Textiles inherently are not an advanced, high-paid industry, and it is no wonder that an economic superpower doesn't do a lot of textile production. Would Dobbs prefer that more of us were hunched over sewing machines rather than employed in industries like software development, financial services, law, accounting, biotech and pharmaceuticals?
It's a reminder of the Wall Street Journal article "We Think, They Sweat" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB110376349870907921.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

And Lou Dobbs won't want to read Alan Reynold's analysis of income data
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009398
Biggest problem? Not including transfer payments to low income earners. I do remember back in 1995 that the four most common and simultaneously provided programs together for families was the equivalent of a $40,000 taxable income. I have not seen any data that make the adjustment for taxation to determine what the equivalent income would be for a wage earner in 2006.
There was an excellent book a few years ago about this called "Myths of Rich and Poor" cited in Thomas Sowell's 2/8/06 column http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell020806.asp
The book does a worldwide comparison of economies and populations, and is more fascinating that one would think.

Profit windfalls, Statistical Abstract, Lou & Mises, OpenOffice resource

2006-12-15T16:41:00.000-05:00

Profits as a percentage of sales:
Microsoft 28.5%
Adobe 26.6%
Goldman Sachs 23.1%
Exxon 11.5%
So let me get this straight... we want to have a windfall profits tax on.... Exxon?

The Commerce Department has published the 2007 U.S. Statistical Abstract, one of the most fascinating documents for data geeks ever produced. It's got something for everyone, and has lots of international data. Sections are downloadable as PDFs.
http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstract.html

Good article titled "Lou Dobbs Thinks You're a Fool" on the Mises economics site.
http://www.mises.org/story/2407

If you're using OpenOffice, there is a downloadable free manual now available
http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors2/index.html

Profits, Excel, Traditional Media, and How Inflation Distorts the Movies!

2006-12-14T16:08:00.000-05:00

A discussion of printing industry profits is the latest "Data-to-Go" release, available at the e-store
http://drjoe.stores.yahoo.net/prinshandpr.html

Got a note on my blog the other day about the Excel bug, suggesting I try online spreadsheet program EditGrid http://www.editgrid.com/home It failed the test as well. For those who want the latest "score" or who want to try the spreadsheet again, I have uploaded it to http://download.yousendit.com/F1B2CB416BF827CF where it will be available until 12/26/06. Lotus 1-2-3 passed. In total, 14 spreadsheet programs were tested and only 9 passed. The final tally:
602PC Suite = PASSED
Ability Office = FAILED
EditGrid online spreadsheet =PASSED
Evermore Office spreadsheet = FAILED
GNUmeric open source spreadsheet = FAILED
goBeProductive Suite = PASSED
Google online spreadsheet = PASSED
Lotus 1-2-3 = PASSED
OpenOffice/StarOffice = PASSED
Softmaker Planmaker = FAILED
Thinkfree online spreadsheet = PASSED
WordPerfect Office Quattro Pro = PASSED
Zoho online spreadsheet = PASSED

Good B2BOnline article about how traditional media still lead among consumers
http://btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=30166
According to the survey of more than 300 online shoppers, more “traditional” holiday gift-idea sources such as window shopping (46%) and catalogs (45%) still beat Web sites (32%), online advertisements (15%) and e-mails (14%). Going directly to the source (for instance, asking the recipient what they would like) (67%) is what most survey takers planned to do. “What really surprised me is that this was an online sample—these are people who are doing their buying online,” said Scott Bailey, exec VP-strategy at Targetbase. “I expected that they would prefer online, but they don’t.” ... Bailey said that catalogs are on the rise, but changing drastically. “These aren’t the 1,000-page Sears behemoths anymore,” he said. “They’re kind of sexy now.” He said that L.L. Bean’s catalog has a mountain-climbing story in it that’s written by a company employee. If the reader wants more information on the climb, they are directed to the Web site. “They’ve achieved the goal,” Bailey said. “The Web site is where the purchases take place. It doesn’t matter how people get there. Catalogs aren’t out of vogue; they simply serve a different role than they used to.”... To Bailey, the lesson to direct marketers from the survey is that “the old channels don’t get thrown away,” he said. “No matter how many new channels get created, they all need to be integrated and used.”

I've always wondered what the differentiation is between online print businesses. One may be the kinds of files that they accept. According to the Kim Komando computer newsletter..."Lulu, iUniverse and Cafepress are three print-on-demand services that can create your book. Lulu and iUniverse accept Word files. Cafepress requires a PDF file. Prices vary, depending on the number of pages and the binding selected." Last I checked, Blurb.com did not accept Word files.

Funny headline on a computer site re: MSFT Vista
"Vista won't be worth buying until after the first 500MB service pack"

Inflation distorts our perceptions about all types of historic events. One of my favorites is movie hype about how much a certain picture did over a weekend and whether or not it was a record first weekend, etc. etc. This page lists the top movies on an inflation adjusted basis and puts many things in perspective.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm
Titanic is considered the biggest grossing movie of all time, at $600 million. Sorry, it's actually #6, with less than half the revenue of Gone With the Wind. Also ahead of it are Star Wars, The Sound of Music, The Ten Commandments, and E.T. Last year's top movie, Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest is #44 on the list.

Profits Improve; MSFT Exec Wants a Mac, Musicians Behind the Curve

2006-12-12T13:31:00.000-05:00

Printing profits were a lot better in 3Q-06, but are still not up to historical levels. The good August and September helped out tremendously. It was mainly a cost change, however. Non-production employees are down -6.5%, which means that printers have been cutting overhead. The net number is that there are 12,000 fewer non-production jobs, and 3,000 more production workers. The number of production employees stayed the same. It works out that for each employee cut, profits went up $116,000. Basically, the reduced costs of salaries and benefits went straight to the bottom line, which makes me wonder how much of the increased sales the industry had actually had improved margins. The cost of goods sold part of the income statement may have been about the same, but the expenses below that look like they were the reason for the improved bottom line.

The four-quarter moving annualized total of inflation-adjusted industry profits is now $4.59 billion. The profits for the quarter itself were $1.27 billion, highest since Q3-2004 when it was $1.36 billion. The profits before interest and taxes were 5.7%, highest since Q3-2003, when it was 6%. This is the best industry profits performance in three years, and the data are slowly getting better and better. We are still about 1/3 of what profits were in 2000. This is a minor rise, but it's a good rise. Expect more cost cutting ahead, often from consolidation. We're in the right direction, finally

Article in ComputerWorld how MSFT development officer says that he would buy a Mac.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9005873&intsrc=hm_list
I'm not buying a Mac because I'm an Ubuntu man!

The headline was "Musicians Oppose Media Consolidation" so I figured I had to read this. Talk about being behind the curve! The complaint is about so many stations sounding alike as you drive along for miles and miles. This is coming at a time when radio properties are going up for sale because their future does look pretty bleak. They're attacked by streaming media, commercial free satellite radio, iPods, all kinds of recorded music, and any variety of things. The Internet is making location meaningless. Radio was a local medium. Its high maintenance costs led it to carrying national programming, which in turn, led it to consider local presence except for drive time as a real revenue problem. The companies may be consolidating, but the sources of content are clearly not, and radio is not the place to be.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/061211/fcc_media_ownership.html?.v=1
The musicians doing the most complaining in this article are country-western artists. I always loved David Allen Coe's perfect country song, and the lyrics can be found here:
http://www.singulartists.com/artist_d/david_allen_coe_lyrics/you_never_even_called_me_by_my_name_lyrics.html
The key verse is
WELL, I WAS DRUNK THE DAY MY MOM GOT OUT OF PRISON
AND I WENT TO PICK HER UP IN THE RAIN
BUT BEFORE I COULD GET TO THE STATION IN MY PICKUP TRUCK
SHE GOT RUN NED OVER BY A DAMNED OLD TRAIN

There's the old joke about playing country music backwards: you get your house back, your girlfriend or spouse returns, and you get sober again.
The big "villain" has been ClearChannel, which was just sold to some private equity investors and will be partially dismantled. The economics of the industry changed and they weren't ready.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/16/AR2006111600537.html

Digital Divide, Digital Magazines, Newspaper Death Spiral, Other Stuff, and My Adventure Getting to Atlanta

2006-12-11T20:15:00.000-05:00

The digital divide.... between young Internet users and old ones. Good article, special emphasis on instant messaging, which I could not live without, but others my age (50) just can't seem to like it the same way. Part of it seems to be typing speed (I'm darn good for being a five-fingered typist), for others it seems to be a vision thing.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/12/07/D8LSAHOG7.html

Digital magazines not doing as well as originally thought they would.
http://www.foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=6849

B2BOnline article discusses newspapers' imminent "death spiral"
http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=30136
The economics of social media will chip away at the newspaper business model just as readers are taking flight. The number of households in the U.S. has grown by 40 million in the last 30 years while newspaper circulation has actually declined. About half as many people under 25 read newspapers as people over 65. Readership is declining in all age groups... History has taught us that businesses based on scarcity collapse in the face of abundance. Ten years ago, information was expensive to gather and disseminate. Today, we're overwhelmed by information. Newspapers still operate as if they were the gatekeepers of news, but that gate has swung wide open... Over the next 20 years or so, most of America's 1,450 daily newspapers will die or be merged out of existence. They will be replaced by many thousands of special-interest online communities. The craft of journalism will change fundamentally in the process.
A longer article titled "The coming collapse and rebirth of newspaper journalism"is at http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=30158
The author has a blog at http://www.paulgillin.com/
And they call me "Dr. Doom"

Margie Dana of the Boston Print Buyers was interviewed about small and micro-businesses using print
http://www.globaltalkradio.com/ondemand/shows/thelifestyleceoshow/2006Dec04/index.asx

Wharton's Jeremy Siegel writes about Milton Friedman
http://finance.yahoo.com/columnist/article/futureinvest/15733

Anyone using OpenOffice may benefit from the free manuals that are at
http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors2/

A discussion about incomes that Lou Dobbs doesn't want to hear. It reviews changes in spending, income, and as they relate to family size and other demographics.
http://www.nysun.com/article/44915

Below is what is more typically called a blog, about my trip to Atlanta last week. My blog is usually reminder notes, mainly to myself, so that I have a central place to keep links to articles and thoughts that I can use and expand upon should I desire at some other time. I've described my blog as my refrigerator with an infinite number of cybermagnets holding notes onto its front door. Most blogs are personal, as this entry is below. But before we get there, I've been updating my personal blog http://karateafter40.blogspot.com/ about my study of karate and its assistance to me in living with and sometimes conquering prostatitis and chronic pelvic pain syndrome. I'm still working on some more current posts for that as I get the chance. Anyway, below is my blog of my most recent business travel adventure...

Victim of the Bean Counters

Companies are often fond of saying that theirs is a numbers business. They set up processes and structures and then get very good at measuring them, correcting as they go along. Then they teach people how to manage by the numbers, setting parameters that identify when processes are in or out of a controlled range, and when they are out, then they act. The business news of the past few years have been filled with stories of executive financial improprieties, but those improprieties are widely known only because they involve money. There are many other numbers that are abused in organizations.

The tyranny of numbers caught me the other day as I was attempting to make connections in Philadelphia to my flight to Atlanta. I'll leave names out of this, but this airline is large enough to make a bid for Greek Letter Signifying Change Airlines, and is otherwise USeless. It lived up to its reputation that it should be avoided whenever possible. It is possible to manipulate non-financial measures to make it look like things are in control but they are not.

My 6:00pm flight left early from Providence, as all passengers were on board. After we were in the air for a few minutes, we were told that Philly was in a landing delay, but it appeared that it would be lifted in time for our arrival. It wasn't. We ended up circling and touched down 20 minutes late. The position of the aircraft upon landing was such that we basically drove the full length of the airport to get to our gate. Blocked for about five minutes by the movements of another taxiing aircraft near our gate, we finally pulled up. The bell rang in the cabin that it was now safe to unbuckle, stand, grab our things, and prepare to disembark.

We stood. We waited. After another five minutes, the pilot announced that no one was there to move the jetway to the plane. A union jurisdiction issue, I imagined. He didn't say. We waited.

Finally, the problem was solved, and we began to leave. I had five minutes to go from gate B6 to C17, which I did. People movers certainly helped. I was confident I could do it.

I arrived at the ramp and an attendant was trying to solve a problem with another passenger's boarding pass. She seemed flustered as she poked at her keyboard and kept coming up empty. Some other Providence passengers arrived. We waited while she was helping the passenger. One of us asked if we could get on and we were told to wait. A door opened near the gate and another attendant walked in and said the plane had pulled away. I said, “but it's 7:55 and we were here from the Providence flight that just got in.” I explained the delay and the jetway problem. I asked why the plane was not held, since every passenger I've known has been on flights where we waited for “connecting passengers,” especially on the last flight of the day. She explained that the FAA made them do that (didn't Flip Wilson have a routine that sounded something like that?) and that it was out of the airline's control. I explained that I had been on many flights that were held for passengers. The deer was paralyzed, standing majestically over the faded double yellow line of the winding country road, the reflection of my headlights shining like bright stars in its eyes. We were told to go to the customer service counter a few gates away.

Told that there were no more flights to Atlanta, nor a way of getting me to a closer city that might have a very early flight the next morning, we were “offered” the opportunity to stay in a nearby hotel at a reduced rate. I called Marriott and found that all their properties were full. I accepted the “invitation” to stay at the Ramada Inn for $75 rather than sleep in the airport. I was told my baggage would be down at zone 4.

So much time had passed that I figured I'd get something to eat and let more time pass to let the bag get to where it should be downstairs. Stressful times require comfort food and a break to my low carb routine. Sbarro pepperoni pizza and a diet Coke were in order. I guess I could have eaten just the cheese and pepperoni and stayed loyal; I gave in and enjoyed the lush slice in the fullness its designer intended.

I went downstairs and saw the hotel phone bank at the bottom of the escalator and called the Ramada. When asked if I had my bags, I said no and was told to call back when I did. When the operator asked me, I immediately knew I should have done that, but I figured so much time had passed it just had to be there. I had waited long times for many “courtesy” vans before (the drivers are all trained to say “you didn't see me when I passed the first time, sir?”; adding “sir” to insults makes it a “courtesy” van). So I went looking for my bags and found the Providence carousel. The bag was not there. I walked up to the “baggage information” counter where there were four people sitting, and two other employees on the customer side chatting with them. I asked for help and was directed to the baggage service office at the other end of the baggage area. I guess that was the only information they were trusted with.

I went to the baggage service office, and a cheerful new employee, untainted by the intensive company training efforts she was to eventually endure, asked me a few questions. She made a call asking about the location of my B22 bag with Southwest Airlines ID tag, TSA lock, and blue tape on its feet. Ten minutes later, the call came that my bag was nowhere to be found. Another customer came in that my cheerful attendant started to assist. I chatted the more grizzled and methodical, but not unpleasant second attendant. She explained that the bag probably made the Atlanta flight. That was strange, I always thought because I could run faster than a Samsonite bag, even if it had the advantage of wheels. She checked her screen and said it indicated that the Atlanta flight had actually left at 8:30, not at its scheduled 7:55. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

It was then clear what had happened. It was more important to shut the door of the plane, and possibly roll back (though if my bag made it, they probably closed the door and pulled the jetway back) just to claim that the flight left on time. Bean counters, I thought. The flight and bag left on time, but the passenger did not. Doesn't matter, the plane was on time; they don't report missed passengers, just bags and planes, it seems. She gave me an overnight pack with shaving cream in some foil packs, a short-handle toothbrush, and other essentials. I asked for a food voucher. She said I'd have to go to the baggage information counter. I thanked her and left, with the excited anticipation of finding out what those four people really did at that counter.

I asked for some help and said I was directed there because I needed a meal voucher. I was told she would have to go to another office to get it. I asked for two, and she said “two?” with great disbelief. She started to walk to the office. I interrupted one of the other employees, engrossed in a novel and asked if I could talk to a manager. She told me to follow the one who was working on my vouchers. I caught up to her and asked if she could find a manager for me, and she said she would. It was now clear what the four people at the baggage information counter do: they specialize in telling dissatisfied passengers to go somewhere else so they could get back to their novel.

We got to the office and she disappeared into a door behind the counter, emerging a few minutes later with a manager who listened to my story. I explained how I thought it was quite interesting that my bag could make a flight but I couldn't, and he agreed that they probably held the flight at the gate to load bags. The dumbness of the whole thing just seemed to get grow, and he knew it wasn't worth defending, only apologizing. I asked them to pick up my hotel cost, and he said he couldn't, but would try. He came back about 10 minutes later with a coupon for discounts on a future Bankrupt Airways flight. I said I never had these kinds of problems on Southwest, which I have flown almost exclusively for four years. I've never missed a connection, and usually arrive early. As I mentioned Southwest I thought about a line from one business book that the best customer service is to have a product that requires none, and that's what Southwest seems to have figured out, though they are not exempt from problems, they just seem to have reduced the frequency to be far less than others.

He told me I could give the discount coupon to anyone, which was a relief. Perhaps there is someone I don't like for whom it would make a nice meaningless gesture of friendship. I had already gotten my meal vouchers: $5 for breakfast, $10 for dinner. I thanked him for his help and called the Ramada again. I realized that I could have been at the hotel an hour before because I had no bag to wait for anyway, and perhaps this was all the Ramada person's fault... nah, they'd have to be really in tight with Foreclosure Airways to do that, and I was learning that was impossible. The operator said they still had plenty of rooms. Great, I thought, a hotel that no one wants to stay at.

The courtesy van arrived and we piled in. It smelled like a smoky bar, but it was getting me where I was going, and that was to sleep, so it was tolerable. Five minutes later we got to the hotel and I could see through the doors that the line for registration was about 10 or 15 deep. Luckily, there were three people working the counter. There are good airport hotels and there are bad ones. This was close to the latter, needing renovation about 10 or so years ago. But it had free wireless, it turned out. Kind of like someone pulling a rickshaw while wearing a Bluetooth headset to chatter on their cell phone. This was one of those places that specialized in “missed flight” stayovers and airline crews who are being punished. While I was at the counter, someone who had just checked in and came back down and said that their room had not been made up. Having that happen to me would certainly have made my day complete, I thought.

I got up to my non-smoking room by walking through the smoking hallway, and opened the door. It was in good order, right out of the set for My Name is Earl, on NBC every Thursday night. Their so called “distressed” rate for the room was a premium price for its condition. The rug was in decent condition because of its protective layer of dust. “Anyone can stay in a bad hotel for one night,” I remember being told early in my career. Since my computer charger was in my suitcase, soon to land in Atlanta, I hoped, I checked out the free wireless, which was slow, but still free, and reliable. My cell phone battery was dying, so I called home and asked Mrs. Webb to call back, and we reviewed the events of the last hour or so. She had canceled my hotel at Atlanta airport, for which they waived the cancellation fee, the only thing that had gone right in the last few hours, it seemed (though I am always grateful for landing safely, even if late).

I woke up about 4am and decided that getting the 5am van was probably a good idea, figuring the chance of bedbugs in an airport terminal was lower than at the My Name is Earl. The mildewed shower and its faulty drain compelled me to push up my scheduled exit from the hotel. The foil-packed shaving cream and imitation Trac-II razor did their work with a minimum of grimace, and bloodlessly. I left the room and headed downstairs for the van, and got to the airport in time.

The Forced Liquidation Airways kiosk did not let me check in, but the attendant at the counter figured out the problem, assigning me seats for my new flight and my return. What was supposed to be 18 hours in Atlanta was going to be seven, and I would miss my plant tours that I was so looking forward to making. I asked him to also check where my bag was, and he said that it was definitely in Atlanta waiting for me at the baggage services office. Good, I thought, I'll head straight there and then find a men's room and be spared of staring longingly at a moving luggage carousel.

I deplaned and made may way through the escalators and legendary Hartsfield Airport subway. I bumped into one of the other Providence passengers and we walked to the baggage office together. He did the talking this time. I was surprised we were in the right place at all without the Philadelphia baggage information desk to advise us. He told the smiling lady behind the counter that we had been bumped from the Philly flight last night but our bags were on that flight. She said that she had no bags for us, and that the only bags leftover from last night were by the window, and it was clear it was not mine or his. She got out from behind the counter and started to check the room next door, but stopped. “Can you check the carousel once more?” As I was about to ask why, there was my bag rounding the turn. The bag never made the flight last night, the Philly baggage handling crew had it all along. I could have had it with me at the Ramada Inn had someone found it. We thanked her and went on our merry separate ways.

After my consulting engagement, I returned to the airport and rather quick work of checking my bag and getting through security. My dinner voucher found me at Sbarro again... the lines were too long elsewhere. I camped out and did some more writing and then it came time to board my flight to Charlotte. All went well until we got to the runway when we learned we were being held 15 minutes as a traffic hold. Here we go again, I thought to myself, but we landed only 10 minutes late and I made my way from Terminal E (which looks disturbingly like the commuter gates at Dulles) to Terminal D and found my way to the flight to Providence. It's quite a difference going from a packed commuter jet to a half-full 757. I appreciate the latter, but I was impressed with the two commuter jets I had on this trip. We were all on board when we were informed that Charlotte had imposed a 15 minute wait to make sure everyone's bags made it to the plane. Gosh, that sounded familiar. This was after the door was closed. I wonder if anyone was stranded like I was. All I knew was I was headed home, supposedly with a tailwind that would make up the time we lost on the ground.

Well, so much for making the bean counters happy at literally the expense of the clients. I could have been in Atlanta on time, but my bag could have sitting in Philly. But I would not have been subject to the My Name is Earl Inn. That would have actually been better.

In the whole process I remembered the line Flip Wilson used more than 30 years ago while in his character of Geraldine: “If you can fly six hours in the dark from Los Angeles to New York, you can find my bags.”

I've had some odd reactions when I tell people I prefer to fly Southwest; some clients actually volunteer to pay more for my expenses so I could fly something else. I know the Southwest system quite well and how to get my “first class” seat most of the time (the emergency window seat 10A where I have real leg room). The airline has really transformed Providence, and everyone thinks it's their pricing. It's not; that's how they get you the first time. It's the fact that things work and you get where you need to be, and if you don't get there, they will find a way for it to happen. The expectations are set by what they do: it's a no frills airline but because they don't pretend to be anything else, you focus on whether they get you to where you need to be. You get the sense that the Southwest employees actually like working for their company, and that it's infectious. Their jovial manner comes from a confidence that they know what they are doing and that they like doing it. They are not there for the jobs, but to there for those jobs at Southwest. Back in the late 1990s when I was on the road more often and for more extended trips, I was always dealing with delays and missed connections, no matter what airline I took. Southwest had limited service in Providence, but was growing little by little every few months. Their system was not capable of supporting what I needed at the time. Now it is. Three cheers for Herb Kelleher's grand idea of an airline that works.

This airline annoyance capped off a week where a major multinational bank bungled the merchant services account for our new business, getting everything wrong including the most basic contact information, spelling of the name, phone numbers, addresses, which credit cards we would use, equipment, and other items, even opening a business Visa account we specifically said we did not want, despite filing of all of the proper forms with all of the information correctly supplied. None of these problems appeared all at once; they became evident a little at a time, the drip drip drip of a water torture. I asked the account manager who was so skilled at setting up the account incorrectly to close it for me. That, I was informed, could only be done by customer service. I told him that I was miffed that an assistant VP could open the account, but an 800 number clerk was the only one who could close it. He insisted; I complied. I called and immediately asked for a supervisor; there was no resistance to my request.

It turned out that the only thing that went well in the entire fiasco was how quickly and efficiently she was able to close the account, and ensure that it could not ever be used. I remarked to the person handling it that she was the only person who knew what she was doing, and that I really appreciated it. She apologized on behalf of the bank, sent me a confirming e-mail, and that was it: it was over. I wondered if I should consider opening another account so that she could close it because it was so refreshing and unfortunately odd to have someone do their job so well. Did I mention that the bank branch we use had ordered three sets of checks, and the format and style was wrong each time? We ended up ordering directly from Deluxe. They had also gotten the endorsement rubber stamp wrong; that only took one time to fix.

The big shots are all there for the glory of the sale, but you hear crickets in the corner office when something goes wrong. I think I'd insist that a VP close an account once in a while just to find out why it happened and what led up to it. That's just me. It reminded me of the bad resort stay that our family had one time, and when I asked the president of it when the last time was that he or anyone on his team stayed at their own resort he asked “Why would I want to do that?” Exactly my point.

Dr. Doom is Up to No Good, Take The New Media Test, Economics, Postal Reform, Ubuntu

2006-12-10T12:27:00.000-05:00

Above headline from Providence Journal picking up a story from the Washington Post about the new video game Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

The economic webinar from 12/6/06 can now be accessed online
http://members.whattheythink.com/home/webinars/webinar061206.cfm

Take this test that will tell you how savvy in new media you are.
http://chiefmarketer.com/new_media_marketing_12042006/
(I got a 12; you score well if you have the right cell phone)

Good Thomas Sowell column about worldwide economics
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell120506.php3

Universal McCann’s Bob Coen’s Advertising Forecast
http://www.mccannworldgroup.com/news/pdfs/insider1206.pdf

Tips about offshoring book printing successfully
http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/story/story.bsp?sid=41638&var=story

Article in praise of Ubuntu Linux
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/54507.html

Economist Walter Williams' article about Milton Friedman
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams120606.php3

What? Postal reform in a lame duck Congress?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/07/AR2006120701961.html

One of the proposals is to link rate changes to the CPI. Bad idea. Nothing like market forces to keep prices down, or to allow prices to rise to reflect demand. Giving the CPI safety valve may make things predicatable, but it removes the pressure to reinvent ways to reduce costs. It's bad enough the Postal Service's prices cannot reflect marketplace realities (the can never have sales, for example, or raise prices during peak demand, and lower them during slack demand), but to now let them depend on regular increases unlike every other business that has to fight it out in the marketplace is a bad idea. A camel is a horse designed by a committee.

October Printing Shipments Up +$259 million, +$155 million on Real Basis

2006-12-05T11:52:00.001-05:00

Printing shipments in October were up a strong +$259 million on a current dollar basis, and up +$155 on an inflation-adjusted basis. Real printing shipments have been up three consecutive months.

An increase of this size has not been seen since July 2004, when real shipments were up +$206 million. September's shipments were revised down -$21 million on a current dollar basis.

For the year, real shipments are now slightly better than last year; it had been negative until October.

The increase may be due to the highly contentious local political races, where print was considered more effective than new media, since local digital media does not have the presence nor the interest among Internet users that global, national, and topical web sites attract.

The first two months of the most important quarter for printing are up +$436 million compared to last year, and +$170 on a real basis. While some print categories, such as magazines, are still having problems, it is clear that other sectors are now picking up the slack. Direct mail probably had a good run because of the political advertising, especially.

Some historical stuff:

The last year there was a full year of months with real increases compared to the prior year was 1995.
The last time we had three months of consecutive real increases was actually a four-month run from May to August 2000.
The biggest one-month rise compared to a prior year (our data only go back to 1993) was +$897 million in December 1995.
The biggest one-month decrease compared to a prior year was September 2001's -$1.5 billion. No one should assume that was the result of 9/11. Every month of 2001 prior to that had a real decline averaging -$557 million. 9/11 didn't help, but the industry had declined 12 consecutive months before that.

Now here's the question: why are print shipments going up with weak GDP, just like the regression models I've been running said that they would? Because, I guess, they are. But to speculate, not everything can be done electronically, and digital media are concentrated in some big properties, like Yahoo!, AOL!, and a few others. It's still a very concentrated business. They have been able to raise their prices. Also, there is an understanding that multiple media are more effective than just one, so print gets a share. Remember, strong economic growth creates investment dollars in communications technologies that make avoiding print easier. We may be picking up a billion dollars or so of print that is not being imported, especially from Canada. We're still reviewing those data.

Is this the bottom of the market? I am not bullish in the long term as broadband is still growing and more really cool gadgets with more reliable connectivity are on the horizon. They're not just staying on the horizon... they're starting to march toward us. Let us not forget that for the past 13 years, the average change in monthly printing shipments is actually a decline of -$155 million. One has to wonder if the bulge in political printing that we got this time was actually a last gasp of large scale local political printing. The national elections of 2008 will have coattails that local and state elections can ride, and then the next local-only elections are 2010. I suspect that local Internet and digital media will be in a quite different position at that time than they were this past November.

Newspapers, Digital Future, Brands as Destination Sites, and more

2006-12-04T15:00:00.000-05:00

Excellent article from Slate about the state of newspapers, and the industry's predictions about itself for the last 30 years
http://www.slate.com/id/2154678
...print editions of newspapers, which saw the endgame coming 30 years ago and did everything they could to forestall it, need to figure out what they're best at and double down in those realms. To give one example, if newspapers think they're in the editorial business, the slimming of the business pages at most dailies indicates that the standard business section is doomed and the copy should be folded into the rest of the paper to make room for a section the masses really want to read. Sports sections that refuse to retool themselves as the smart supplement to ESPN can kiss their pages goodbye.

Newspapers have neglected local news for quite a while, and have been scooped by non-dailies. The Internet does not "do local" very well, and newspapers have realized that this is an area where they can leverage some expertise. Gannett is experimenting with "hyper-local" news.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/03/AR2006120301037.html

The USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project has just released their latest report, highlighted in a press release.
http://www.digitalcenter.org/pdf/2007-Digital-Future-Report-Press-Release-112906.pdf
“More than a decade after the portals of the Worldwide Web opened to the public, we are now witnessing the true emergence of the Internet as the powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future. “The Internet has been a source of entertainment, information, and communication since the Web became available to the American public in 1994,” said Cole. “However, we are now beginning to measure real growth and discover new directions for the Internet as a comprehensive tool that Americans are using to touch the world.”
What's really interesting is that Cole is giving presentations titled: "Just an Essential Part of Everyday Life." And I still run into Internet deniers...

P&G's marketing mix is a subject of a Cincinnati Enquirer article
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061203/BIZ01/612030305/1076
It's all part of the gradual transformation of the advertising industry from one dependent on television commercials and print ads to electronic, promotional and word-of-mouth marketing campaigns that try to catch you at the moment you're making your purchase decision. Companies and consumers alike are increasingly relying less on mass media and more on targeted messages that meet the industry mantra of "relevance."...The transformation has spread well beyond P&G. In a region known for its branding companies - in part because of P&G's presence and spinoff business here - every marketer, every media buyer and every advertising agency is trying to plot its impact. Companies increasingly are putting more messages in more places in your daily life, whether it's your mobile phone or the soccer field where your child plays on Saturday morning.
The article includes a link to a video that makes one think: gosh, i certainly miss those people teaching the world to sing about the real thing... can't we get big budget commercials back again?
http://www.eepybird.com/exp214.html

Brand sites are getting heavy Internet traffic. P&G and Unilever get about 9 million unique visitors monthly.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=113556
The combined monthly traffic of unique visitors to the P&G and Unilever websites is more than 9 million, according to ComScore Media Metrix. And part of what's driving the traffic is old-fashioned web display advertising and e-mail pushes. Corporate and brand websites -- once derided as "brochureware" in a digital marketing world that quickly moved to sexier applications -- are getting a rehabilitation of sorts as their traffic numbers vie with those of many consumer sites in the web's long tail. Such package-goods marketers as Procter & Gamble Co. and Unilever don't sell many products directly online. Their low-cost, low-involvement brands tend not to generate much search. Yet the websites of P&G and Unilever now reach nearly 6 million and 3 million unique visitors, respectively, in the U.S. each month, according to ComScore Media Metrix.

WSJ article about media growth in 2007 that summarizes data from GroupM, Zenith, and Merrill Lynch
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116519642214339626.html
Merrill and GroupM see a slight cooling of online advertising's red-hot growth next year, though it will retain double-digit percentage rates that would be the envy of older media. Zenith, however, sees online ad-spending growth rising to 29% from 25% this year, fueled by online video advertising, which has taken off this year. Merrill notes that the pace of online video advertising and ads on popular social-networking sites could affect its prediction.

Washington Post has article about the blending of TV and Internet
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/AR2006120101633.html

Barron's economist Gene Epstein has an excellent column about why the ISM report of Friday is not dire, and also takes real aim at CNN's Lou Dobbs for what is basically journalistic malpractice. I used to really like Lou Dobbs until about 15 or so years ago, and his sloppy work is just a real turn-off now. Epstein disected his work in Econospinning and this column just updates some of the latest problems with Dobbs-isms.
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB116502150054438720.html?mod=9_0031_b_this_weeks_magazine_columns

Because Microsoft Word knows that I have been saying bad things about it, it decided to crash at an inopportune time. I didn't remember whether I had saved after entering a few paragraphs of text, so I wanted to make sure that I didn't lose what I had written. I obviously could not print it out. Luckily the computer had not locked up, so I hit the PrtScn (print screen) key to save an image of my screen and then pasted it into Microsoft Paint and saved the image as a bitmap file. When I restarted Word, I realized I was missing only two paragraphs. I opened the bitmap in Paint, grabbed those two paragraphs, and saved them as a separate .BMP. I then ran my OCR software on the image, and I had text back with some minor corrections to be made. And that was my big entertainment for the weekend.

Novell and MSFT made a deal re: Novell's SuSE Linux product that has the open source community in an uproar. This CNet article has an interesting perspective on it.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+has+OS+patents+Linux+has+none/2010-7344-6140341.html?part=dht&tag=nl.e703

BULLETIN: ISM Manufacturing Index Turns Negative

2006-12-01T10:32:00.000-05:00

http://www.ism.ws/about/MediaRoom/NewsReleaseDetail.cfm?ItemNumber=15697

It fell below 50 for the first time in 41 months, and the employment indicator turned negative as well. The Fed has overtightened, and we may get a rate decrease in the first quarter rather than the second quarter of 2007 if more negative months are reported. The ISM non-manufacturing is reported on Tuesday, all of this just in time for the webinar on Wednesday.

If you have not signed up, do so at http://members.whattheythink.com/home/webinarregistrationform2.cfm Needless to say, my next few days updating economic forecasts will be .... interesting....

NFL, P&G, Counting Surfers, That Excel Bug is Elsewhere, Bad Data, Other Stuff

2006-11-30T18:41:00.000-05:00

Monday's column has been submitted... the common wisdom about postal rate increases affecting print shipments significantly to the downside is debunked. I know I'll get letters. The data actually suggest the opposite.

Saw this coming a mile away... NFL.com is going to start broadcasting games on the Internet http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=internetNews&storyID=2006-11-29T202925Z_01_N29339251_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-SUMMIT-NFL-VERIZON.xml
Major League Baseball did the same this year on MLB.TV

P&G is allocating more money to mobile marketing... it's now a legitimate spending category
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=113514

They're still having trouble counting the number of people on the Internet, and Newsweek has documented the chase and its problems. And there's a terminology problem... in our industry UV is a way of drying ink, but in the Internet business, it's "unique visitors." How can we keep this straight... even when we say "go to the web," printers think of a press, but their kids think it means to go surfing.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15789991/site/newsweek/
Each of the major measuring firms is eager to point out its rivals' flaws. Omniture's measures are based on technology that counts computers, not people—an approach that can lead to double-counting of UVs (for example, when the same user contacts a Web site from work and then from home). On the other hand, since panel data by definition are extrapolations, the counts produced by Net-Ratings and comScore can be substantially off, Web-site publishers say. "Where you get into craziness is taking 10 different numbers and trying to figure out which is correct," says Peter Daboll, Yahoo's chief insight officer. "What we're looking for is consistency within each vendor." Industry groups like the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Media Research Council have been aggressively trying to establish measurement guidelines. As in counting couch potatoes, totaling up UVs will require wanna-be Nielsens in cyberspace to keep an eye peeled for the details.
The other day I posted an Excel file that Excel gets wrong because it has a bug. http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=6C2C711C618CA347
Other products have failed the test as well.
WordPerfect Office Quattro Pro = PASSED
Google online spreadsheet = PASSED
Thinkfree online spreadsheet = PASSED
Zoho online spreadsheet = PASSED
GNUmeric open source spreadsheet = FAILED
Evermore Office spreadsheet = FAILED
Ability Office = FAILED
602PC Suite = PASSED
goBeProductive Suite = PASSED
Softmaker Planmaker = FAILED
For the ones that failed, it almost makes you wonder if they've pirated MSFT's buggy code! I've written to Tony Bove (author of "Just Say No to Microsoft") to see if he's had results from yet other suites. I don't have EasyOffice or LotusSmartSuite handy.

I had to transfer about 500GB of data to a 1 terabyte external drive and found that my Windows systems could not "see" it. I tried it on 3 of them. My two Linux computers could see it, but could not perform any file functions on it. It turns out it was formatted as a Mac drive. Stumped, I Internet searched my way to software called "MacDrive" which allowed a 5-day free trial. The product worked, and did so very well. Info is at http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/bootcamp.asp and the free download is at http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/freetrial.asp

I'm always on the lookout for articles that describe "bad data" and how they got that way. The WSJ "Numbers Guy" column is always good in that regard. Here he tackles the misinterpreted number that 1 in 166 kids suffers from autism. One thing he does not mention is the incentive school districts have to identify kids with a variety of maladies to qualify for extra Federal dollars. Here, statistics with monetary incentives tend to create greater incidences. The result is that solving the right problem with the right approaches becomes difficult. In the case of the article, the 1 in 166 is justified based on new definitions and only in its proper context, but it rolls up so many categories that one has to wonder if it does anyone any good other than the shock value that has proved itself lucrative in fundraising.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/numbers_guy.html?mod=djemnumbers

Speaking of cutting through junk data, I have always loved the site www.quackwatch.com that gets to the heart of the matter when it comes to medical and various homeopathic things. It's amazing how few things that people assume are true, especially homeopathic approaches, actually survive clinical trials; this site documents them. There's also my favorite science site www.junkscience.com. And as far as urban legends go, www.snopes.com is quite good, especially in checking out some of those chain letters about viruses that new computer users send about with such paranoia and panic. A quick visit to Snopes is all it takes to see if it's real or not.

Ben is Uncomfortable; GDP Revised; New Blogs; Catalogs; Free B2B Guide; Stock Photo Trouble; MSFT Nervous About Tux the Penguin

2006-11-29T14:15:00.000-05:00

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke spoke on Tuesday, and used the words "uncomfortably high" to describe inflation. The Fed has overtightened, so look for things to be slow and only mildly positive for the first half of 2007.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2006/20061128/default.htm
Inflation, which picked up earlier this year, has been somewhat better behaved of late. Overall inflation was pushed up this spring by a surge in energy prices, but the recent declines in energy prices have largely reversed those effects. Price inflation for consumer goods and services excluding energy and food, the so-called core inflation rate, has also moderated a bit in the past few months. But the level of the core inflation rate remains uncomfortably high. Over the next year or so, the economy appears likely to expand at a moderate rate, close to or modestly below the economy's long-run sustainable pace. Core inflation is expected to slow gradually from its recent level, reflecting the reduced impetus from high prices of energy and other commodities, contained inflation expectations, and perhaps further reductions in the rate of increase of shelter costs and some easing in the pressures on capital and labor resources.

3Q GDP was revised up from +1.6% to +2.2%. Don't be surprised if it gets revised down to +2.0% for the final figure. I knew +1.6% was too low based on things like the ISM reports. These revisions are not trivial. Being off the way they were means the government couldn't detect only $750 billion. That's all. Kind of like the 810,000 workers the BLS missed counting over the last year.
www.bea.gov

Two new print blogs: Randy Davidson has launched www.PrintCEOBlog.com and tied it to the still growing WhatTheyThink.com. I often comment to postings there. Randy tells me that traffic is steadily increasing faster than he expected. Industry consultant and trainer Peter Muir has started his Bizucate blog at http://www.bizucate.typepad.com/ , where he focuses on stimulating ideas and creating customer-directed change. After I meet or have a meal with Peter, my head always hurts from all of the ideas. I'm still surprised how many people read this blog. In a lot of ways it's not a blog at all, but my "cyber-refrigerator." I post things here like one might put them on the kitchen fridge with a magnet, because I'm always losing things and references otherwise.

Some recent catalog business articles
About LL Bean http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1310AP_Catalog_Holiday.html
Associated Press http://www.nydailynews.com/business/story/474852p-399453c.html

Google's translation capability is something deserving to be made fun of for its entertaining problems with idioms and jargon... and also great awe as it is a true wonder of what technology can do. Here are some overseas printing site links using the Google translation to what we affectionately call "Googlish"
Graphiline (French) http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.graphiline.com%2F&langpair=fr%7Cen&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
Publish.de (German) http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.publish.de%2F&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

B2B Marketing magazine has issued their annual Marketers Resource Guide, and it's free as a PDF. It lists top agencies of all types. Contents list is below
http://www.btobonline.com/toc.cms?productId=19
Top 100 B-to-B Advertisers — Page 4
Top 50 B-to-B Internet Advertisers — Page 7
Top B-to-B Agencies — Page 10
Interactive Agencies — Page 15
Direct Marketing Agencies — Page 16
List Managers — Page 20
List Compilers — Page 24
Data Cleansers — Page 26
Data Segmentation Vendors — Page 28
Analytics Vendors/Web Analytics Vendors — Page 30
E-Mail Resources — Page 32
Search Engine Marketer Resources — Page 37
Event Services — Page 38
Event Designers/Producers — Page 41
Media Power 50 — Page 44
Online Publishers — Page 50
BtoB's Who's Who— Page 51

Anheuser Busch will be spending 10% of its ad budget in 2007 online, taking it mainly from broadcast TV. It's starting Bud.tv, with 8 Internet "channels" as part of its plan
http://adage.com/article?article_id=113496

A mostly negative Ubuntu review. I'm still thrilled to have something non-Windows and non-Apple that works so reliably; I've been really impressed. I'm sticking with it.
http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/59/

Stock photography has its downside: it can be used over and over and over again... in the strangest places
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116467838729434053-j1YX6tWZ7hTQ_MqzLcRfX2utcSE_20071127.html
The ad from Key Bank portrayed a heart-warming family moment: a dad pointing out something on his laptop to his smiling young daughter as she leans over his shoulder. In fact, the scene may have been a little too charming. The same image appears in a recent marketing brochure -- from Bank of America.

Microsoft is getting feisty about Linux, so it must be hurting or worrying them. The have to see the non-developed markets slipping away from them. How can you complain about piracy when people use open source software. Easy: complain that the open source software infringes in MSFT intellectual property.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=7629

With all the penguin stuff that's out this year because of Happy Feet and last year's March of the Penguins, you'd think the Linux supporters would be making a bigger deal about things. After all, Tux the Penguin is the official symbol for Linux.
http://www.linux.org/info/logos.html

Microsoft's Vista (and Office2007) will have some pretty stringent end user agreements that will be enforced by the software itself. It will undoubtedly cause problems. This article cites them and the case law involved.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/22/vista_eula_worries/
The terms of the Vista EULA, like the current EULA related to the Windows Genuine Advantage, allows Microsoft to unilaterally decide that you have breached the terms of the agreement, and they can essentially disable the software, and possibly deny you access to critical files on your computer without benefit of proof, hearing, testimony, or judicial intervention.
In fact, if Microsoft is wrong, and your software is, in fact, properly licensed, you probably will be forced to buy a license to another copy of the operating system from Microsoft just to be able to get access to your files, and then you can sue Microsoft for the original license fee. Even then, you wont be able to get any damages from Microsoft, and may not even be able to get the cost of the first license back.
The French government is starting a switch to Linux, worth watching throughout the continent.
http://www.toptechnews.com/news/The-French-Say-Au-Revoir-to-Microsoft/story.xhtml?story_id=130007NARIVO

StarOffice, the enhanced version of OpenOffice will now be part of some really plush inflight services on Singapore Airlines
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-28-2006/0004481573&EDATE=

NAA Hides Downturn in Newspaper Online Ad Revenue in Plain Sight; American Business Media Almost Gets It Exactly Right; PDF Alternatives

2006-11-28T05:59:00.000-05:00

The news media made much of the NAA's press release
http://www.naa.org/sitecore/content/Global/PressCenter/2006/ONLINE-NEWSPAPER-ADVERTISING-REPORTS-TENTH-CONSECUTIVE-QUARTER-OF-DOUBLE-DIGIT-INCREASES.aspx?lg=naaorg
that said how strong newspaper Internet revenues are. Unsaid in the release, but on their site http://www.naa.org/trends-and-numbers/market-databank/quarterly-newspaper-advertising-expenditures.aspx is the real data. Online ad revenues actually DROPPED from $667 million to $638 million. Before that gets blamed on seasonality (July and Aug are typically slow in newspapers), this is the first time that there has been any quarter-to-quarter decline EVER since they started measuring it.

The trade association American Business Media has published as small booklet "The Business Media Proposition. It was announced in a press release a couple of weeks ago.
http://www.americanbusinessmedia.com/abm/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=337&SnID=1988050364
I can't help but compare it to the Print Council (www.theprintcouncil.org and not www.printcouncil.org, as we well know) brochure issued at GraphExpo. The difference is night and day. I'll just accentuate the positive: the ABM's booklet is concise, informative and speaks communicators' language. It is almost totally objective. A business person, new or experienced, can get something out of reading it. Most of all, it explains why and how different media work together, as it recognizes that the business communications market is far different than it used to be. It's a fine job, and well worth emulating, not just for the printing industry, but for many industries.
One thing not to emulate is that the booket is $10 on their e-store. First, the store is incredibly hard to find on their site, so here's the link: http://www.e2e-store.com/abmstore/index.cgi?member
Second, there should be a downloadable PDF of such a fine effort. The idea is to infect minds with these ideas, I would think, especially when this is so well done. They're missing the opportunity to reach a much larger audience by not having such an excellent promo piece like this online. I've written to them asking for a link to one, and will post it if they decide to do so.

Sure, I say that Office2007 might be the last of its kind... and the WSJ says that Vista might be the last rollout of its kind...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116459728069433263.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today

Tired of the length of time it takes for Acrobat Reader or Acrobat itself takes to open a PDF or a PDF web page? Jump over to FoxIt Reader. It's stunningly fast and quite good http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
I'm a big fan of making PDFs with OpenOffice, but you of course need other programs that don't have built-in PDF capabilities. PDF Creator does a great job http://downloads.sourceforge.net/pdfcreator/PDFCreator-0_9_3_GPLGhostscript.exe?modtime=1156491273&big_mirror=0

Mailbox, a Dying Breed; ChiComms Start Blogging; Major US Newspaper Sings 'O, Canada!'; Just Say No to MSFT... It Can Be Done

2006-11-27T13:25:00.000-05:00

Street corner mailboxes are a casualty of the Internet age, or so the USPS claims. They're also a casualty of electronic funds transfer, credit cards, cell phones, telephones, and a whole host of other things.
http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_330172513.html

China's Communist party... starts blogging!
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/11/25/061125195449.kom7jmiw.html

Long rumored, the SF Chronicle has now agreed to outsourcing its printing to Transcontinental starting in 2009
Editor & Publisher http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003409527
CBC http://www.cbc.ca/cp/business/061117/b111773A.html

No wonder Amazon.com did not want to sell an e-book reader-- they will be selling their own!
http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/amazon-kindle-ebook-reader-packs-evdo-199789.php

The $100 laptop emerges in Thailand http://www.bangkokpost.com/Database/22Nov2006_data001.php

Marketting trends to watch for consumers, business, the media
http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/smallbiz/entrepreneur/10322970.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

Remember I mentioned I was using the latest version of the Ubuntu Linux operating system? There's an interview with the man behind it at
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS4646261136.html

Finally, I got to finishing Tony Bove’s fascinating book “Just Say No To Microsoft.” In it, he details numerous reasons and ways to avoid Microsoft software. This is not the rant of a software conspiracy theorist, of which geekdom has too many. Nor is it against proprietary software, as many computer enthusiasts and users are (even my beloved new toy, Ubuntu operating system based on Linux, but I find that I need a few small proprietary products to make it really sing... until those products go open source).

As he started the review of problems with Microsoft software, especially Word, I found myself nodding to almost every single one of them. I had suffered every problem... the crashes, misbehaving formatting, etc., he described. Since I have used every office suite, even the most obscure, and have now settled on OpenOffice for the bulk of my work, the lack of problems in my writing tasks has been noticeable. Every version of Word past 2000, for example, crashes on startup because of my Logitech mouse. No other word processing program does. Just this past weekend, I had to load Outlook because I purchased a Dell Axim PDA that runs Windows MobilePC. The mere loading changed my default e-mail settings from Eudora to Outlook and from AvantBrowser to Internet Explorer. I had to load the software three times, as a matter of fact. Ugh! ...and my Handspring Visor worked straight out of the box six years ago! I should have stuck with Palm!

He documents a calculation error in Excel that I was able to duplicate, which should make one very wary of any logical tests that are in an Excel sheet. Even the extremely basic Google spreadsheet gets the calculation correctly. I've posted the file at yousendit.com; it'll be there until 12/10/06. http://download.yousendit.com/6C2C711C618CA347

Here’s the book
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159327064X?ie=UTF8&tag=drjoewebbcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=159327064X
Here’s his blog http://www.tonybove.com/getoffmicrosoft/blog/

With all that is going on in software and connectivity, I firmly believe that Office2007 will be the last substantial release of the product line from Microsoft. Too much is changing, and they know it: in emerging markets, open source software is growing as the best solution to piracy. The old desire that the network should be the computer is being pushed by Google, especially, and will become commonplace in other services as well. Desktops and notebooks are in trend to become very thin clients, with connectivity and basic programs and some data storage, with heavy lifting of data to be done by networks. Just think of how e-mail has destroyed word processing: who sends letters anymore? We’re all sending plain text files to each other and no longer care about margins, hyphenation, spacing, and other aspects of what used to be core parts of a secretarial school curriculum. Who would have thought that of all things, Powerpoint, would become the primary reason to have an office suite. There are many substitutions for word processing and spreadsheets, but there are very few good substitutes for Powerpoint, and none, other than OpenOffice Impress, are on the horizon.

Milton Friedman Obits, Wal-Mart, Internet & Old Media, Fun Stuff

2006-11-20T16:57:00.000-05:00

Good obit of Milton Friedman in NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/business/17friedman.html?ei=5094&en=505fe80dff8061d4&amp;hp=&ex=1163826000&adxnnl=0&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1163772055-mrxnHVmEL6w570fgT3XF2g&pagewanted=print print

Barron's Gene Epstein writes about Friedman
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB116381029790026944.html?mod=9_0031_b_this_weeks_magazine_columns

Interview of Milton and Rose Friedman from July 2006
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008690

Mises Institute remembrance of Friedman
http://www.mises.org/story/2393

Why Wal-Mart is important
http://www.mises.org/story/2377

Internet ad revenue surpasses $4 billion
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20061114005885&newsLang=en

Internet ad potential is underestimated, according to Yahoo! CEO Semel
http://news.com.com/Yahoos+Semel+Internet+ad+potential+underestimated/2100-1024_3-6135250.html

Yahoo! makes deal with major newspapers re: classifieds
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/business/stories/2006/11/19/1120bizyahoo.html

Are magazines dead?
http://mediabistro.com/articles/cache/a9077.asp
No, they're not dead, they're just pining for the fjords
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/dead-parrot.htm

How new and old media can work together
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/nov2006/pi20061108_232958.htm

Online video seen taking broadcast TV dollars
http://www.directtraffic.org/OnlineNews/Online_advertising_to_capture_market_share_17967105.html
The study predicted that a particularly marked increase would take place next year, when budgets for online advertising are expected to rise by an average of 42 per cent compared to 2006.

Sure you want to upgrade to Vista and/or Office2007?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=111&tag=nl.e539
Skip all this licensing stuff. Go to open source software instead. Ubuntu Linux is my new toy, and it works just great. www.ubuntu.com Got an old computer at home? Give Ubuntu a shot and you may not have to replace it at all.

Ad Age Global Marketers Report
http://adage.com/images/random/globalmarketing2006.pdf
Global Players (executives) report
http://adage.com/images/random/globalplayers2006.pdf

Latest toy: USB turntable... gosh, saves time and many hassles. And it works great!
http://www.ion-audio.com/ittusb.php

Someone should ban this site as obscene
http://www.lileks.com/institute/publicity/lewis1.html

30 Rock might be the best-written new TV show on this year. It takes some great shots at corporate management (especially GE, since it owns NBC) but this past week took some very funny shots at product placement.
http://www.givememyremote.com/remote/30-rock-recap-2/
My favorite line was the management gobbledygook about increasing sales... whoops... I mean "upward revenue stream dynamics."
show video http://www.nbc.com/Video/rewind/full_episodes/?show=30rock

The Kodak Video is Back

2006-11-17T16:33:00.000-05:00

It's not on YouTube that we know of, but it has been shown at DICE. http://www.dicegroup.org/
I was told that the "cojones" comment was out but the "big fat makeready" and "kick their a**" comments are still in. The Animal House line "I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part" was wrong... the really futile and stupid gestures can obviously be repeated again and again.
My original post is at
http://drjoewebb.blogspot.com/2006/10/kodak-embarrassing-moment-tv-guide.html
... and the comments still apply. The most offensive thing is the "big fat makeready" comment, referring to Kodak's history of constantly downsizing and making really bad acquisitions. Again, those were real employees, with real families that the company led on and let go, not even counting the investors who got taken in at those times. So what if some of the bar-room adolescent rant was removed from the video... it's still a dumb video that does not do Kodak any good.

ad:tech Wrap=Up, Internet and Small Biz, Big Plans for Cell Phones, Response Rates

2006-11-14T06:03:00.000-05:00

ad:tech wrap-up by Marketing Sherpa
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=29775
Fast Company blog posting http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2006/11/08/kevin_ryan_at_adtech.html
Kevin Ryan, founder of DoubleClick, spoke at ad:tech in a speech titled "1996 vs. 2006: The Web Then and Now". I've requested full text or a download. http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/search-marketing/38942.html
Ad revenue went from $270 million to more than $12 billion. Bandwidth prices went down from $1000/mbps to a measly $20/mbps. Expensive software and hardware has become open source software and almost free hardware. Mr. Ryan believes that mobile advertising and IPTV is the future.

Using the Internet to reach small businesses
http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=29882

Samsung has big plans for cell phone features
http://www.pcworld.com/article/127852-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Telephone and e-mail have the highest response rates, according to the Direct Marketing Association
Story http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=29896
Press release http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/disppressrelease?article=836++++++
· Direct Order & Fundraising: For direct marketers whose primary objective was to solicit direct-order sales or motivate customers to make a contribution, Catalog (2.30%) and Direct Mail (2.18%) produced the highest response rates.
· Lead Generation: Telephone (2.60%) and E-mail (2.45%) produced the highest response rates for direct marketers whose primary objective was to generate leads.
·Traffic Building: Catalog (10.34%) and Telephone (7.83%) have the highest response rates for traffic building, although these figures are based on a small sample of only five campaigns for Catalog and four campaigns for Telephone.

Download this Now: The State of the Internet Report, and other news...

2006-11-13T06:30:00.000-05:00

Meeker State of the Internet report has been updated, and is as usual, essential reading
http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/webtwopto2006.html

ad:tech in NY was a smashing success with record attendance. Yet virtually no one from our industry goes.
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623900

Folio: article about RRD/Banta
http://www.foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=6778

MOD-PAC reports losses... well, so much for that big, profitable packaging business. I never knew how that myth got started, but file it under "the grass is always greener on the other side."
http://members.whattheythink.com/news/newslink.cfm?id=25041

Spam levels up, way up.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/127801-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

World now has 2.6 billion cell phone users, and therefore more people who can eventually download content.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/127820-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

The World Band and PriceWaterhouseCoopers issued a report about taxation that compares ease of tax payment with economic growth. It's amazing how many undeveloped countries have tax systems that are so incredibly injurious to their own economic growth and scare capital away.
http://rru.worldbank.org/paperslinks/open.aspx?id=7381

This was funny. As one who was warned not to go on a low carb diet and then ends up losing 50 pounds and have my blood tests become better than any medication ever did, this article was a pleasure to see. Those low fat diets? The do nothing except lower your HDL and increase triglycerides. Nix the bread and pass the turkey pepperoni please...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0611090062nov09,1,1064638.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

Great Morgan Stanley Report (It's Free!), ad:tech, eBooks in Schools, the Election, CFO Salary Windfall

2006-11-08T05:00:00.000-05:00

Morgan Stanley report on Internet advertising. The great eBay vs. newspaper classifieds chart has been updated. It's on page 25, and as startling as ever.
http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs/msinternetadreport101306.pdf

ad:tech is in New York this week, and already the provoking comments and articles have started
http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/index.php?p=633

The new http://www.printceoblog.com/ has a posting about our industry's AWOL status at ad:tech in NYC
http://printceoblog.wordpress.com/2006/11/07/how-many-printers-are-exhibiting-at-adtech/#comment-16
Nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks this way... but Randy's heard this complaint from me before. Great, so now there's two of us. Wow... our grassroots movement has doubled.

E-Books in schools; sometimes, it has to go to a vote! Funny, where are the people in the associations who are supposed to make us aware of these kinds of government things? Not a peep out of the book or printing associations about this. This is the first I've heard about anything called "SCORM"
e-book story http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6707
SCORM http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6249

Agencies creating content and advertising beyond their typical range
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/02/business/adco.php

Verizon is in talks with YouTube for video over cell phones. Note that Google just bought YouTube. Also note that the cell phone is a horrible way to view videos... when you're over 50, as I am... and the vision is starting to be affected. But also remember many cell phones are really ear pieces wirelessly linked to PDAs.... and video on PDAs can actually work!
http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?view=CN&storyID=2006-11-07T100033Z_01_N07342627_RTRIDST_0_TELECOM-VERIZON-YOUTUBE.XML&amp;amp;amp;rpc=66&type=qcna

I know people will ask about the election and its effect on the economy. The Senate and House Republicans got what they deserved for bad leadership and a loss of the values that got them elected. They became inside-the-beltway and got used to being in power so much so that they squandered it. Frist was a horrible majority leader who got nothing done. Hastert always seemed lost. It also goes to show that mid-term elections are often the times of greatest change. Remember this, however, and that is that Fed actions are a far bigger determinant of economic conditions than fiscal policy, especially in the short term. The bigger issue is that income and corporate taxes need to be renewed, otherwise they just return to prior levels with no action necessary. Paradoxically, the stock market does very well under Democratic control of Congress. Cynically, the higher degree of regulations on business that emerge from such controls (even Sarbanes-Oxley, which was way overdone) creates barriers the big businesses use to block competitors. Big business loves regulations, especially when they can lobby to have it work against competitors. In the past, this would have been a time to be in outright fear of protectionism. Big business is too connected worldwide and benefitting too much from international operations for the new Congress to do anything that will stop that. Sure, they'll have hearings and press conferences, but U.S. jobs are so dependent on trade that nothing serious will get done in the long run. (Remember, it was Bush43 who pushed for the steel tariffs, which hurt the economy rather significantly at the time). Small business usually does poorly under Democratic control (remember, whichever party runs the House runs the Federal budget; you don't need the Presidency to run the country from a financial perspective). We may have changed parties, but bluster and the photo-op will still be in office. Buy big company stocks. Sell Vistaprint and Staples. (please don't take stock advice from someone who is unlicensed or unqualified to give it, notably yours truly, but this would be the theme, in my mind).

Look at this good economic news, and then try to explain why an incumbent could not run on them (you can't):
•GDP positive for 20 qtrs, averaging +3% (real dollars)
•ISM manufacturing index positive for 54 mo
•ISM non-manufacturing index positive for 56 mo
•Largest employed workforce in history: 145.3 million, +2.4 million in the last year
–Last month +427,000 new jobs in household survey
–BLS corrects itself: has been undercounting by +810,000 jobs
–averaging +79,000 net new businesses per month
•Household wealth $53T, +7% (current dollars)
•Personal income +8.6% (current dollars)
•Corporate profits +18% (current dollars)
•Tax collections
–Corporate +27% (up more than 50% than corporate profits) (current dollars)
–Individual +13% (up more than 50% than personal income) (current dollars)
•Exports +8% (current dollars)
•Conference Board September consumer confidence index 104 vs. 87

Why arent these reported? I still think it's journalistic bias: "the economy can't be doing well if the newspaper I'm working for is laying off people." It's the exact opposite of the Internet boom reporting, where the economic data was as good, and often not as good, but publishing was booming, so it was reported as unprecedented incredible growth when it was not.

One note about tax collections: the Congressional Budget Office has a horrible (that's worse than bad) of forecasting tax collections. Tax cuts increase collections. The CBO is not allowed, by law, to include that assumption in its budgets. Just as Robert Rubin, Clinton's treasury secretary, whose plan to cut the capital gains tax led to a windfall of revenues. Every tax cut produces increased revenues, from Coolidge, to Kennedy, Reagan, post-1996 Clinton, to Bush. How Congress squanders those increased revenues is a different matter. Assuming the tax cuts expire, look for the deficit to increase as the CBO cannot, by law, assume that increased tax rates affect people's economic behavior. Also remember, that Congress inflation-adjusts, and adds additional increases, automatically to its budgets, under its baseline budgeting procedures, a luxury which no business or no family has a similar luxury. Reductions in rates of growth are called "cuts" inside the beltway. This could get out of hand, unexpectedly. Keep an eye out for it.

Again, of all of the Washington officials, Ben Bernanke is the one to watch. If the tax cuts expire, one hopes that the Fed will loosen the money supply to counteract them.

Also remember that demographic trends are more powerful than any Congress. More than 70% of U.S. households now own equities, directly or indirectly. Congress is very much aware of that. The electorate is getting older, and income from savings and investments will become more important than ever. Taxing them away is not in an incumbent's best interests.

Speaking of Sarbanes-Oxley, its byzantine laws have created a windfall of CFO salaries.
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/8099449/c_8102077?f=magazine_special_reports

Bloomberg news reports " Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG led declines in the Stoxx 600, sliding 8.1 percent to 33.78 euros. The world's largest printing-machine maker lost the most in five months after reporting worse-than-expected fiscal second-quarter earnings." Yup, that buyback was really important.
Report http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aqXrlh4CdBG4&refer=europe

Cenveo Ethics Issue?, Gannett Wakes Up, Other Neat Stuff

2006-11-07T07:51:00.000-05:00

Election day: vote early and often. I always think of Aunt Rosie on this day. If the person running was Italian, she would vote for them. That was easy in the Bronx. Everyone who knew her misses her, especially the big Christmas Eve dinners.

Story about Banta and Stephanie Streeter. Loved the next to last paragraph:
It's not known if or to what degree Burton invested in Banta, but a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission says the Cenveo board waived its ethics code to let some directors and officers invest in Banta while the company was pursuing it. Banta's share price closed Friday at $52.03, up 53% since Burton first disclosed his intentions toward Banta on Aug. 9.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=526904
Mr. Burton may have made more money causing the run-up than he could have by owning it. He still needs to acquire something or sell CVO. He's not used to losing. Wonder what's next.
Here's the link to the SEC document
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/920321/000106880006000712/0001068800-06-000712-index.htm

Gannett is modernizing its newsrooms to be 24/7... what took them so long?
Reuters http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061104/wr_nm/media_gannett_dc_2
E&P http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003352557&imw=Y

DoubleClick CEO: “The Internet is a Huge Disruptive Force on the Print World”
http://www.foliomag.com/viewMedia.asp?prmMID=6769

Another story about skepticism regarding web metrics
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/29/business/netads.php

WTT put my column about graphic communications on its "free" side... enjoy...
http://members.whattheythink.com/home/drjoe163.cfm

Political online advertising down.
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623858
Seems like when it's local, it's print, when it's national, it's online. May have played a bigger than typical role in the recent rise in print volume.

Heidelberg still buying back its stock for whatever reason they're doing it, it's still not the best idea for stockholders in my mind. But my vote doesn't matter.
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20061030006232&newsLang=en

E-book software that would just send me bonkers
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17714&ch=biztech
Thought this was interesting:
"The Sony Reader, which our people have examined, is due to be a flop, just as with all the other dedicated hardware readers--totally the wrong business plan for the Internet age," comments Michael Hart, cofounder of Project Gutenberg, a site that makes free public-domain texts available as e-books. "The difference is that there are a billion new cell phones made every year--nothing like that for any other such devices."

Kodak's performance is becoming less bad. Some analysts think the crossover between their digital and analog business is now getting onto the favorable side.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/01/business/kodak.php

Who cares about the $100 laptop :)) -- the $99 computer may be here for Christmas
http://redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=19569&hed=A+%2499+PC+by+Christmas%3f

The OpenOffice fans get really riled up when you forget them. I'm using the StarOffice version -- and use M$FT Office less and less... and when I shift Linux, I will barely use it.
http://blogs.smh.com.au/mashup/archives//007435.html

Speaking of Linux, this "chooser" helps determine which OS is the best for your needs
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/index.php?firsttime=true

P&G Switching to MORE PRINT!... Newspaper Troubles, and Lots More Stuff

2006-11-06T23:15:00.000-05:00

P&G reallocates budget to add more.... PRINT!! The results of this media reallocation are right out of the book What Sticks, which, sure enough, is mentioned in the article. Note the comment about e-mail campaigns as having "little or no media cost."
http://adage.com/article?article_id=112994
P&G is realizing it's oversubscribed to TV, and is pouring more money into print... As it reduced TV spending, P&G hiked spending on national magazines 22.3% and outlays on all print 23.9%. The medium now commands 28.2% of P&G's $1.6 billion first-half outlay, up 3.5 percentage points from a year ago... Most P&G brands are now in their second or third years of using marketing-mix models extensively, and that's generally the time by which marketers who use models to fine-tune media plans generally have made the biggest reallocations they're going to make...The shift to print is far more broad-based, though, focused heavily so far this year on P&G's big-spending beauty brands, Olay and Pantene... P&G also has continued to do more direct marketing, with the second big double-digit increase in as many years for its fiscal year ended June 30. But most of that shift is going toward e-mail programs that have little or no media cost, said John Cummings, whose DBM/Scan service tracks database-marketing programs by package-goods marketers... Overall, P&G mailings and e-mailings increased 48% to 469 in the 12 months ended in June, following a 35% increase the year before, he said. As a whole, the package-goods and drug marketers he tracks boosted mailings and e-mailings 32% in the year ended in June.But beyond pricing, many marketers are coming around to see more value in magazines, if not newspapers, said Rex Briggs, CEO of Marketing Evolution and co-author of the ROI tome "What Sticks."

CNN reports that there are now 100 million web sites. Should we be surprised? It could only be possible with Google. Otherwise many web sites would go undiscovered.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/01/100millionwebsites/index.html

Political spending on media has been quite strong, perhaps a primary reason for recent print rise. This will be part of Thursday's PFC Perspective discussion.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=112918

Randy Davidson has posted some very interesting cmments about Consolidated Graphics on his printceo blog http://printceoblog.wordpress.com/2006/11/02/consolidated-graphics-a-leading-digital-printer/

Speaking of blogs, Peter Muir has started one
http://bizucate.typepad.com/my_weblog/

NYT report about direct mail. For sure this is the top of the market when newspapers start paying attention to this; most of the trends they cite have already moderated and result is less print than used before (i.e., catalog has fewer pages when it shifts to direct mail campaigns and used more e-commerce)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/business/media/02adco.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Printing scents has been mentioned as something that would keep print viable. Imagine, though, all of those competing scents on store shelves. It's like the gauntlet you have to run in a department store to avoid getting sprayed.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=112849
Of course this reminded me of smell-o-vision http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-o-vision

Hayden Printing in Spokane, WA has gone from 0 to 60+ employees in just four years
http://www.spokanejournal.com/spokane_id=article&sub=2935

First class mail headed down... are we surprised?
http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/direct-mail/38763.html

Houston Chronicle doesn't like the Sony e-book reader
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/biz/4298669.html
Cute title: "Sony uses novel approach"... i guess it's the real article, then!

Headline: manufacturers turn pessimistic. Not in the headline: only 60 respondents. I guess the optimists were too busy!
http://www.barometersurveys.com/production/barsurv.nsf/vwAllNewsByDocID/E4C484E6B6568CE385257217004FE143
TV networks experimenting with streaming video in every possible way
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-10-29-web-TV-main_x.htm

Marketers still demanding reliable Internet traffic data
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/technology/30adco.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1162332191-g6Z/NddbbRYPF96RYc/Jzw
Funny... when I read about this kind of story in newspapers, I just chuckle, after their circulation fraud problems of the past few years. It's one thing to figure out how many people go to a web site, but when you fudge the number of copies sold... well,... I guess counting real things is just as hard for some people as it is for cyber things.

Newspaper revenues... supposedly it will take 30 years for Internet revenue to be 50%. Yes, another person who knows how to extend straight lines using Excel.
http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/30-years-till-online-represent-50-of-total-newspaper-revenues/
also reported at http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003314460

Record newspaper Internet use. The Newspaper Association of America really gets it. They have a great site, and they know that new media is where it's at.
http://www.naa.org/sitecore/content/Global/PressCenter/2006/ONLINE-NEWSPAPER-AUDIENCE-EXPERIENCES-RECORD-MONTH-IN-Q3.aspx?lg=naaorg

Newspaper circulation falls... no surprise... as reported in the NY Times whose shoddy reporting has done a good job of losing their audience. Amazing how that rag NY Post has changed itself over the years to pass the NY Daily News. The post was a really bad afternoon paper when I grew up in the NYC area. Now I'd rather pick it up than the NYT or the NYDN. The New York Sun is even making progress. I remember all kinds of failed startups in NYC, even when Newsday tried to get into the market and failed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/business/media/31paper.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1162332009-w9tC4ZFGFFyugynBmal8RQ

American Business Media has posted video from its various conferences. This association gets it too.
http://www.americanbusinessmedia.com/abm/Video.asp?SnID=1976442693

More laments about newspapers
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0611020208nov02,0,1241459.story?coll=chi-business-hed

$100 laptop about to be released
http://www.pcworld.com/article/127720-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws
The project is facinating.
Wiki http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Main_Page
News http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Current_events
The official one-laptop-per-child page http://laptop.org/index.en_US.html
This may be one of the most important initiatives to stimulate the use of non-print media that has been seen to date. Yet, I suspect no one in the printing business knows about it.

Microsoft and Novell are now cooperating about Linux
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/15913376.htm
I've been playing with two Linux distributions lately, and my favorite, Ubuntu, is definitely ready for prime time. It will become my operating system of choice soon... it already is on my notebook. I love Ubuntu. I was using Xandros, but Ubuntu is just plain wonderful.... and free. www.ubuntu.com
The $100 laptop uses a version of Fedora Linux

Printing Shipments, BN-CVO-RRD, CGX

2006-11-02T10:53:00.000-05:00

September printing shipments were up +$198 million compared to September 2005, an increase of +2.4%. This was the fifth month in a row of increased shipments. On an inflation-adjusted basis, it was the second month of real increase in shipments, up by +$36 million in inflation-adjusted dollars. August's current dollar shipments were revised higher as well, by $5 million, making August's rise $302 million, or +3.8%.

September is the first month of commercial printing's most important quarter. The September-November period traditionally represents more than 26% of the industry's shipments for the year.

For the year-to-date, current dollar shipments are up +0.4%, and real shipments are down -3.2%

Re: Banta selling to RRD, it certainly is disappointing that it happened, but that was the best port in the storm. Both companies can consolidate well from a conceptual standpoint, but it always works out on paper best, and takes two or three times as long in real life. Burton needs to merge with somebody, so I wonder who's next?

Consolidated Graphics is making a big deal about their earnings, but their bottom line is still only 6% of sales.

I've got loads of things to post that I'm still working on... some of the stuff coming out this week in media news has been rather impressive, and the meatiest stuff is under everyone's radar. Will post Friday or Saturday.

SystemSuite, American Magazine Conference, Monkey Ward is Back, Newspapers Newscasting, Adobe E-Books, Business iPods, Economic Misreporting

2006-10-26T14:51:00.000-04:00

I'm a free software kind of guy, but I must recommend SystemSuite 7 which was just released and is on sale until tomorrow for $37 for upgraders at http://www.v-com.com/promo/SystemSuite7_Launch_UP_1006_IA_4.html. It's far less annoying than Norton Systemworks and has kept all of our computers in the office and in our home working great. It's also legal to put it on three computers. Ain't that great? If you're not a current user, it's $45. http://www.v-com.com/ -- well worth it. Soon I'll be writing about the various open source software that I use and where they might be found.

The American Magazine Conference meeting in Phoenix is summarized in this NY Sun article.
http://www.nysun.com/article/42052
NYU's publishing program has been revised so that there is a digital component to every course offered.And those who want a career in magazine publishing, on the editorial or the business side, are advised that nowadays that means both print and electronic publishing... Diane Salvatore, editor in chief of Ladies' Home Journal, says, "For editors, it really is a moment of great, unprecedented creativity. You are forced to think three-dimensionally because the reader really wants to participate on a new, intimate level." ..."It just isn't one size fits all, anymore," Ms. Link said. "Your brand and your audience will determine how you reach them. I am asked all the time about organization. Should a publisher have one advertising sales staff or two? One editorial staff or two? There are no definite answers yet. It isn't unhealthy but it is unsettling."

The Montgomery Ward catalog is back. That is, the people who bought the rights to the name in bankruptcy court have issued a catalog with that name.
http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2006/10/26/montgomery_ward_brings_back/index.php
Some history is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Ward

Newspapers, especially local-focused ones, are experimenting in other media. Here's a Canadian newspaper http://www.durhamregion.com/that is doing a video newscast. http://www.videodurhamregion.com/newscast.php

Adobe is about to start pushing e-books again with some new software
http://www.informationweek.com/industries/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193402059

Companies are giving iPods to their employees for training purposes and for company announcements
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116173887200102825.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today
Will free e-book readers have the same destiny?

Good article on this Rodney Dangerfield economy that we're in...
http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2006/20061025152931.aspx

There's Some Serious Magic at Adobe, Sticking to Magazines, Hypertargeting Unisys, Printing is a Staple at Staples, and more

2006-10-24T16:41:00.000-04:00

A bellwether of where communications is going is Adobe. They rarely make mistakes in acquisitions or in strategy over the long term. This article reports their purchase of Serious Magic. I have used their Visual Communicator product, and it is ... COOL! The product allows ordinary people to make computer-based video files, and has all kinds of little features that include TV-style graphics. I used it to make my famous roast video of Dick Vinocur.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/print?id=2586807
I wasn't particularly skilled at using Visual Communicator at the time of Dick's roast, but a copy of it can be downloaded (10mb) at http://download.yousendit.com/7D4B77D217F0C5E5 for the next 2 weeks.

One of the most important marketing books of the past year is What Sticks. The author just spoke at a magazine conference and said some very interesting things about print. The industry should memorize this book... it is one of the most comprehensive discussions on the interaction of media available. While we do have to remember it's an analysis of large companies' spending, it is an eyeopener, first at how little is known, and second, how well new techniques can identify optimal media allocation. Key item below: As a marketer you maximize ROI when [you] use all media. Isn't this where the new opportunity is for printers?
http://adage.com/amc06/article?article_id=112665
TV was dominant in all the studies as a way to increase brand awareness. But magazines proved to be more effective at both brand awareness and purchase intent. Magazines were superior to both TV and online in driving purchase intent. "Magazines are the most consistent performer of all media measured if you look at ROI," Mr. Briggs told attendees. "As a marketer you maximize ROI when [you] use all media, and magazines were key to that. Each element of the marketing mix must find its own strength and leverage it to surround the consumer with a synergistic and consistent message. Leaving magazines out of the mix is tremendous mistake."

The WSJ has a very interesting article on targeted marketing (the article is on their free side of the site). The first line of the article: Around 20 high-ranking executives at corporations such as Subaru of America, DHL, Citigroup and Northwest Airlines will get a surprise when Fortune magazine arrives on their desks this week. Each will find his or her own face gracing the cover.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116165243559401530-BpNz2cj4YySTN5X2T_XI1NSa694_20071024.html
This was particularly interesting: Unisys once relied mainly on magazine advertising, but it left people with a "vanilla" impression of the company, says Ellyn Raftery, its vice president and general manager of world-wide marketing and communications.
It's a good article, quite short, but worth pursuing.
Coincidence? Joe McGrath, CEO joined Unisys after serving as president and general manager of Xerox Production Color Systems.
http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/management__team/mcgrath.htm

Staples continues to make investments in printing, opening up a production facility in California and one in New Jersey.
http://www.purchasing.com/article/CA6380042.html?industryid=2149

When you see a headline that reads "Germany sees increase in mail order shopping" don't you think "mmm.... catalogs and direct mail must be doing well"? It always pays to look at the definitions. As you read on you find "Mail order purchases include those made online, via catalogues or phone" and then "Internet shopping is the most popular form of mail order purchases." I guess something gets lost in the translation.
http://www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?ArticleID=19205

This article updates the current state of e-mail in the marketing mix...
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623744
... and... there is now an "E-mail Experience Council"
http://www.emailexperience.org/

Putting Consumers in Charge Messes Things Up; Video Clogs; New Media Jobs in Great Demand; Small Customers; and more...

2006-10-23T17:01:00.000-04:00

The idea that the consumer of information is in charge of the communications process is difficult to comprehend for many. This article explains how it has affected the network TV business, as old rules of thumb no longer apply, and no one knows how long the new rules of thumb will apply.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/15365611/site/newsweek/

Streaming and downloaded video clogging up servers! These problems never last long... because technology never moves in lockstep across all sectors, you get these kinds of imbalances... which entrepreneurial executives detect as opportunities...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061020/wr_nm/nortel_dc_2

Business Week reports on some of the new video technologies that are on their way
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_44/b4007052.htm

WSJ reports how salaries for new media jobs are rising significantly.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116155953695800346.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace
Soaring demand for online advertising is creating an all-out battle on Madison Avenue for people who can create or sell interactive ads. A shortage of advertising talent with digital-media experience is sending salaries soaring -- up as much as 60% in the past year...The lack of digital talent could slow the growth of online-ad spending...marketers across industries are looking to spend 15% to 20% of their budgets on digital media, but right now are spending less than 5% of their budgets in the space..."There is more demand for expertise than there is expertise." Part of the problem, Yahoo's Ms. Millard, is that skills required in the online- and old-media worlds are so different that few people can easily "toggle back and forth." Creative directors at an interactive ad agency need to understand how to craft banner ads, email promotions and video spots that don't look like traditional TV commercials. Media buyers need to know all the newly popular Web sites as well as understand search functions and other new digital venues -- a different role to buying space in newspapers or time on TV.

WSJ article about how libraries are changing
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116140136138599875.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
"What is the role of the physical library when so much of what students use on a day-to-day basis is available on their laptops or iPods at home?"

Article about some printers in the Wichita, Kansas area
http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/business/15817714.htm
"I think I've seen more change in the last 10 years than my father saw in 30," he said. "We were just beginning cold type back in 1984. We had our first typesetter. I'm now on my 15th."..."A lot of the business I used to do just isn't there anymore," Wooten said. "We used to do a lot of pre-printed forms for people to fill out. Now the form is on the computer screen. We used to do 30 forms for Intrust Bank. Today we do three."...But technology has also made it easier to generate documents and opened doors for designers -- and would-be designers, printers say...Home printing and self-printing have also cost commercial printers some clients. "We've lost some business to laser and office printing, but overall the industry is still growing," said Stuart Lungwitz, co-owner of The Print Source, a company that has roots 60 years deep in the Wichita economy...."There are a lot of things that can't be done electronically," he said. "You still need a commercial printer to do metallic colors, foil stamping or fluorescent colors."

Founder of Transcontinental talks about China
Click here (link is so long it messes up the layout)
"Printed products are the country's primary method of disseminating information and the government is not ready to transfer control to a private corporation, and even less so to a foreign one," Marcoux said. Foreign companies are only allowed to hold a minority position in these companies, he noted. Marcoux also said Chinese competition has squeezed the Montreal printer's markets, but the company has come up with effective strategies to compete. He estimated that 75 per cent of Transcontinental's income comes from areas where competition from China is not a factor. He said the composition and publishing of circulars and newspapers offer a sound base for the company's growth. In book publishing, the firm also invested $45 million to equip two Quebec factories with fast, automated presses.

GM spending more online, and is encouraging local dealers to do the same.
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/interactive/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003286259
...[GM] plans to allocate more of its national ad budget to the Web even as the company faces widespread spending cuts and heavy revenue losses, according to Merrill Lynch... "more of GM’s marketing budget will go online despite an already 10-15 percent share of the national ad budget [being spent on the Web]"... "The company is also nudging its local dealers to spend more online."...On the local level, currently just 9 percent of GM's media dollars are allocated to digital properties.

I was having a conversation with someone and in passing they mentioned that they had a client who wasn't interested in pursuing someone because they were "too small." I immediately thought of YouTube. This is the company that Google just bought for $1.65 billion.... (yes, billion... a thousand millions) and they had only 67 employees and were only in business for 19 MONTHS.
http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/google_youtube.html
Two things: first, Peter Drucker's famous "feed tomorrow, starve yesterday" is very important in sales. Sales people, however, live in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world that penalizes long sales cycles and nurturing of small businesses. Second, this is why we advertise. The over-emphasis of immediate returns and ROI on communications spending means that no one... and I mean no one... worries about people who are not customers yet, but will be decision-makers in the future. This is why we create brands. This is why we work with schools. But many companies have stopped, and instead focus on "events" or sales situations where there are only "qualified buyers" today. They're ruining their business tomorrow, in the process, and will always be selling. Drucker again: the purpose of marketing is to make selling unnecessary. These managers will always be selling, and one day they'll wonder why a competitor seems to "inherit" their business or come out of nowhere.

That Kodak video? YouTube vistors are now greeted with this:

A Kodak (Embarrassing) Moment, TV Guide Becomes Internet Only in Canada, Malaysian Printing?

2006-10-21T05:29:00.000-04:00

I must say the posting of a Kodak-produced supposedly motivational video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8XvRcZHahY&NR
to define its new attitude and new aggressiveness is more "Animal House" or Lewis Black is rather strange and silly (the speaker in it is imitating LB... and if not, the idea that there is a second person just like him should scare us). The video won't change people's minds about the company, and it's very embarrassing... mainly because someone may have actually thought it was a good idea. While sales people and many Wall Street executives enjoy the good, sometimes raunchy jokes that a rush of testosterone creates, those are usually best left in the locker room or in the bar.

What is also questionable is that in a market that increasingly includes women (and it will even more so, as women represent more than half of graduate business students), this video is even sillier. This is men's locker room ranting, much like John Belushi in Animal House. Even though coarseness can be genderless (the girls on Sex and the City have their own locker room chatter), there is a sense that when you go to do business in the public, you take a shower, you shave, you brush your teeth, you dress in clean clothes, take one last look in the mirror, and go out into the world. But this is just men behaving badly, and much should not be expected of men anyway, at least that's what the SATC girls would say, and they would be right. As Otter says in response to Bluto's monologue in AH: "I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part." And we see the results of it here.

What is even stranger about this is the leaking (was it purposeful?) of it online at youtube.com, and now it is there for everyone to see, and link to. Right now, it links to a "Kodak S***s" video. I'm sure that's exactly what Kodak wanted.

Some people will look at this and say that it's nothing more than a PG-13 movie or what one would see on Saturday Night Live. They are absolutely correct. Some would suggest that it's out of context. The fact that it can't stand on its own testifies to its weakness. If you can't proudly say it over a family dinner with little kids at the table with the desire that you'd like them to do it too when they're an adult, then you probably shouldn't put it in a corporate video. The old saying "character is what you do when no one is looking" goes out the window in a YouTube.com world: once it's there, the whole world sees.

It's best to leave coarse satire to those who do it best. When those folks do it, it's called "buzz" and it can actually help build a brand. When we watch Animal House we know it's funny because of how unlikely it is: Dean Wormer would have been fired long ago, and the Delta House students' parents would have yanked their tuition or the school would have tossed them many semesters ago. It's funny because it is so over the top. Maniac Lewis Black is funny because he's not in charge of anything, yet somehow can find the weakest point and grind humor into it and make it uncomfortably funny for anyone watching. At the end of the day, Lewis goes home. We know that if we trusted him with anything, it would end up in shambles, and that's why he is funny. At the end of Kodak's day, the executives still have to be trusted to run Kodak.

As far as Kodak's problems go, real people with real families lost real jobs because of the decisions Kodak executives made. One of America's great companies was undermined by executives who were out of touch with the market except for their posh lifestyles and smooth talk with investors and the public, and employees naive enough to believe them. When they should have been acting aggressively and decisively to save and reposition the company, they ignored competition and protected their turf and their bonuses instead. The video says that Kodak has never been short of "big ideas and brass cojones" (at 1:48 of the video, and he points to the cojones, like no one in the audience knows where they are typically found). That's been their problem, and it still is. The big ideas were to ignore Fuji and digital imaging because they could never be as good as what Kodak blessed and approved, and it turned out that the "brass ones" were what they used to keep telling people that they were on track as planned and that things would be better next quarter. This is the company whose only dependable part of their financial report was its accounting for "non-recurring charges" which seemed to occur every quarter, more predictably than anything else that was happening, as they kept being surprised by the constant need to downsize again and again.

Dismissing its dysfunctional decisions, affecting all those employees and the once thriving city of Rochester, by "call[ing] the 90s one big fat makeready" (at 1:42 of the video) minimizes what happened to this once admirable member of the Dow Jones 30. It exhibits managerial behavior and credibility more typical of unlisted "pink sheet" stocks. All I know is that if I was shown this video as a Kodak manager, I'd be rolling on the floor laughing. But the joke would have been "between us," and would never have seen the light of day outside my office. Kodak doesn't need big ideas, nor does it need "brass cojones." It needs competence and people who can implement wise decisions, and whose reliability is unquestioned. This video would work, possibly, if they were at the top of their game. Instead, it's disappointing that someone thinks something like this, done all in "good fun" can actually build respect for a company that still, after more than a decade, is having trouble centering its image. Delivering consistent performance based on delighted customers changes one's image. This video doesn't advance that cause one bit. In the end, it's not offensive, it's dumb.

For the culturally impaired:
What is Animal House? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_House
Who is Lewis Black? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Black
What is Sex and the City? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_the_City
"cojones" has an encyclopedic listing! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cojones
"cojones" dictionary listing http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cojones
Kodak 10-year stock chart (it's not very pretty, and they even tried to stop it with a stock buyback; the chart may default to 1-year; switch it to 10 years by clicking the drop-down arrow under "Time" and selecting "1 decade"; then click the box that says "chart" and it will refresh the data) http://money.cnn.com/quote/chart/chart.html?pg=ch&symb=EK&time=10yr&amp;amp;amp;amp;compidx=aaaaa%7E0&comp=&ma=0&maval=60&freq=1dy&type=2&uf=0&lf=1&ind_compind=
Kodak dropped from the Dow 30 Industrials http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml?articleId=18842297
At one point, the white-haired Lewis Black-like speaker lets out a "booyah." The definition is at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/booyah but I heard it's generally a fishing term, screamed when you catch a big one. The word has been popularized by CNBC personality Jim Cramer on his show Mad Money http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cramer. Whoever made this video has create a composite Black-Cramer character. The only thing missing is the throwing of an office chair when Cramer starts his "lightning round" where he gives off the cuff stock advice to callers.
When he calls someone "Bucko" it's much like the old comedian Eddie Lawrence who had the character "The Old Philosopher" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Lawrence whose routines are at http://www.lyrics-lyric.com/song/lyrics/5200/Eddie_Lawrence/Old_Philosopher,_The.html -- It would not be surprising if Lewis Black and others were influenced by Lawrence's rather strange novelty act of the 1950s and 1960s.
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/xmas/Eddie_Lawrence_-_Merry_Old_Philosopher_1.mp3
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/xmas/Eddie_Lawrence_-_Merry_Old_Philosopher_2.mp3
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/0512/xmas/Eddie_Lawrence_-_Merry_Old_Philosopher_3.mp3
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/2006/04/Eddie_Lawrence_-_D.J._Philosophy.mp3
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/2006/04/Eddie_Lawrence_-_The_DJ_Philosopher_Returns.mp3
The similarity to this video and the famous monologue by John Belushi is quite evident. Famous lines from the movie, unedited, can be found at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/quotes, but here's the monologue in question:
D-Day: War's over, man. Wormer dropped the big one.
Bluto: Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Otter: Germans?
Boon: Forget it, he's rolling.
Bluto: And it ain't over now. 'Cause when the goin' gets tough...
[thinks hard]
Bluto: the tough get goin'! Who's with me? Let's go!
[runs out, alone; then returns]
Bluto: What the **** happened to the Delta I used to know? Where's the spirit? Where's the guts, huh? "Ooh, we're afraid to go with you Bluto, we might get in trouble." Well just kiss my *** from now on! Not me! I'm not gonna take this. Wormer, he's a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Niedermeyer...
Otter: Dead! Bluto's right. Psychotic, but absolutely right. We gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part.
Bluto: We're just the guys to do it.
D-Day: Let's do it.
Bluto: LET'S DO IT!

--------------------------------------

TV Guide Canada discontinues its print version to be Internet-only; it's owned by Transcontinental Printing.
http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7005243330
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/40853/TV_Guide_Canada_Goes_
Online_in_Attempt_To_Be_a_Tele_Visionary
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/10/19/tvguide-web.html

NYT article about why business is so bad: "To Explain Soft Numbers, Newspaper Companies Name a Common Culprit": lack of ads. No kidding. Cynics would say if you don't have hard news, you get soft numbers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/20/business/media/20adco.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1161363607-lCQoLM+eblHOKXhC0fq1SQ

Good NYT article about the economics of printed materials and technological change
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/business/19scene.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

One never hears of Malaysia as a source of "offshore printing." This article cures that.
http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v3/news_lite.php?id=224238

Zinio, Times Plunge, E-Mail Problems, Interesting E-Paper News, and a Barron's Note

2006-10-20T05:35:00.000-04:00

Digital magazine provider Zinio has press release about its recent sales levels. Sales are picking up, but digital magazines are not performing anywhere near the levels that they were expected to years ago. They are on a firm, positive trajectory, however. Their biggest competitor: websites, operated by their own clients... called publishers.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061018/sfw061.html?.v=75
...the site has seen more than 154% growth in transactions per month for the first 8 months of 2006, compared to the first 8 months of 2005. Monthly transactions include both subscription sales and single copy sales, which have grown on average more than 166% compared to year earlier levels.

The New York Times had a 48% plunge in profits though revenues were down only 2%. Are they that perilously close to their breakeven point? Anyone who mentions the superior financial ratios that newspapers have compared to other industries.... well... what do you think now? It's the momentum of earnings that matters, and this is not a pretty picture.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003285206

Think there's nothing for printers and graphic designers to do in e-marketing? This report from SilverPop explains the graphic, layout, and other elements that improve e-mail campaigns. If print and creative sales are supposed to be consulatative, isn't this something that should be part of that process?
http://www.silverpop.com/downloads/documents/SilverpopStudy_EmailCreativeThatWorks.pdf

Monthly shipments of e-paper screens reached 10,000, according to this report, with the bulk of them to Sony
http://www.digitimes.com/NewsShow/Article.asp?datePublish=2006/09/28&pages=A6&seq=34
Monthly shipments of Prime View International's (PVI's) electronic-paper (e-paper) reached 10,000 units in August, with most of the shipments going to Sony, according to today's Chinese-language Commercial Times...PVI is the only e-paper supplier for Sony, according to market sources...In August, sources at the company revealed that the company is ready to ship its electronic paper (e-paper) in volume to clients for electronic book (e-book) and electronic label (e-label) applications.

By the way, the Sony e-store now has this message:
Due to overwhelming demand, new Sony® Portable Reader orders may ship as late as November 30th. Existing orders will be shipped in the order they were received.

Regarding my comments about the Barron's article by Thomas Donlan, "Dow Be Not Proud," I did get a note from him which indicated that "Dividends covered about half the Dow's losses to inflation and about a third for the S&P."
The article was at http://online.barrons.com/article/SB116077960597192502.html?mod=9_0031_b_this_weeks_magazine_main#DOW

GraphExpo, Despair with HP/Indigo, Inflation Distortion, Trade Deficit Hysteria, Good Economic News Buried on Page 12, There's Less of Dr. Joe!

2006-10-19T08:02:00.000-04:00

I started the notes for this blog the early morning before the last day of GraphExpo. This has been the most upbeat show I have been to in quite a long time. We have to remember that the "winners" go to trade shows, plus whatever the local crowd is. But that was true of recent shows as well. Perhaps the worst of the pain is finally over? We still have many things as an industry to work through, and more ahead, but this was quite encouraging... finally. The industry needs to revise its capital base and make significant investments in modern workflow and management. For once, the latter area seemed to be getting some attention from less-than-cutting-edge printers. You can't invest in capital improvements that unless you are generating profits. Clearly, many of the attendees finally are if their show floor behavior is any indication.

Everyone knows how much I love the work done at www.despair.com where making fun of clueless and bad management is the core of their business. For everyone who has sat through a dumb seminar, a silly motivational speech, or explanation of procedures that assume physical laws do not apply, this company is for you. A month ago they announced that they were doing customized calendars http://calendar.despair.com/. I just got an e-mail today that has the text below... they've bought their own HP Indigo 5000... business must be good! Some background on Despair.com can be found at http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A395807
Here's the text from the e-mail that mentions their purchase:
For once in your life, don't procrastinate. Buy it now. Because we're not sure we'll be able to keep up with demand when the holidays start. You read it right. With only one HP Indigo 5000 printer under roof, a maximum output of only a couple thousand calendars per day, and no back-up plan in the event of equipment failure, Despair is playing a dangerous game of chicken with Fate this year. Sure, it would've been a lot more pragmatic to secure a second printer- just to have a little bit of extra capacity, to say nothing of redundancy. But at half-a-million a pop, that would've cut into profits, and in turn, might have forced certain higher-ups here to indulge their annual Relentless Pursuit of Perfection at Southpoint Kia instead of Lexus of Austin. It goes without saying that can not be allowed to happen. So if YOU'RE planning to indulge in the Relentless Pursuit of Dejection this year, why not just go ahead and do your Christmas shopping today, while our turnaround times are less than a week? What? Sheer pragmatism isn't a good enough motivator for you? You're waiting for a coupon code or something? Okay, fine, why not try "ipinchpenniessoharditmakesabelincolncry". It'll save you a whopping 1%, just like my employee discount does. Are you satisfied now?

Barron's opinon page editor Thomas Donlan reminds us of the insidious nature of inflation on the indices we use to measure investment performance. The brief note "Dow Be Not Proud" is in relation to the joy in the recent move of the Dow to new highs. I wrote a note to him asking what the values are with inflation-adjusted dividends reinvested; I'll post if I get an answer.
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB116077960597192502.html?mod=9_0031_b_this_weeks_magazine_main
The DJIA needs to rise almost 20% from here, to about 13900, to offset inflation -- even the weak inflation of the past six years...S&P index investors need another 12% rise to get back to the old top of 1527, set in October 2000. To offset inflation, S&P 500 investors would like to see the index surpass 1807 -- a 32% gain from here. Others need still more: The benchmark S&P index beat two-thirds of actively managed mutual funds over the past five years...The only good news about the Nasdaq is that inflation losses aren't significant. That's because losses due to inflation are as nothing, compared to the 55% nominal loss in the Nasdaq index since it hit its record of 5132 in March, 2000. A buy-and-hold investor in the Nasdaq index would be even with the all-time high, adjusted for inflation, if it were at 6075.
Some folks get upset with me when I adjust industry shipments for inflation, but you have to. While I do it in both ways, the real question is what those consumer dollars can buy. I find it fascinating that you can buy more printing today with a dollar than you could before, because the Producer Price Index for print has not kept up with the Consumer Price Index. Yet such a bargain is not stimulating print demand, and it has nothing to do with capacity because capacity is coming down and capacity utilization is going up, yet these problems with shipments persist. So it must be coming from elsewhere, and these bargain prices for print are caused by the fact that dollars are going elsewhere. As far as Donlan's investment calculations, because investment dollars are long-term dollars for savings, you have the choice to find undervalued investments and move your money elsewhere, or invest a little at a time, such as is always suggested by the dollar-cost averaging advocates. Print buyers are not investing: they are buying all they need at a particular moment. They can't buy a little at a time because their content's value is greatest at the particular time that it is published. Though archived material may benefit from a "Long Tail," the greatest profits are at a time when the marginal cost is lowest, and that's at the time when the most of an item is sold. And that goes for the intellectual value as well; content has the greatest value when it is newest.

Economist Walter Williams has an excellent column explaining how silly it is to be preoccupied with trade deficits.
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/articles/06/angst.html
Last week, the trade deficit increased... that was great news, but reported as devastating, as is usually the case. An increase in the trade deficit means that the economy is still strong, stronger than most give it credit for.

Speaking of that, at the beginning of my WTT event on Tuesday, I summarized the neglected or under-reported good economic news:
GDP positive for 19 qtrs, +3%
ISM manufacturing index positive for 53 months
ISM non-manufacturing index positive for 55 months
Largest employed workforce in history: 144.8 million, +2.4 million since last year at this time
Last month +271,000 new jobs in the BLS household survey
BLS corrects itself: has been undercounting by +810,000 jobs (was on a page 5 footnote of their last report)
We're averaging +78,000 net new businesses per month
Household wealth $53 trillion, +7% since last year (current dollars)
Personal income +8.6% since last year at this time
Corporate profits +18% since last year at this time
Tax collections are up: Corporate +27%, Individual +13%
Exports +8%
Conference Board consumer confidence index is now at 104 vs. 87 since last year at this time

I received many positive comments about my presentation on Tuesday, but am still surprised by the number of comments about my weight. Briefly, I have been on a low-carb diet for five years, and knocked off more than 50 pounds and kept it off. I also have done traditional Okinawan Karate "almost seriously" for three years (I'm not good, but you don't have to be to get the benefits from it) when I realized doing it casually was solving a nagging health problem http://www.prostatitis.org/ExerciseKarate.html. Okinawan Karate is not sport karate, nor does it emphasize fighting, but is almost exclusively self defense; I do my "forms" most every day for 45 minutes and do some light weights most of those times (even when I travel), as well as class two or three times a week. I have the various limitations in movement that one has when you break 50 years old, but it's not hard to imagine that I would be in pretty bad shape if I had not started doing this. As far as the diet goes, avoiding bread and starches has been essential. For breakfast most days I have egg whites or EggBeaters with turkey sausage or ham, but no toast and no juice. Lunch will be plain salad with no-fat no-carb dressings (www.waldenfarms.com), or turkey, or turkey kielbasa, or certain other meats. I snack on turkey pepperoni or similar items, and also almonds or walnuts. For dinner I limit bread and stay away from sugary vegetables, and only have small portions of potatoes. I'm half Italian, so I can't give up pasta, nor should I (too many nice memories of my grandmother's fresh tomato gravy [that's what NY City Italians called it, it was never called sauce] with a newly cooked meatball and the end of a piece of Italian bread after Sunday Mass; to this day we have spaghetti as the first dinner meal when I get home from a trip as my favorite comfort food). I have a stranglehold on two meals, so I just tweak the dinner meal because I don't want to burden the family for my dietary issues. I also make certain that at least once a week I have something totally off-diet that I "miss." I've found the diet easy to stick with, partly because of how my weight gain was the result of "eating healthy." Most diet foods are horrible (which is an improvement because they used to be ghastly), but low-carb dieting doesn't require them unless you like them. Many "diet" foods have no fat but still have sugar, which makes them not applicable for low-carb dieting anyway. Food was meant to be enjoyed, and I can't say I feel like I've given anything up other than the weight. One day, I'll write a book. Somehow this single blog paragraph will get dragged out to 150 pages. Then will be the book tour. Then will be #1 on Amazon. Then will be my own cardboard-tasting cereal.

Download Tuesday's Presentation, WSJ Review of Sony E-Book, 1st-Half Ad Revenues, and Other Essential Things...

2006-10-18T05:38:00.000-04:00

Tuesday 10/17's presentation is now downloadable as a PDF and an MP3
http://members.whattheythink.com/home/ge06event.cfm

Walt Mossberg of the WSJ reviewed the Sony Reader
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116059982533389758.html?mod=hps_us_at_glance_columnists
Overall, I'd call the Sony Reader a good start -- impressive in some ways, but clearly a work in progress. I enjoyed using it, but would advise all but hard-core ebook fans to wait for an improved version.

TNS Media Intelligence reports on first-half 2006 US advertising spending (barely more than inflation)
http://www.tns-mi.com/news/09062006.htm
Total advertising expenditures in the first six months of 2006 increased 4.1 percent to $73.0 billion as compared to the prior year period...growth in total ad spending for the second quarter fell back more than expected and finished at 2.9 percent...Consumer Magazines encountered softening demand during the second quarter and finished the half year with a 4.4 percent increase in spending, to $10.90 billion.
Local Newspapers, confronted with over $600 million in reduced automotive spending year-to-date, saw total expenditures erode by 3.9 percent to $11.65 billion... The Internet continues to grow its share of total advertising expenditures. For the first half of 2006, the Internet accounted for 6.4 percent of total ad spending, up from 5.6 percent a year ago. Newspapers lost 1.3 share points over this period, slipping to 18.6 percent of expenditures and falling behind magazines.

Quick-response media... coming to a cell-phone near you.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/16/business/wireless17.php

Yet another "we don't know what these Internet data really mean" story
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_43/b4006095.htm

More Stuff... and It's Organic!

2006-10-17T06:36:00.000-04:00

Harte-Hanks releases "Marketing Enabler," an end-to-end web2print system. Remember-- they bought a digital printing company earlier this year-- HH is a big B2B data base company. It was obvious that this was up their sleeve.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=171620

Brief, but good, article about graphic design
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/15744267.htm

Adobe bought a company active in mobile media, Actimagine. They had already announced that Flash, which they had acquired in the Macromedia deal, was being adapted for cell phones and other devices.
http://business.techwhack.com/1215/actimagine/

Affluent working women access the Internet more. This is not that big a deal of a story, because access to all media increases with income, even the reading of magazines, regardless of gender. But when it's over 90%, I guess it's worth reporting, however statistically "un-special" it is.
http://www.radioink.com/HeadlineEntry.asp?hid=135472&pt=todaysnews

NAA release that provides data to advertisers about the Internet reach of newspapers. The change in tone at the NAA to support the notion that newspapers are Internet players is palpable. If only our associations could make that leap as well.
http://www.naa.org/sitecore/content/Global/PressCenter/2006/NEWSPAPER-WEB-SITES-EXPAND-REACH-OF-TOTAL-NEWSPAPER-AUDIENCE.aspx?lg=naaorg
Newspaper advertiser data base
http://www.naa.org/nadbase/

Brian Wesbury's opinion column in WSJ discusses the resilience of the economy and how bad data causes bad policy, such as the recent revision upward in the number of employed of +810,000 by the BLS (btw, that news was buried on page 5 of the BLS release, so not a single news report of the unemployment data mentioned it).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116104870331894679.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Okay, I'll say something... the Print Council released its long-awaited brochure. It perpetuates the stereotypical printing industry problems about our being preoccupied with equipment, as it is principally a capabilities brochure. It data here and there, but none of it is convincing. Its design is stock images gone wild, and the piece is hard on the eyes. What's missing? Media planners and print buyers are like consumers and they like to see people like them or people about whom they aspire to be. There's no media planner or analyst or marketing communications executive explaining why they use print and how effective it is for them. There's no product manager explaining how print worked in a big campaign. Aside from some digs at new media, there is no simple comparison, nor is there an intent to show in a demonstrable way where print fits in a typical media mix. Most of all, it violates the first new rule of selling print: electronic media has distinct and demonstrable advantages over print. There is still a great story to be told about the new print business, especially on the digital print side, and it's not told here. At a time when print is being asked to demonstrate its ROI, the things being done in direct mail are obvious choices for inclusion, especially when they use the latest technologies for targeting and measuring. Don't take my word for it, download it and make up your own mind:
http://www.theprintcouncil.org/WhyPrintBrochure.pdf
Printers are encouraged to download it, but I can't find anywhere on the site where printers can get high resolution files to use it. Also, if there's a great story to be told about why people should print, it certainly can be told in Flash, online, or in a video posted on youtube.com.

Make up your mind...
Overpriced organics are not selling
http://adage.com/article?article_id=112509
Wal-Mart prices 10% over regular goods
http://adage.com/article?article_id=112484
Whole Foods has been a darling of Wall Street for quite a while, known for its ability to market commodity foods to an upscale, highly educated consumer, at superb margins. Wasn't it quite funny in a cynical way (except for the people who died or got sick) that the spinach e-coli problem was an organic provider? The science behind organic foods benefits is quite poor and often dubious (one day I hope to write about the placebo effect and what it means about how we're wired, good and bad). The biggest statistically provable and valuable actions one can take for health is regular strenuous exercise and never smoking; that's followed by avoiding accidents (accidental death is the leading cause up to around age 46; then diseases take over). For all of the harping about cholesterol, half of all heart attack victims have normal cholesterol readings, and the statistical relationship of cholesterol and heart attack loses its statistical relationship after age 47, based on the multi-decade Framingham heart study. As one who gained 50+ lbs over 15 years with terrible cholesterol readings by eating health foods and steadfastly avoiding fat, and having serious medical complications from cholesterol meds, and doing the opposite of what the doctors said to all that weight in just 2+ years on low-carb diet of my own invention, solving other health problems in the process, it's no wonder I've developed a dubious eye for organic food marketing (that's DrJoe's run-on sentence for the day). The fact that they are having problems overcharging (excuse me, charging premium prices) is perhaps a sign that consumers find little benefit in their products. Last year, Atkins Nutritionals, funded by Goldman Sachs to cash in on the low carb craze, went bankrupt. Gee, could it be that the food was overpriced and tasted really bad (the cereal box would have tasted better)? As one who occasionally shops at Whole Foods, I can say that there are some items sold there that are definitely worth the price in higher quality and attention to sensory detail; most are not, and claimed benefits cannot stand statistical tests or clinical trials. But just because what you sell is organic, doesn't mean that you're exempt from the competition of the marketplace. Organic marketers, if they believe that their products are essential to a healthy lifestyle, should be cheering Wal-Mart on to bring the lifestyle to a lower income, less educated market that is larger than they can address with their top of the market price, selective distribution marketing. What all this has to do with print, I don't have a clue. Yeah, one day I'll write about the diet, too.

Nobel Economics, The Print Council Brochure?, Other Stuff

2006-10-11T17:15:00.000-04:00

The Nobel Prize in Economics for 2006 went to Edmund Phelps. The WSJ just ran one of his essays explaining the difference between US and European capitalism. It's long, but worth sticking with it.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116043974857287568.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

The Print Council has issued a press release about a new brochure titled... well, let's have the release speak for itself:
...“Why Print? The Top Ten Ways Print Helps You Prosper,” the full-color brochure marks the launch of an ongoing series of strategic activities by The Print Council designed to make a major impact on media decision makers, significantly elevating their awareness of, and appreciation for, the value of print...The first copies of “Why Print?” will be released on October 14th during Graph Expo 2006 as a highlight of the annual meeting of The Print Council membership.
Well, more is there to say, other than:
1) the release is not up on their site (as of 10:40am 10/11/06, and as of 4:20pm, too... see if it's there... http://www.theprintcouncil.org/newsPR.htm ... if the JapsOlsen release is at the top, then it's not)
2) there is no downloadable PDF of the brochure on their site (as of the same time; I heard that someone asked and said they had to get it from the printer after the job was run.... that's kind of backwards, isn't it?)
At a time when every manufacturer has been creating buzz by "previewing" their announcements to the press, this is being withheld until the show, so there is no pre-show "buzz." Was this done in a rush? Seems like it. The press release could have even listed the 10 items... after all, the press release is a promotion of those 10 items. You never know when people will find it with a search engine... oh, and by the way... a Google News search for the press release came up... empty.... except for a GAM article... the other links were to a printmaking council. A search of the words "print council" still comes up with a totally different association http://www.printcouncil.org/

Continuing....
In a separate program, The Print Council is moving forward with the creation of a marketing information clearinghouse to provide verifiable research on the value of print. By the close of 2006, the web-based information is expected to be on-line and accessible by the industry and Council supporters.

While this is a tiny step, it does not talk to any decision-makers about print, and is not aggressive at all. This is incredibly passive and decidedly un-proactive.
As far as the premise, “Why Print? The Top Ten Ways Print Helps You Prosper,” the focus seems inappropriate. Print can't make you prosper. It is clearly possible to prosper without print. But you can't prosper without communications. The issue has to be making communications better, especially making electronic communications better. Again, I recommend the book What Sticks to get a sense of the latest thinking about advertising media; while it may not be directly applicable, the spirit of it certainly is.
Print won't be considered modern media until we aggressively and relentlessly use modern media to promote it. Using a brochure to encourage people to use brochures is not what we need. If the press release quoted a real print user who used direct mail to drive their e-commerce volume to new and better levels, or Hasbro saying that their first catalog ever after 150 years went better than expected (I have no idea if it did-- it may have been a disaster for all I know--- just using it as an example, but it would be interesting to follow up). I have not seen the brochure, indeed I don't know anyone who has, but since these kinds of things were not mentioned, I assume they are not part of it.
To get the real sense of the way things have changed, just read this short article to get a sense of what we're up against: http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=29514
OnDemandJournal had a good article as well about it: http://members.whattheythink.com/home/ge061011pellow.cfm
And then, ad:tech is in New York in November.... the exhibitor list is at http://www.ad-tech.com/exhibitors-ny.asp
When it comes to understanding modern media, the Print Council, and printers, are clearly "404 Not Found"

What should be done by the industry and, more importantly, printers? This was the subject of two WhatTheyThink columns. These were originally on the premium side of WTT , but the WTT folks agreed to move them to the "free" side.
http://members.whattheythink.com/home/drjoe161.cfm
http://members.whattheythink.com/home/drjoe162.cfm

Media Use, B2B Marketing, and "Engagement" = Bigfoot

2006-10-10T17:00:00.000-04:00

Arbitron has a free report about Internet and media use: highly recommended
http://www.arbitron.com/downloads/im2006study.pdf
Selected highlights:

There was a sharp increase in the number of heavy on-demand media consumers compared
with 2005 (from 11% to 21%).
Consumers find cell phones and broadband Internet access the most “life-changing” new technologies.
The user base of MP3 player owners is growing rapidly (almost doubled).
Households with broadband Internet access now significantly outnumber those with dial-up.
Thirteen percent of respondents have three or more working computers in their homes.
The number of respondents having ever made an online purchase has grown fourfold since 1999.
The weekly Internet radio and video audiences have each increased 50% over the last year.
Given a choice between never using the Internet or never watching TV, four in 10 would choose to keep the Internet and eliminate television.

The article "The End of Lazy Marketing" is where I found the Arbitron link. The article gives a perspective of the kinds of media decisions marketers are facing today. The use of the word "lazy" is quite good. Was print the old "lazy" choice?
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623635

Short article with some interesting data about the B2B marketing mix and the influence of direct marketing.... and some discussion about how no one can really define direct marketing
http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=29487

B2B now ordering 40% online? According to Abacus, a division of DoubleClick, it is. No wonder B2B space advertising has suffered...... once people realize that the Internet is just a fad, it will all go away.
Story http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=29476
Also significant is the report's finding that b-to-b customers make online purchases nearly 10% more than b-to-c customers, with 40% of 2005 b-to-b sales occurring over the Web, compared with 31% of consumer purchases. Abacus' report said the statistics highlight what most marketers already know: "Business purchases exhibit a different dynamic than consumer purchases."
Press release
http://www.abacus-us.com/News_and_Events/Press_Releases/default.asp?p=115
Download the executive summary http://www.abacus-us.com/News_and_Events/Press_Releases/The_Abacus_2006_B-to-B_Industry_Insights_Report_Executive_Summary.pdf

Insights into selling multichannel campaigns
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=112347

Great commentary in Advertising Age by Steve Rubel, "You Might as Well Be Searching for Bigfoot:
In Other Words, the Truth About 'Engagement' Is It's a Myth"
http://adage.com/article?article_id=112346
Engagement is, quite frankly, hot air. It's indicative of a systemic issue in the marketing community. We love to create buzzwords to describe new marketing methods when the good ol' outdated ones like blunt interruption don't quite work anymore.

European web use now passes newspapers. Study was by Jupiter.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/eb9509dc-5700-11db-9110-0000779e2340,_i_email=y.html
The time European consumers spend online has, for the first time, overtaken the hours they devote to newspapers and magazines, a study revealed. But the growth of new media is expanding total media consumption rather than simply cannibalising print and television. Print consumption has re-mained static at three hours a week in the past two years, as time spent online has doubled from two to four hours. Viewers are also spending more time watching television, up from 10 hours to 12 a week. The Jupiter Research survey of more than 5,000 people in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain shows that Europeans’ use of the internet is still behind the rates seen in the US. A similar study by Jupiter of US habits found that Americans now spend 14 hours a week online – as much time as they spend watching television – and just three hours reading print.

BLS Finds 810,000 Jobs! Soft Newspaper Revenue (That's What They Get for Not Having Hard News), Channel Conflict (Blame it on iTunes)

2006-10-09T16:50:00.000-04:00

NY Times coverages of the Association of National Advertisers where they discuss participatory or "bottom-up" marketing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/media/09adcol.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&pagewanted=print
“Content is no longer something you push out. Content is an invitation to engage with your brand.”

Newspaper revenue is "softening." I've noticed all those stories comparing newspaper company valuations on the stock market compared to other industries, and also those that say "things are not so bad." For the former, comparison to other industries does not matter, it's comparison to what-have-you-done-for-me-lately. And as fars as "things are not so bad", then why the layoffs?
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003221595
While publishers are shifting more to online to slow the print ad slowdown, the benefits may not be realized immediately... it will probably take until 2008 before online revenue is big enough to start making a financial impact.
Well, yet another situation where the old business is declining and the new one is growing but the top line is stagnant? There's lots of situations where the dynamism is obscured by the aggregate, until there is a breakout to the upside. I think it will take longer than they think and newspaper owners will become very impatient. Look for more deals!

Small bookstores are fighting back against amazon.com and others. Interesting article.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8KKJC104.htm

I love channel conflict stories like the bookstore one. But here's a bigger one: Target complaining that downloads are hurting its DVD sales. Apple is the problem. Target will stop investing in DVDs; if this is fixed, it will only be temporary.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116035902475586468.html?mod=hps_us_pageone

The Bureau of Labor Satistics "missed" 810,000 jobs! Last Friday, the news reports were that payroll increased only +51,000 jobs. But the household survey showed an increase of 271,000 jobs. And now, this comment in the report, on the last page, is starting to get some attention. Yet again, we set another record for the number of people employed.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Each year, the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey data are benchmarked to comprehensive counts of employment for the month of March derived from state unemployment insurance (UI) tax records that nearly all employers are required to file. For national CES series, the annual benchmark revisions over the last 10 years have averaged plus or minus two-tenths of one percent. The preliminary estimate of the benchmark revision for March 2006 is +810,000 (0.6 percent).
Again, I strongly recommend Gene Epstein's book, "Econospinning", which digs into this kind of thing, and how the business press, rarely reads past paragraph 2 of any press release.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&path=ASIN/0471735132&amp;amp;tag=drjoewebbcom-20&camp=1789&creative=9325

Sony Reader Poo-poo'd, Digital Natives, Google Books, Work with Acrobat Files... for Free!

2006-10-08T20:48:00.000-04:00

Sony Reader gets a bad review in Business Week in an article with a great title: "Gutenberg 1, Sony 0"
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_42/b4005034.htm
...the reading experience is far inferior to that of a real book, partly because all concept of page design is lost... Files downloaded from a computer (via a usb cable) fare worse. I found that most pdf files were unreadable even in the largest type size, and I could not get Word files to download at all...Another big limitation is that the display can show only four shades of gray, thus restricting graphics to line drawings. This essentially disqualifies the Reader from one of its most attractive uses, textbooks...These deficits, however, pale compared to Sony's Connect bookstore (ebooks.connect.com), which seems to be the work of someone who has never visited Amazon.com (AMZN )...The worst problem is that search, the essence of an online bookstore, is broken. An author search for Dan Brown turned up 84 books, three of them by Dan Brown, the rest by people named Dan or Brown, or sometimes neither...The problems of the store and software are fixable. But unless Sony repairs them fast, the Reader may be headed for the scrap heap of failed e-book readers.
This article is from the UK and is typical of what has been written lately
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2165931/sony-launches-reader-device
So, the bottom line is that the Business Week writer is biased because he actually used the product before writing about it :)

USA Today article about "digital natives," in other words, the Internet generation that is always connected... is now in college.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-10-02-gennext-tech_x.htm
This part of the article got my attention:
Still, the ease with which young people can manipulate data, do online research or even play games may bode well for some types of careers. For example, video games may improve a surgeon's effectiveness in the operating room, according to a study released in April by researchers at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City in conjunction with the National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis.
The study of 303 surgeons found a 20-minute warm-up of video gaming immediately before laparoscopic surgery improved performance. These findings support a smaller 2003 study by the same researchers that found doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37% fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and were 27% faster than doctors who didn't play.

It's not just students... half of myspace.com users are 35 or older.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8KIT3KO0.htm
but this article in Advertising Age thinks that's a bad thing
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=112306

In media mix discussions, public relations is easily forgotten, as everyone focuses on electronic media. This article offers a perspective on the new p.r. world.
http://www.newsobserver.com/104/story/495067.html

I write (almost constantly it seems) that the savings rate data that is supposedly "so horrible" is meaningless. This article offers a good explanation
http://biz.yahoo.com/brn/061002/19658.html
When typical consumers hear "savings"...they think about the portion of money stowed away for safekeeping in a bank or investment account... But to an economist, that emergency cash is not savings, but instead is considered "wealth."..."we see savings as the absence of consumption. Wealth is the accumulation of assets"... By many measures, even with a falling savings rate, U.S. consumers are wealthier than they have ever been.The official definition of what an economist calls "savings," according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, or BEA, is "disposable personal income less personal outlays." In other words, add up everyone's after-tax income and subtract everyone's expenses. The amount leftover is the national savings rate... According to the BEA, the national annual savings rate fell in 2005 to its lowest point since the Great Depression: negative 0.4 percent...Compare those numbers with 1985 when the national savings rate hit a record 11.1 percent and it is clear why economists are raising the warning flag...But at the same time, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., or FDIC, records show that American banks have more cash in their vaults than at any other point in recent history -- with $6.4 trillion deposited in the domestic offices of U.S. banks as of June. Of that $6.4 trillion, $5.23 trillion was in some type of interest-bearing account, such as a money market account, savings account or certificate of deposit... [E]conomists...say this disconnect between statistical measurements proves that the official method of calculating savings is itself a flawed measurement...calculations...reflect income earned during the production of some good or service during the period being measured. This strict definition means some big income sources get excluded..."Capital gains does not fit that definition, and therefore are excluded from the measure. ... Benefits from private pension plans are not counted as income because some portion of the benefits are paid from capital gains...

This story about how Google Books is stimulating sales of publishers sounds suspicious to me (note the lack of data). But it's also interesting in that this may be just like when the studios fought video rentals... only then to "discover" that this was the best way to sell their titles (and they also discovered a "post-theatrical release" market, and that there is definite age and income segmentation for various formats).
http://in.today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-10-06T184900Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-271097-1.xml

Finally! An industry event at a decent location! :)
http://neilbauman.cachefly.net/top_b/pc01_top.html

Don't want to buy Acrobat? (I don't! It won't work with some of my peripherals!)
Of course, Acrobat Reader is free, and we'll soon be getting version 8.
You've got free alternatives for actually working with the files...
Office suite OpenOffice has PDF making built in www.openoffice.org --- works great for Powerpoint documents
Use PDF Creator for all the non-Office suite documents
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pdfcreator/PDFCreator-0_9_3_GPLGhostscript.exe?download
PDF Split and Merge does exactly that for PDF files http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pdfsam/pdfsam-win32inst-v0_6_sr.exe?download

Print Scores Four Positive Months in a Row; Newspaper Next Report; Other Stuff

2006-10-04T12:46:00.000-04:00

The August manufacturing shipments data were released by the Commerce Department, and printing’s August was strong. Current dollar shipments were up +$245 million, or +3.9%, compared to August 2005. On a current dollar basis, this was the fourth consecutive month of positive comparisons. July 2006 shipments were revised down by -$22 million. For the last four months, inflation-adjusted sales are down -$57 million, which is essentially flat with last year. The Newspaper Next project of the American Press Institute has released a worthwhile report. Go to this address, fill out the form, and you can download a PDF at not charge.
http://www.newspapernext.org/2005/09/report_availability_1.htm

Story about digital makeover of the NY Times
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/09/01/8384343/index.htm

Xerox bought XMPie... after being reported in the Israeli business press a couple of months ago and then vehemently denied by XMPie, to the point of sending accusatory e-mails questioning the journalistic competence of some who reported it. Well... it's obvious there was a leak, and this is how they attempted to plug it. Not good to burn bridges with the press... you may need them one day. The people who were flamed are above that, though.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20061004/tc_cmp/193101565

IMPORTANT STUFF:
Back in April, I gave my forecast of the eight teams that would end up in the baseball playoffs. I got all four teams in the National League playoffs correct; and got all four in the American League wrong. I never liked AL baseball after the rule change allowing the designated hitter. Well, I should stick with what I know, I guess. Let's Go Mets!

More Myths Debunked, New Media in Real Use, Cable Business Knows How to Fight Back, and Other Stuff

2006-10-03T09:17:00.000-04:00

This is a really light story about how the printing industry is changing, perpetuating all kinds of myths like "we're no longer a manufacturing industry" and "Printing companies need skills never required before in the industry, such as marketing, financial analysis, long-range planning and human resources and organizational development."
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/business/15663379.htm
Yeah, right. The industry always had activities and always needed to do them better. Marketing? 1972 was the publication of "Why Marketing?" the seminal article by Victor Strauss demanding that printers wise up; most never had to and they still made money because markets were growing. Sorry: good sales management is part of marketing. PIA Financial Ratios have been about all that printers have needed for decades, that, and a good cost accountant. When they didn't have that, NAPL and others were there with cost books, as were manufacturers who provided these as a service, as were a variety of published estimating resources. Bookkeeping was always bad for small business, but even though it's bad today, it's a lot better because accountants and bookkeepers have far better tools (software) than they ever did before. Long-range planning? That's why God made 10 year leases on equipment; the print entrepreneur made a bet, putting all that capital in plant and equipment, and that was their long-range plan, a bigger bet than any MBA with an Excel spreadsheet would ever dare to do with their own money. Only recently has writing about business planning started to recognize the value of the entrepreneur's unspoken, unwritten culture they create in their business as more important than any written strategic plan. Human resources? For years, this was the role of the unions, who by their own hands and deeds made themselves irrelevant, but left a legacy of industry structure. If they weren't in a company, non-union printers still mirrored the structures and workflows unions created. Organizational development? Print businesses are still primarily family businesses; nepotism begins at home, as they say. Small businesses are functions of the owners personality, and wise owners found like-minded individuals to aid them in their business. And when succession was not possible, sale, merger, or acquisition was the organizational development plan. Large print businesses have most of these functions, and have had them for a very long time. Think Donnelley or Quad or Quebecor don't have these things? They have for decades. Having these things are no guarantee of success. All kinds of unsuccessful companies have had all of these functions; business graveyards are full of companies with bad ideas but who had great procedure manuals and binders full of plans. None of these functions make print demand change in the industry's favor. Much as I love marketing, the marketing practiced in the printing industry is not uniquely deficient; it is the same marketing practiced by most manufacturing companies, it is mainly sales-based and administrative. As far as printing not being manfacturing, that is hogwash. While the nature of manufacturing and service seems blurred throughout the economy, the printing industry does not create intellectual property, it reproduces on behalf of others, and that process requires capital equipment, and inputs of other manufactured goods that must be transformed into something else that is physical in nature. As far as service goes, do not confuse the change in the ways of delivering or selling with the core nature of a business. All businesses are service businesses, one could contend. The definition (according to dictionary.com) is "the making of goods or wares by manual labor or by machinery"... we don't do that? Service has many definitions, but they all relate to the provision of activities, or the movement of things from one place to another, for the public. In that sense, no manufacturing business is "pure" as just being manufacturing, but one cannot doubt where the bulk of its resources are invested. Creative businesses position themselves to look like service businesses but that is actually a marketing strategy, and not the essential economics of that firm. Print businesses are manufacturing companies, and unless they understand that first, they can't craft the right range of activities that need to be built around them to make manufacturing appear secondary. That's where good management comes in: holding these two seemingly conflicting ideas in their head at one time, and still making them work. Most important: understanding why people use print, and that wasn't cited in the article at all. None of these tools do anything to make a print owner understand media.

Good story with some case studies about the use of new media
http://www.adweek.com/aw/national/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003188652

The cable industry is not taking any of this new media stuff lying down. This study may be biased in favor of TV (I don't have the methodology or the questionnaire). Their site has sales materials for cable folks to use to sell against other media.
Story http://www.onetvworld.org/main/cab/press/releases/cab-releases-findings-of-.shtml
Press release http://www.onetvworld.org/main/cab/press/releases/cab-releases-findings-of-.shtml

And new media can be its own worst enemy. While metrics can be reported immediately, such as web page hits and site visits, no one really knows if these data are correct, or what they really mean. Ultimately, how do people judge advertising? Sales. Yet no article ever really mentions that.
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003156019

Flexible packing market study. Predicts slow growth. Packaging does that... it's related to population growth and then the demographic and other trends that are around at the time, and often disappoints in sales to the downside. It's still a wild and crazy business, with great potential overseas as economics change in developing countries.
press release http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060927/nyw090.html?.v=72
report description http://www.sbireports.com/product/display.asp?productid=1209593

Wonder why Sony is donating to breast cancer awareness? Campbells doubled sales to Kroger with special pink cans with the same pitch. "Cause marketing" works... but it has diminishing returns, which is why it is only done at particular times.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=112198

More Sony E-Reader, New Quark Logo, The Dead Parrot, Good Riddance to the Old Agency Ways, and Stop Asking Opinions and Do Something

2006-10-02T11:15:00.000-04:00

The Sony e-Book Reader press release http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/consumer/computer_peripheral/e_book/release/25280.html
and promoting e-readers for the visually impaired
http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/consumer/computer_peripheral/e_book/release/25283.html
and to support breast cancer research
http://news.sel.sony.com/en/press_room/corporate_news/release/25266.html
MS Word documents:
Company-created interview with Sony VP Ron Hawkins http://news.sel.sony.com/assets/reader/documents/Reader_Q_A_with_Ron_Hawkins.doc
Quotes from impressive industry leaders who want to say something good in case the product takes off
http://news.sel.sony.com/assets/reader/documents/Reader_Quote_Sheet.doc
Spec sheet http://news.sel.sony.com/assets/reader/documents/ebook_Product_Spec_Sheet.doc

The daily comic Close to Home illustrates how the Internet has affected a critical social and religious institution. http://www.gocomics.com/closetohome/2006/10/01/

Quark has a new logo... again!! I haven't seen this reported anywhere except here
http://www.ospreydesign.com/foreword/archives/001921.html. The company has not issued a press release (perhaps they are gunshy?)
Last year they made a big deal about their logo
http://www.quark.com/about/presscenter/prview.jsp?idx=633&alap=no
but then bloggers and others realized it was just like that of the Scottish Arts Council
http://www.antipixel.com/blog/archives/2005/09/11/the_new_quark_logo.html
and
http://www.ospreydesign.com/foreword/archives/001779.html
The whole thing was so badly bungled... including their defense of the mistake, which seemed a lot like the Monty Python "dead parrot" sketch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H6DSoqZz_s
I wonder if they got a makegood from their agency. The logo business has changed quite significantly over recent years. A Google search http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=logo+design will get you to lots of companies that will design logos for less than $500. This used to be a big business for graphic designers ("corporate identity") and now, it's not... except for big agencies who still make megabucks with big corporations in market repositionings.

Article that laments the downfall in advertising creativity... huh? Maybe in the B2B space... Back when there were three networks and that's all there was, everyone saw the ads. With narrowcasting, they don't. The article also makes it seem that older advertising was actually good, but we only remember the good ones. The turning point was the "I can't believe I ate the whole thing" ads for Alka-Seltzer, which won many awards, was highly memorable, but made Alka-Selzer sales go down. The Clios changed their ad awards standards the next year or so. What's really changed is that there are more media than print, and executives, starting two decades ago, became sick and tired of the agency markups and started demanding fixed billing. It wasn't the three-martini lunch era that ended, it was the 15% markup on anything that moved era that ended, and well it should have.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/special_packages/business_monday/15644764.htm

This article is probably even more important: consumers are sick and tired of being asked their opinions.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=112237
Nothing kills creativity like market research. Consumers can only respond to what they know, and all their answers regress to means. If good strategy is to create differentiation, and exploit niches that others haven't, using market research is like hitting a railroad spike with a stale banana. Market research is best directed at measuring historical things, and identifying problems, never to ask what kinds of products people want. The best examples I can think of, but can't find anything on it, both involve Coke. The New Coke fiasco is a classic that is online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke
But when Coke bought Columbia Pictures, they attempted to do market research about what movies people wanted to see. It didn't work. Creativity is the search for newness. Market research used in that way just creates mediocrity.
Finally, whatever happened to leadership? Research is the greatest excuse to do nothing. All this article tells me is that new, small agencies are going to well, because they way they get noticed is because of the risks they take and their unforeseen success. Let's hear it for entrepreneurship.

A Bevy of New Media Mirth and Fun

2006-10-01T19:49:00.000-04:00

Magazines have to wise up to the digital age, according to Robin Steinberg, svp and director of print investment at Publicis Groupe's MediaVest
http://www.adweek.com/aw/specials/advertising_week/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003157368
...pressure is mounting on magazines to offer advertisers multiplatform packages that tie-in to the Web, mobile and other appropriate digital media... clients are scrutinizing print budgets more closely, demanding greater accountability and innovations..."It's getting harder and harder to sell" clients on the notion that print is an essential medium in the digital age...Digital ad budgets are increasing exponentially, and "it's got to come from somewhere and it's coming from both print and TV budgets"... "You have to solve problems and the consumer has to be at the heart of your marketing plan."

In the meantime, publishers are trying to gang up on Google... don't they know the portal thing died a couple of years ago and that search engines are the portals to content now? Sheeeesh!!!
http://www.adotas.com/2006/09/publishers-team-up-against-search-engine-heavyweights/

Good article that misses the point -- the 9/22/06 "Driven to Despair" posting by William Powers of the National Journal (this link will probably go to the latest posting).
http://nationaljournal.com/powers.htm
Powers is lamenting that newspapers financial performance is actually good to other industries, and they're being tarred as bad businesses when they really aren't. The really are bad business... 18-36 months from now... and that's what investors are looking at. They're also looking at the loss of prestige in many newspapers over the last few years because of horrid reporting (Jayson Blair need not apply). Of course their financials are good. But they're not as good as they used to be, and the writing is on the wall, and they're still ticked off that journalists didn't put it there.

Media buyers are having a really tough time keeping up with changes in families and their media habits.
http://adage.com/advertisingweek2006/article?article_id=112116
...Thanks to portable media and multitasking behavior, the typical consumer packs an average of 43 hours worth of activity into a typical day. .. The family, according to the survey, is more democratic than ever, with children influencing 50% of all purchases...But technology and changing family dynamics and makeup is increasingly allowing everyone in the household to have a say in buying decisions.

Forrester has an interesting report about changing media habits and how they vary by age.
http://now.eloqua.com/es.asp?s=332&e=259AF077DDC741939496547C8CDF6761&elq=BAC9DC4C7F074775B9F872C01FF187F9
Gen Y and Gen X households lead the way in integrating technology into their lives. Gen Yers take technology everywhere. Young adults are the most likely to put a premium on mobility, owning mobile phones, laptops, and MP3 players more often than their older counterparts. But the balance of consumers are following in their footsteps: 34% of Older Boomers and 22% of Seniors have cut the long-distance cord.... Seniors' media intake revolves around TV. Seniors consume one-third more hours of TV per week than Gen Yers do; Gen Yers devote more than three times as many hours to the Net per week as Seniors...Viral or word-of-mouth marketing is appealing across generations, but the Net is the place to reach Gen Yers and Gen Xers for product research. While almost 90% of Seniors do their decision-making research offline, nearly 40% of Gen Xers do research online and purchase offline. .. Gen Xers are the sweet spot for online shopping. With their disposable income and near-ubiquitous connectivity, more Gen Xers shop online than any other generation: 16.2 million online households... More than half (55%) of online travelers book their travel online. Young adults research and book their travel with Web agencies like Expedia or Orbitz more often than older travelers: 51% of Seniors booked with the airline they flew compared with only 33% of Gen Yers.

This article says podcasts are misunderstood-- and there's lots of "PC-casts"... which is my experience as well
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid={2AC72A0B-8A77-4A48-B8FA-427CBC1AC51B}&siteid=mktw&dist=nbc

The Sony e-Book Reader is out!
PrintWeek story http://www.printweek.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&UID=18a40cff-3161-4db0-9c6f-d06412328153
Book Business http://www.bookbusinessmag.com/story/story.bsp?sid=37714&var=story#37714
Skeptical Computerworld article http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=e-business&articleId=9003753&taxonomyId=71&intsrc=kc_feat
Online video http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/itpd/reader/
Order it! (early demand must have been hot, because no more shipments until mid-November, a message that just recently appeared on the page) http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-Start?ProductSKU=PRS500U2&INT=sstyle-PortableReader-tophero-portable_reader&LCID=LCTR_Showcase:ITPD:Reader:Home:btnClick

B2B marketing getting more sophisticated in some ways, but not in others... are printers helping? I think not.
Here's the original story that got my attention http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=29360
And this is the press release
http://www.alterian.com/Press_Releases_1.asp?category=1&news=27045&id=18545&id=18519
[Marketing Service Providers]cited several challenges limiting the success of B2B marketing. Topping the list is analytics. Data acquisition, database management, lead management and tracking ROI also present major obstacles... “Given the protracted sales cycles and lack of data insight, B2B organizations must rely on marketing even more than B2C organizations to establish a dialogue with prospects and customers,” said David Eldridge, Alterian’s chief executive officer. “There’s a huge opportunity for MSPs to apply their technology and services to help B2B marketers understand their audiences’ individual preferences and purchasing motivations. Specifically, MSPs can lead their clients to a greater use of interactive marketing tactics that elicit audience insight that can be used to advance B2B analytics.”... clients use email for customer retention and cross-selling, 72 percent stated their clients do so for customer acquisition. And 48 percent reported their clients use email for transactional communications. About 50 percent confirmed that email is part of a combined online and offline tactical mix, while only 14 percent of marketers said they use email as a stand-alone effort... “Each year, the adoption of direct and database marketing strategies grows more widespread, even taking firm hold among B2B marketers,” said Eldridge. “As this trend spreads, the role of the MSP is more important than ever. Businesses need a knowledgeable marketing partner as consumers and professionals cross multiple channels, preferences become harder to pinpoint and privacy and legislation concerns deepen.”

World Economic Forum has issued its country competitiveness rankings
Release http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/Global%20Competitiveness%20Report/index.htm
Executive summary http://www.weforum.org/pdf/Global_Competitiveness_Reports/Reports/gcr_2006/gcr2006_summary.pdf Rankings (Excel) http://www.weforum.org/pdf/Global_Competitiveness_Reports/gcr2006_rankings.xls

Staples, Outsiders, Future of the Internet, Fuji Trying to Smell Nice, and More

2006-09-26T15:50:00.000-04:00

Ready or not, here they come.... Staples is now offering design services
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060925005380&newsLang=en

I got an e-mail from ZipMailUSA, another reminder of how an outsider (data base provider InfoUSA) is driving a use of print for direct mail for small business owners.
http://www.zipmailusa.com/
What will it take, I still wonder, to wake the commercial printing business up. Is the only innovation coming from outsiders, unbound by tradition and trade practice, free of a myopic love for the print process, and able to view print and its workflow differently that those who are immersed in it?

The Pew Internet Survey has released the second report about the Future of the Internet
Read the release http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/131/press_release.asp
Get the report http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Future_of_Internet_2006.pdf

Fuji is becoming a holding company and will be selling... cosmetics? Sure will! Conglomerates have a long history of flat, but predictable, underperformance.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20060920a2.html

Can we quantify online effects of print like this article attempts to quantify the offline effects of search?
http://chiefmarketer.com/online_marketing/search_offline_demand_09222006/

Offshore Package Printing, Steve Forbert?, Capt. Bo

2006-09-25T23:20:00.000-04:00

I'm often asked about "offshore package printing," that is, package printing that is used for goods that are imported here, sometimes reported as "stealth printing" referring to the fact that its value is not reported because it is part of the total product value. This is the issue as I see it, as I have written in Adam DeWitz' Printmode blog recently. Context: Adam was commenting about Keith Hevenor's 9/20 blog posting about the vibrancy of the packaging business now that he's involved in the CMM show since PennWell shuttered the print version of Electronic Publishing. The below is my stream of consciousness reply to Adam's question, but I must advise that I had studied this two years ago when doing my study on offshore printing, so the background is solid, but the writing below is not. And just as an opening comment, there still persists in the US a sense that we only import and never export. The trade data does a very bad job of capturing all of the crossborder activities, except it does a good job in old style manufactured goods and a rather horrid job in services, and a dreadful job in other stuff. So the data are flawed. Nonetheless, you do have to add imports less exports (which gives us a deficit) and add in foreign direct investment, which would be investments made in the US by overseas investors who cannot find anything to invest in in their countries. That's not an insult, that's a description: for example, if I make product A in the US, but I see an opportunity to sell more product A in Europe, I will probably build a product A plant in Europe once its sales volume justifies itself. Building that plant is called "direct investment." Biggest foreign real estate holders in the US? The Brits and the Dutch! Yet no one talks about them taking over our country. Once you add everything together, imports, exports, etc., it totals to 0. For some reason, the press never reports the months we set records for exports, which we have, quite often. It's just like there is never a report that the number of people working is at another record level... again... almost every month for the past year. Anyway, here's the comment I posted on PrintMode:

While we're importing more, we're exporting more, and many of the imported goods are in bulk and not packaged until they get here. It's really dynamic. I've figured that about $4b worth of packaging is part of the imports. It's not all that big, because so much of our packaging is for food, and that's either fully prepared here or arrives in bulk here and then packaged. In some cases, the imports are ingredients, such as cocoa or spices or other things. So it shouldn't automatically be assumed that the products need packaging. Packaging grows at the rate of 1% annually because of population, and then anything on top of that is the result of other effects, such as changes in preferences or innovations (people forget that there was a time when there wasn't frozen food!). It's a fascinating market because the materials and the filling technologies are all changing so much. As the world becomes wealthier, especially in emerging/developing economies, packaging will be a constantly growing and interesting business. It's becoming less so in the U.S. because household wealth is already so high and population growth is limited. Europe's population growth will not be all that good, in fact it is basically negative. But everywhere else in the world will be just plain fascinating.

Speaking of offshore, WSJ has a sky is falling story about U.S. owing more money to offsore investors than it gets in return from its own offshore investments. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115915177853972817.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
Sorry, it doesn't make a difference. Interest rates (long-term bonds) are falling here and the returns overseas investors will get will decline. Interest rates are rising elsewhere. You can create dire situations depending on when you take the snapshot. Years ago I used to explain to my students that one of the worst things executives do is read the WSJ every day and decide based on what they just read to do something. There is quite the culture of "I believe the last thing I heard" among executives rather than building a preponderence of evidence. We see it the past few weeks: most economic data show very conflicting signs. Corporate profits are up; housing starts are down; inflation is high, commodities prices are falling. All data, every last bit of them, are historical, and those that often have reputations for being a way to predict marketplace conditions often give false signals. There are always times when executives have to act on the last thing they heard ("the building is on fire, sir"), but those should be rare. There are also too many times executives are indecisive, waiting for more and more data; by the time they have it, their opportunity has passed them by. Early '80s rocker Steve Forbert may have written it best, in a song that has absolutely nothing to do with business:
"I don't wanna see no fortune teller,
I'd rather do without prediction
I'll see it when it's all around me,
Hey, what's the hurry?"

Publishing guru Bob Sacks (known to his friends as "Capt. Bo" or "bosacks") has a an interesting article at Publishing Executive Magazine
http://www.pubexec.com/doc/291275178443975.bsp

Webinar Goes Well, Fridays with Frank, BN-CVO Heats Up, Mag Circulation Doesn't, HP Spies on the Media, and Other Stuff

2006-09-21T16:46:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's webinar went quite well, and can be downloaded at
http://members.whattheythink.com/home/webinars/webinar060920.cfm
There are also prose answers to questions that we did get to during the call. This was one of the better webinars as far as I was concerned. Gosh, finally got it right on the 9th try :)
Thanks again to Kodak and WhatTheyThink

Now it can be told: Frank Romano is replacing me on Fridays at WTT, and I shift over to Mondays as previously announced.
http://members.whattheythink.com/home/wttnews060921.cfm
Unintentionally funny line (if out of context) in the release, quoting Frank: "I have always gone where the industry goes." A joke about restrooms comes to mind.
Randy Davidson is quoted as "Our editorial mission from day one has been to have the best minds in the industry writing for our audience." Somehow, he must have slipped when he let me in.

Banta-Cenveo is heating up. Burton sent a rather nasty, belligerent letter, but by now it's almost an endearing quality which we have come to expect, and would be disappointed if we did not see, kind of like when the hiccups finally stop.
Letter http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/09-20-2006/0004436250&EDATE=
Banta says they got the letter http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060921/cgth044.html?.v=71
The Cenveo letter is absolutely hilarious, kind of like a Star Trek episode "you dare challenge my powers?" threat to the safety of the Enterprise. The $16 special dividend Kryponite isn't going to work against Burton. M&A mavens in the industry keep telling me the deal will happen and that Burton is just relentless in these matters. The fact that Banta's ownership is mainly institutions makes them relatively easy prey. It's easier to make a deal look good in Excel to people more concerned about which of the thousands of stocks they pick once they cash out of Banta. I haven't done work for Banta for years but I can only imagine that the prospects of selling are just frightening and hard to deal with. Cooler heads seem to be prevailing in their measured responses to date, however. It may go for $50-$52 I suspect, but I still think Banta has more surprises up their sleeve, and I would not be surprised if someone like Quad shows up with a bag of money, some phasers, and some proton torpedoes. And don't be surprised if the logistics division sneaks out on the shuttlecraft.

Magazine subscription volume is down, despite the rise in titles.
http://www.circman.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=2470
...over the last ten years, total industry subscription volume is down by 12 percent, even as the number of titles is growing, which indicates that new titles are taking circ away from existing titles. The industry is not creating new magazine buyers...

HP was spying on two CNet reporters, and even sending them false story leads! Good thing printing industry vendors don't have budgets big enough to hire investigators!
http://news.com.com/HP+targeted+reporters+before+they+published/2100-1014-6117497.html?part=dht&tag=nl.e703

For years, media choices were mainly print and broadcast. Doesn't it seem strange that big newspaper publishers like The New York Times are now selling their broadcast properties and buying Internet properties? It would seem to me that they know broadcast is dying, and that ondemand news video over the Internet will be, in the long run, the broadcast model of the future. They most likely feel they've milked broadcast TV for all it's worth. The Times even got out of its co-branded cable channel with Discovery.

GDUSA stock image survey. Stock photography was one of the most exciting markets in the late 1990s with the activities of Getty Images and Corbis (a company that Bill Gates owns as a personal investment).
http://www.gdusa.com/issue_2006/09_sept/survey/StockSurvey.pdf

Fridays No More! Print Will Not Die! (and I read about it on the Internet)

2006-09-20T08:51:00.000-04:00

"Fridays with Dr. Joe" on WhatTheyThink.com is no more!
"Mondays with Dr. Joe" on WhatTheyThink.com starts on 9/25!
There will be a press release about changes in the WTT lineup very soon.
Now, instead of ruining people's weekends, I can ruin a whole work week!

Print will not die! At least that's what some new media experts say.
http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=29273
“Print can be a legitimate spinoff from the Web and can be customized for a particular audience and its subgroups,” said David Worlock, chief research fellow at Electronic Publishing Services, which is owned by Outsell. “Print will become much more specialized.”... “Everybody is scattered, and you have to do everything possible to get your audiences and advertisers.” ... “What works best online doesn’t work in print” and vice versa. “But don’t go crazy and just start to flip from one medium to another.”
The comments were at a panel run by Outsell. Inc.
The report on which much of their media comments are based are at http://www.outsellinc.com/subscribe/FutureFactsIndustryOutlook2007.htm

Womens Wear Daily reports that "the Annual Mendelsohn Affluent Survey claims wealthier Americans are reading more magazines more often than ever. " (on the linked page, scroll down toward the bottom-- the story goes onto the second page).
http://www.wwd.com/issue/article/109181?page=0
I'm kind of not surprised. Wealthier Americans tend to be older and more educated, and if we studied them, we'd find higher use of all print media, and will for some time. I don't know if the survey covered Internet use, but it would show higher than average, though probably not the highest daily use, but it would have the highest broadband penetration.

This e-marketing stuff is a lot harder than print. Ummmm..... all of print's images get to the recipient.
http://directmag.com/disciplines/email/html_email_nightmare/
E-mail box providers are increasingly blocking HTML in their efforts to fight the transmission of viruses through e-mail: AOL, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft among them.There is some good news: 69% of e-mail users who have encountered image suppression said they at least sometimes activate images in statements or order forms from senders from whom they’ve bought, Epsilon’s survey determined. Also, 57% said they at least sometimes activate images in promotional e-mail from senders from whom they have bought, according to Epsilon.

Steve Duncan of the blog Lornitropia discusses the state of blogging in the printing industry
http://www.lornitropia.net/archives/2006/09/18/on-the-printing-industry-and-blogsagain/

BN-CVO... Again!.... and Other Stuff

2006-09-19T05:00:00.000-04:00

Banta-Cenveo heats up... Banta had a web-based investor call outlining cost savings plans, and... a special $16 dividend to stockholders of record on November 10. The stock will drop by about that amount on that day, which is about $5 more than the stock has moved after the CVO kerfuffle started (at about $35). As I am writing this, CVO has not responded, but this certainly removes BN money from the possibility of being raided after a takeover, making it less attractive as an acquisition. No doubt, there will be a CVO response, and it will probably mention what a bad decision this is, especially noting the fact that BN is borrowing money to pay the dividend. It's such a shame that this stuff is going on because it really chews up management time... and those investment bankers and lawyers are very expensive. That time and money is better deployed elsewhere in restructuring the business and reinvesting in it. There is a chance that CVO and its investors, who have probably been buying BN stock at its lows and its rebound, may take the dividend, declare victory and go home. I suspect, however, they're in this for the long haul, and that these actions will be identifiying the great need for Cenveo's management acumen in Banta.
http://www.corporate-ir.net/ireye/ir_site.zhtml?ticker=BN&script=410&layout=-6&item_id=905188
Reuters story http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?view=CN&storyID=2006-09-14T172415Z_01_BNG228992_RTRIDST_0_SERVICES-BANTA-UPDATE-2.XML&rpc=66&type=qcna

Veronis Suhler Stevenson has issued their latest forecast of the media business.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060912/nytu177.html?.v=54
Overall communications spending is on pace to grow at an accelerated rate in 2006, driven by double-digit growth in alternative advertising and marketing strategies...Over the forecast period from 2005 to 2010, spending on media and communications will increase by more than $330 billion to $1.2 billion. In 2000 the industry spending total just over $700 billion...Internet and mobile services is one of the fastest growing segments of the media industry with a projected growth rate of 14.7 percent over the next five years, but according to new data compiled by VSS the fastest growth within internet and mobile services is coming from traditional media companies...Marketing services was the largest and fastest growing communications sector in 2005, growing 9.1 percent to $309.93 billion, and is expected to rise at a five-year CAGR of 8.0 percent to $455.72 billion in 2010, fueled by growth in direct response media, event marketing and custom publishing...Never have there been so many media options available to advertisers and consumers, a trend that has both excited and frustrated brand marketers as media buying decisions have become more complicated by a market veering toward new media.
Also reported in the Financial Times http://www.ft.com/cms/s/956196d8-41cb-11db-b4ab-0000779e2340.html

Case study about effective use of e-marketing... yet another glimpse about how communications efforts are evaluated.
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623427

Yahoo starts new classified service
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623429

Valassis has a free report on the effectiveness of newspaper inserts
http://www.valassis.com/1024/MediaDiet/AAFMediaDiet_PrePrintresearch.pdf

PC World has its own article about the hard drive's 50th birthday
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127104/article.html?tk=nl_wbxnws

Gosh, Where Do I Start? That's the Problem with Today's InfoBuffet

2006-09-14T06:55:00.000-04:00

Time, Inc. is selling a bunch of titles. Watch for more reshuffling there.
http://www.foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=6519

Dumb story in USA Today about how retailers manipulate their environment in the attempt to sell more.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2006-09-01-retail-cover-usat_x.htm
I was so annoyed by it I sent in a letter to the editor suggesting that they do another hard hitting story about why milk is all the way in the back of the supermarket and not the front (to make us walk by the other stuff on the shelves, of course) or perhaps an expose about why people shower before they go on a date. Or perhaps why evil executives would decide 25+ years ago to use color in newspapers to divert our attention away from the other papers at the newsstand. If it's published, I'll link to it. But I doubt it will be.

Oh no! Oil price declines may hurt the oil industry!
http://za.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=businessNews&storyID=2006-09-13T094533Z_01_BAN330169_RTRIDST_0_OZABS-MARKETS-OIL-FALL-20060913.XML
(from Reuters South Africa... watch for stories from Canada soon because the western provinces have been booming because of the run-up in prices over the past couple of years)
Speaking of that, many commodities prices are falling, signaling good inflation news ahead, a slower economy, and problems for paper companies. But at least they sold that timberland for inflated prices, and got out at a good time. (this link is likely to die very soon, so access asap) http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aAeXM0d.VU_E&refer=us
When I checked with some folks in the know, their scuttlebutt is that Steve Roach, their economist for this area, has called 'em wrong in the past, so most people on "the street" are not putting much stock in his claims. Most are viewing the pullback as temporary.

Forrester/American Business Media Powerpoint presentation about B2B media and how effective they are
http://www.americanbusinessmedia.com/images/abm/ABMIntel/Forrester%20Ad%20Campaign%20Presentation%206106.ppt

B2B ad spending report
http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=29210

"Long Tail" interview in Folio
http://www.foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=6456&prmID=1

The New York Times is selling its broadcast properties
http://adage.com/article?article_id=111828
Well, so much for cross/integrated media... This is not a dumb move on its surface. They will be into streaming video, very soon, within 5 years.... literally, just watch. Baseball's mlb.com and mlb.tv are just the start of what will be almost exclusively on-demand TV in about 15-20 years. Think broadcast audiences have declined and will stop? Think again. They'll be plummeting more.

At the same time, the NYT seems to finally be getting a grip on reality: more people are getting their news online.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71740-0.html

Postal service expects rate increase in May 2007. The following prediction will be absolutely correct: there will be many stories about how this will be devastating to mailers. It won't be, because they have alternatives. Cost and expected return drive the media mix. Strangely, as physical aspects of mail shrink in size, the share of postage as a cost per piece goes up. Expect reduced frequency of mailings, lower page counts, shifts to direct mail... but wait! These trends have been around for ten years!
http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/direct-mail/38249.html
http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/direct-mail/38249.html

What? Printing Billing Practices are Being Questioned? How Dare They!... and Yet More Stuff, Including 50-Year Old Hard Drives

2006-09-11T17:21:00.000-04:00

Printing industry billing practices are being questioned. (I immediately thought: Again?)
WSJ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115793345655058978.html?mod=hps_us_at_glance_markets Reuters http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?view=CN&storyID=2006-09-11T120144Z_01_N11142822_RTRIDST_0_FINANCIAL-PRINTERS.XML&rpc=66&type=qcna
Again, executives are shocked, shocked, I say, at how malleable print costs are... And that reminds me of...
An angry murmur starts among the crowd. People get up and begin to leave. Rick comes quickly up to Renault.
Rick: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Renault: I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
The display of nerve leaves Rick at a loss. The croupier comes out of the gambling room and up to Renault.
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Renault: Oh. Thank you very much.
(Hear this famous scene from Casablanca at http://www.vincasa.com/gambling.wav)
I still remember a retired typographer who told me that his retirement was based almost exclusively on what he made from author's alterations. Yet another market that desktop publishing killed. Rats! You can't even make money on other people's mistakes and sloppiness any more!

Industry profits data came out today. I discuss that, and the dramatic changes in sales/employee data in the latest "Data-to-Go" package for $50. Profits went up a bit. Good news, but not enough good news. If only we could get author's alterations back again.
http://drjoe.stores.yahoo.net/prinshandpr.html

GM is seeking integrated/cross media campaigns
http://adage.com/article?article_id=111750
The invited guests to General Motors Corp.'s first Media Partner Summit include executives from Time Warner, Viacom, Universal, Walt Disney Co., Google, NBC Universal and Hearst Corp., who will meet with GM Chairman-CEO Rick Wagoner; Mark LaNeve, VP-vehicle sales, service and marketing; and Mike Jackson, VP-marketing. One goal of the three-and-a-half-hour meeting is to forge more cross-media deals and integrated, multiplatform marketing opportunities.

The hard drive is 50 years old! C-Net has a good story about it. I still remember what a good deal I got when I paid just $1000 for a 100MB drive. Now you can get 300GB for less than $100!
http://news.com.com/The+hard+drive+at+50/2009-1015-6112782.html?part=dht&tag=nl.e703
Will we still need hard drives? Samsung unveils chips that will support 64GB flash memory
http://www.pcworld.com/article/127103-1/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

Top Internet properties according to AdWeek
article http://www.adweek.com/aw/iq_interactive/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003119812
chart PDF http://www.mediaweek.com/mediaweek/images/pdf/%20WebSiteHotList.pdf

Good article by Mike Santoli in this week's Barron's about how the perception of risk has changed since 9/11/01
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB115776355154558381.html?mod=9_0031_b_this_weeks_magazine_main
Economist Brian Wesbury writes about the post-9/11 economy's resilience
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115793483650659011.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Accenture, Dilbert, Media Spending, and more

2006-09-10T07:20:00.000-04:00

Good article on how Accenture is using personalizion in e-newsletters. The information consumer is in charge, and communicators who realize that are rewarded. Accenture is pleased with the results... otherwise we wouldn't be reading an article about it
http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=29155

Scott Adams nails it... this is what buying software is like, in the 9/4/06 Dilbert
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20060904.html

AdAge reports on the recent TNS media spending data
http://adage.com/article?article_id=111711

Cell phone ads to be an $11B market!!
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=18400&hed=Mobile+Ads+to+Surpass+%2411B
(but wait... aren't all new gadgets supposed to be an $11B five years from the time they are announced?)

Econospinning author Gene Epstein has set up www.econospinning.com to track reaction to his book.
I reviewed the book in my WTT column http://members.whattheythink.com/drjoewebb/drjoe157.cfm#2

Copywriter Arthur Schiff, inventor of the "Ginsu" knive and the great line "wait! there's more!" died last week. I guess there's no more, of Arthur, at least.
Washington Post story http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/01/AR2006090101777.html
This page has the Ginsu ad http://www.adpunch.org/entry/arthur-schiff-the-unseen-king-of-the-infomercials-dies-of-lung-cancer/
The real pioneer in copywriting was John Caples, who was #21 of the 100 most influential people in advertising (AdAge) http://adage.com/century/people021.html

Tomorrow is five years since 9/11 and I can't bear to watch anything about it. I lost my first boss, the big 6'7" 300 lb Tim O'Sullivan, who had recently retired but was doing a one day a week consulting gig with a pension fund in the WTC. That was his day, in more ways than one. He had a heart attack while descending the stairs in one of the towers. His family was lucky: they were able to recover his body. On this day, 9/10/01, I was on my way home from Print01, thankfully. The next morning I was at my desk, watching CNBC, and all of the events as they unfolded.

The year before, Annie and Dan were standing with me at the top of one of the towers (I've forgotten which had the observation deck), pointing to the various directions of Yonkers, where we grew up, Long Island, where we lived for 7 years, and New Jersey, and of course NY, harbor. That morning we had taken the tour of the Statue of Liberty, and were up in its crown. No one is allowed in the crown and that tight spiral staircase any more. It was a special day we'll always remember.

College and E-Magazines, Local Internet, Proliferation, and other matters of high importance

2006-09-07T14:51:00.000-04:00

The New York Times reports on magazines sending e-editions to college students.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/business/media/07adco.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
It's a program using Zinio. But think of this: even though they claim it's a way of getting students to switch to print, you have to know that 1) college students are very mobile, and must have a disproportionate cost of address updating for college vs home address for those who reside on campus, and 2) college folks are of course e-savvy, and many colleges include laptops as part of the tuition, so there's a built in platform. This is not about converting to print. This is about adding circulation with a fraction of the cost of fulfillment.

Local Internet advertising has been a real laggard in the new media business. This Chicago Tribune article may indicate that things are starting to change.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0609040012sep04,1,5662306.story?coll=chi-techtopheds-hed

Ad spending increasing
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/media_agencies/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003086312
... but, it's in current terms. Deduct 3.5% for inflation and compare it to 3.3% real GDP growth and see if things are really growing. (They're not)

In the meantime, this new study says "online classifieds increase in popularity; category visitation surges 47 percent in the past year"
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=991

"Nobody Killed the Newspaper" according to this article, which is a good summary of the new media age.
http://www.freemarketnews.com/Analysis/175/5918/kill.asp?wid=175&nid=5918

Multichannel marketing at Xerox
http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=29134

The WSJ had a good editorial about "creative destruction" and recent problems at Ford, Intel, and a shuffling of management at Viacom
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115758767979955813.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks

ASAP be sure to catch economist Alan Reynolds' column about the recent income data released by the Census bureau. It's the column of Sept. 7, and it's not permanently at this address. I'll try to find a permanent link later.
http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?next=0&ColumnsName=are

Consulting firm McKinsey has put a book up on their site about the issues in marketing today. It's called "Profiting from Proliferation."
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/PDFDownload.aspx?L2=16&L3=20&ar=1810&srid=27&gp=0
An explosion of new customer segments, sales and service channels, media, and brands is challenging marketers to reinvent themselves so they can simultaneously prioritize opportunities in a more sophisticated way and increase the consistency and coordination of their marketing execution.

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