Advertising Age has a look at how advertising is shaping up for the various categories in 2010 (here):
Automotive
“Ford Motor Co.’s Jim Farley, group VP-global marketing, told a conference that the automaker plans to spend half its 2010 ad budget on ‘experiential’ and online marketing, because 75% of new-vehicle buyers now shop online.”
Beer
“…some beer marketers acknowledge that the brands have, for years, been marketed in a commoditized fashion. ‘People have seen the brands as very much the same,’ said one veteran beer-marketing executive, ‘and that makes the cheaper stuff look like a reasonable replacement.'”
Consumer Package Goods
“…great marketing could substitute for new technology. Innovation can also come by making the experience better.”
Digital Marketing
“…while consumer attention has moved to the web, consumer marketing has not. Instead, the web has, in the words of IAB chief Randall Rothenberg, been colonized ‘by the evil aliens of the direct-response planet.'”
Print
“…this will be the year when publishers find out whether readers will pay for digital content. ”
TV Adertising
“‘I care more about the program than the network that it’s on,’ said Peggy Green, media-buying executive at Publicis Groupe’s Zenith.”
Wireless
“think of the 2.8 million households that hung onto their analog TV sets on the eve of the nation’s switch to digital TV. ‘Migrations take time,’ noted Bob Rosenberg, president of Insight Research.”
Seth Godin is calling the 2010’s the frustration decade (here). We’ve all experienced the frustration with the old way of doing things not working anymore and now the growing frustration with all the cool technology and new ways of doing business not being robust enough. Combine that with slow economic turnaround and I’ll agree it’s the perfect recipe for frustration. He’s giving you the option to embrace the changes and not fight them but I like his next entry on the “Evolution of every medium” (here):
1. Technicians who invented it, run it
2. Technicians with taste, leverage it
3. Artists take over from the technicians
4. MBAs take over from the artists
5. Bureaucrats drive the medium to banality
This means the next decade will belong to the artists. The people who can make you say wow and stop your busy life for a second to check something out. Taking what’s been created and turning it into something beautiful with impact and meaning is the job of artists. An artists with an MBA sounds like a powerful combination. Anyway, here’s to the decade where the artists take over. That will probably be frustrating for some people, hopefully not you.
Folio Magazine has their annual Magazine and Media Predictions for 2010 (here) and there are a few choice quotes I’ve highlighted below. I’ve got a few of my own predictions:
Slightly down is the new up.
We will see fire sale buyouts (a la Business Week) of a few big titles rather than shuttering (a la Gourmet).
More photographers will get into the workshop, book writing and teaching side of the photography business. This is proving by all appearances to be super lucrative, but will get very crowded and competitive as people with an impressive oeuvre enter the market.
Photographers who market with ideas and innovation will be snapped up by marketers who need fresh ideas and innovation.
Product photography will heat up as companies realize products online need great photography to convert online shoppers into buyers.
Local markets will go red hot as local online markets get competitive and companies that normally needed no photos for a yellowpage ad now need lots of photography for a nice looking website.
Video goes nuclear, because nothing is commissioned anymore without video and hey, “doesn’t that camera shoot video too.”
Web 2.0 ideas will give way to Web 3.0 which is fundamentally the joining of content with social tools.
–Jim Spanfeller, president and CEO, The Spanfeller Group (formerly CEO of Forbes.com)
Staff sizes will rebound as managers realize that staffs designed for print can’t do print and a whole host of new initiatives on top of that, at least not effectively.
–Tony Silber, general manager, FOLIO: and Audience Development
Only one or two magazines for most major vertical markets will survive.
There will be many changes at the top of editorial mastheads with more e-community management skills supplementing traditional journalistic skills for the winners.
Print will become richer, better paper will be used, graphics will improve, quality of content will improve and distribution/circulation numbers will drop.
–Don Pazour, CEO, Access Intelligence
One hopeful breakthrough: the four color e-reader. It will be really helpful. Some of the big publications will probably get a few hundred thousand digital e-reader subscribers paying anywhere from $10 to $50. This will bring in anywhere from $3 million to $15 million in subscriber revenue. Unfortunately, some of those same magazines have seen their ad revs drop by $100 million. Get the picture.
–Keith Kelly, “Media Ink” columnist, New York Post
I like this guy already because he says the page flipping is lame (my word) and scrolling is more natural. I also like the idea where you find the things you’re interested in reading in an image based environment and then when you want to drill down in a story the images fade back and it becomes a pure reading experience. This allows the device to be quite small. Of course, photography is so critical to the future of media, I can’t overstate how well it works to communicate ideas quickly and helps you navigate a ton of information.
The only critical piece of the puzzle left here (besides building the damn thing) is the price. This is where the magazine industry will inevitably drop the ball because they’d quickly like to get back to the large profits they were used to. I think cell phone pricing will be critical for mass adoption. The device should be $100 or even free and then users will pay for a tiered number of magazines or articles to look at each month and lock into one and two year plans. On the other hand if they want to charge $800 for the device the yearly subscription for a magazine should be $1. The cost of making a copy and distributing it is zero. I would pay the dollar to have access to a bunch of magazines where I might read a couple articles a year or only look at the pictures. Sort of a newsstand type of arrangement.
The publishing industry is looking a little brighter these days. Just in time.
TechCrunch has the goods on Time Inc’s solution to the demise of print media:
Since last summer, Time Inc has been working on a “Manhattan Project” to create a digital magazine for the new breed of color tablet computers soon to come to market. (Condé Nast is also working on a similar concept). Today, I got a sneak peak at a demo of the tablet magazine designed for Sports Illustrated.
…But please, satisfy my curiosity before I get on my knees and bow down before your genius: How is this different from a web page? Other than costing ten times as much to produce, that is.
Never mind, I will tell you how: It’s a lot worse. It’s just pasting an old medium into a new one, painting the resulting clusterfuck with two layers of thick varnish.
I feel like anything that mimics a magazine experience on a computer or tablet is simply a stop gap for people who need that familiar look and feel (and annoying page turning sounds). I see no point in passing the limitations of a magazine into a limitless medium like a tablet computer. But, there’s no reason it can’t evolve. You have to start somewhere.
CEO Tim Armstrong tells The Wall Street Journal about plans he has previously hinted about–“a new digital-newsroom system that uses a series of algorithms to predict the types of stories, videos and photos that will be most popular with consumers and marketers.”
The idea is that even a brain-dead editor knows that people want to read about Tiger Woods–and AOL’s coverage includes a 500-slide (!) slide show. But there are plenty of other stories that will go unassigned without a computer’s help. For example:
I have to laugh at AOL and how far off the back they’ve fallen with this notion that what we need now is more unoriginal content to consume.
I believe the more clogged the web becomes the higher the value of arresting pictures and original/exclusive content. I get a tinge of joy when I hear about someone creating an algorithm that will churn out content. The more the better.
Online video represents only a small piece of the total advertising pie, but the growth in streaming ad revenue is becoming more of a threat to the broadcast medium that supplies most of the high CPM content. Hulu is a case in point, as Mediaweek and paidContent sources point out the ways the site’s ad sales team often undercuts the network media buys for both streaming and broadcast. Sources tell paidContent that some of Hulu’s broadcaster backers, which include NBC Universal, ABC and Fox, are experiencing growing frustration after hearing from media buyers that the video site’s ad sales often offer discounts on ad sales. At this point at least, paidContent is told, the situation is more of an annoyance for networks, than serious damage, since the dollar amounts remain comparatively minuscule.
I’m not surprised that the king of promotions (Monte Isom) was the first to come out with an iPhone app as a marketing piece (here). It usually pays to be the first so I’m sure it worked for him in the way that a well made mailer might and as a method for cutting through the email clutter it must have been solid gold.
Not long after Monte’s came out I saw another from Caesar Lima (here).
According to this story on the WSJ Blogs (here), companies like Net Solutions in Chandigarh, Inda build apps for clients at $3,000 to $15,000 a pop.
It will be interesting to see where this ends up. I can certainly see an app from someone like Howard Bernstein being quite valuable but how many individual photographer apps can you download before your phone is clogged.
Maggwire.com, a company I’ve written about before, has a plan to charge users for a subscription to a channel that sounds really good to me. There should be a way for magazines to sell content in pieces, so people can assemble their own based on their interests. Also, it’s a good way to recapture the readers they will lose when they finally raise the subscription and newsstand prices. The New York Observer has a brief story (here) on the three former Wall Street investment analysts—Ryan Klenovich, 24, Jian Chai, 26, and Steve DeWald, 24—who started Maggwire.com and who want to “do for magazines what iTunes did for music.”
Here’s the pitch: Offer users a year’s subscription to a “channel” where they can get premium magazine content from a series of relevant magazines, for, say, $1.99 a month, with an additional 99 cents per magazine that they want to add to the package. The publishers would keep 75 percent of the profit, and Maggwire would get the rest.
McSweeney’s, which began in 1998 as a literary journal, edited by Dave Eggers, that published only works rejected by other magazines, has grown to be one of the country’s best-read and widely-circulated literary journals. They’ve just announced that No. 33 (available for preorder here) is to be in the form of a daily broadsheet. Yeah, a newspaper that will be 112 pages all in color along with a 112 page magazine, a 116 page books section, a pocket sized weekend guide and 3 pull out posters. The NYTimes reports:
The pages will measure 22 by 15 inches. (Pages of The New York Times, by comparison, are 22 by 11 1/2 inches.) Called San Francisco Panorama, the editors say it is, in large part, homage to an institution that they feel, contrary to conventional wisdom, still has a lot of life in it. Their experience in publishing literary fiction is something of a model.
“People have been saying the short story is dying for a lot longer than they’ve been saying newspapers are dying,” Jordan Bass, managing editor of the quarterly, said in an interview on Tuesday. “But you can still put out a great short-story magazine that people want to grab. The same is true for newspapers.”
As the crusty old corporate magazines continue to die there are people out there forging a new path.
Andrew Zuckerman seems to have figured out how he wants to use new media to spread the word about these books and films he’s pumping out. He creates a simple custom site: http://www.birdbook.org/; then a vimo channel for the 9 excerpt and behind the scenes videos: http://vimeo.com/channels/bird#5701425; then the publisher (chronicle) has a site with an embeddable preview of the book (here), plus they have facebook and twitter channels. He’s certainly at the forefront of testing all these cool new ways to get the word out. Certainly worth keeping your eye on, plus the pictures are fantastic.
Photographers are doing some amazing things shooting video with the Canon 5D Mark II. Here are a couple that I saw that made me go “wow” when I heard they were shot on a stills camera. I have no idea how they will hold up on a 50″plasma TV, but who’s got time to watch TV anymore. It’s worth noting that both involve some serious hardships to shoot.
First This Documentary on Afghanistan shot by Danfung Dennis. He says “The footage was shot on a custom built rig, using a Canon 5D Mark II, 24-70 f/2.8 L lens, Sennheiser ME-66 and G2 wireless system, Singh-Ray variable ND filter, and Beachtek 2XAs mounted on a Glidecam 2000 HD with custom made aluminum ‘wings.'”
The next one comes from Surf photographer Yassine (Yazzy) Ouhilal:
Since I know Yazzy I asked him a couple questions:
Did you edit, shoot and record all the sound yourself?
I shot most of the raw footage and time lapses over 44 days in the Arctic. A couple of other members of the expedition shot additional footage as well. Since this was also an editorial photo trip, a lot of the surfing footage had to be shot by someone else as I was usually too busy shooting stills. The rest of the time, it was pretty easy to go from shooting stills to video with the 5DMKII.
The audio was pulled from video interviews and audio recordings I got from some of the expedition members. I loaned an H2 digital audio recorder to the surfers on the expedition and asked them to record their thoughts when they were alone or by themselves in order to get authentic impressions from their experience in the Arctic- which wasn’t without challenges.
A lot of the sound effects were pulled from video clips. The 5DMKII has an audio input jack which allows for hi quality mics to be used.
I edited the film myself in imovie and mixed all the audio/sound/music tracks in Garage Band, two simple yet very effective pieces of software that if properly used can yield pretty incredible results.
The time lapses were animated using Quicktime Pro (by importing image sequences of stills and exporting uncompressed movie files)
What kind of experience do you have doing this kind of stuff?
I actually have a film production background- I spent 6 years at Concordia University in Montreal doing the Film Production program there. That was just before the digital/video era so the majority of the film work I did was in 16 and 35mm using editing tables and optical printers that are a much slower process than today’s digital workflow.
After film school, I found it hard to integrate the industry as a film maker. My two options were to try and get funding for my own films or to start working as a technician on film sets and work my way up the food chain. I opted to pursue my dreams and passions as a surf photographer instead and for the last 10 years, I’ve been roaming the globe shooting off the beaten path locations for magazines and companies. This type of work has given me the freedom to work in a field that I really enjoy and has been a good balance of personal and creative freedom as I have been self funding a lot of my trips on a freelance basis and then (hopefully) recouping my investments by providing the content out to various editorial clients.
Returning to filmmaking has been a natural progression and one that I have been looking forward to for a long time now.The way technology is going now, the line between photography and filmmaking is getting thinner and thinner everyday. It has been really exciting to get to shoot with a camera like the 5DMKII. As a photographer, I really know how to compose my shots and how my glass works. To be able to translate that into a cinematic medium has been really incredible.
The experience I had in film school using a much more traditional and slower workflow, it has definitely helped me to restrain myself and not get carried away with all the possibilities of the digital workflow.
How much time did it take you to make this shot doc?
While I probably could have put something together for this project in just a few days, I really wanted to make an authentic film about the experience of surfing in the Arctic- with all the drama and the hostility of the environment. The editing process was done over 3 months. Much like with my photography, I like to distance myself from the content so that I can approach it again with a fresher perspective. It allows me to look at the photos/footage objectively rather than to remain attached to certain shots or clips because of the experience involved with obtaining the imagery. I find that in both photography and filmmaking, being able to “let go” is an important part of the process. Maybe an image means a lot to me because I endured many hardships to obtain it, but I have to keep in mind that the audience doesn’t necessarily know that- therefore will often see less value than I do in a particular shot. Distancing myself from the content for a certain period is definitely part of my approach and it really helps to “forget” about it in order to rediscover it.
Over the first month or two, I basically narrowed down the raw footage from around 40hours to about 4hours. Then I separated all the clips into different categories, much like I do with my approach to editing my photos: scenics, action, lifestyles and interviews. I then narrowed down the footage in each category to end up with about 1 hour of footage that in my opinion consisted of the most beautiful imagery that was also the most pertinent to the story I was trying to push through.
The backbone of the story was constructed using audio voice overs and interviews. This was a very long process as well as I had to listen to hours of audio and basically pull the most important and pertinent points that told the story.
I did this by transcribing every single phrase of audio I had (which turned into around 100 pages or so). From there I edited the audio in the text file by cutting and pasting sentences and later applied that to the actual audio tracks.
Once I had the audio backbone and the best clips, it was about 4 days and nights of intense editing. I actually happened to be back in the Arctic for the editing process which I found very conducive to an inspired approach to the post production. I was really impressed with the workflow in iMovie. It was efficient and simple and compared to editing on a steenbeck (16mm editing table) and splicing film with tape, it was a much simpler process. I definitely made sure to stay away from using too many effects and transitions in order to keep this close to what could have been achieved using more traditional methods. I find in the digital workflow, it’s really easy to say “I’ll fix this in Post” or to get carried away with all the options- which can end up ruining the result. I think with today’s incredible advances in technology, a mix of using the technology along with some self constraint can produce some really interesting and authentic results.
PicScout just announced a new product that will allow photographer to attach some sort of one click licensing to their images (here). This is the same as what LicenseStream has been offering for almost a year now and so there’s nothing revolutionary about it, but it will be very interesting to watch as more companies adopt this business model. There are many people who believe image licensing has a similar problem to what music had, in that people want to license images but there’s not an easy way to do that, so they steal them instead. It’s hard for me to believe this type of licensing amounts to much more than beer money, unless of course you’re handling the transactions and then those pennies add up to millions of dollars as Getty and Corbis discovered in the micro stock business. I do think that it’s good to teach people that images cost money and provide them with an easy way to license them, I don’t think this does much for professional photographers. For pros the more exclusive the image the better.
And Greg Williams has Esquire’s sexiest woman alive cover (here):
So, what did these two magazines do with all the awesome technology they employed in these forward thinking cover shoots. Nothing. That’s right as far as I can tell Outside made their normal cover (the photographer made all these cool futuristic looking living covers and inside spreads in his BTS video) and Esquire made a video to go with their normal cover. It’s sort of like buying a Ferrari and hitching a team of horses to it. Beyond idiotic.
Clay Shirky is fast becoming one of the top thinkers on the future of journalism and if you listen to a talk he gave at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, you will understand why. The Nieman Journalism Lab has an mp3 (here) and the transcript (here).
Some of the major points he makes if any of you want to discuss:
The marriage of advertising and accountability journalism was an accident – “There was a set of forces that made that possible. And they weren’t deep truths — the commercial success of newspapers and their linking of that to accountability journalism wasn’t a deep truth about reality. Best Buy was not willing to support the Baghdad bureau because Best Buy cared about news from Baghdad. They just didn’t have any other good choices.”
Advertisers were overcharged and undeserved– “Not only did they have to deliver more money to the newspapers than they would have wanted, they didn’t even get to say: ‘And don’t report on my industry, please.’”
Consumers want to aggregate their own daily media lineup – “he New York Times is being torn apart right now by its own readers. The number of people who go to the Times’ homepage as a percentage of total readership falls every year — because you don’t go to the Times, you go to the story, because someone Twittered it or put it on Facebook or sent it to you in email. So the audience is now being assembled not by the paper, but by other members of the audience.”
The immediate future is not good -“Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top.”
Newspapers will not survive – “So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.”
The solution or at least his thoughts on what the future holds for journalism is that the bulk of what newspapers do in regards to the public good will be taken up by a multitude of smaller entities that are crowdsourced, commercially funded or non-profits. Basically all media will be broken up into many vertical channels with all kinds of different business models. The idea that an advertiser has no influence over a media company that reports on their industry is total BS so much of the accountability journalism will shift to crowdsourced and non-profit business models. Commercial works as long as the advertiser is in a different industry than the media company is reporting on and so it works really well in the smaller vertical channels. Overall–I’ve said this many times before–content providers are not in trouble it’s the content packagers who are going down.
Photographer Jim M. Goldstein is looking to compile data on how photographers are currently using and receiving benefit from social media web sites such as Twitter, Facebook and others. Won’t you help him out by filling out his survey: 2009 Photographer Social Media Survey
Data from this survey will be shared by Jim M. Goldstein (www.JMG-Galleries.com) October 22 at PDN PhotoPlus Expo in NYC as part of the “Twitter Revolution: Changing the Photographic World, 140 Characters at a Time” (http://bit.ly/3FHUl) discussion panel with Seshu Badrinath, Jack Hollingsworth, and Rosh Sillars. The data from this survey will also be made available later to all who are interested.
I discovered this guide book for journalists–compiled from a series of blog posts by Mindy McAdams, Professor of Journalism at the University of Florida–that teaches reporters how to become more multimedia proficient (download here or visit the download page). I’m sure the section on “How to Shoot Decent Photos” will draw plenty of snickering but there’s good stuff for photographers on audio, video and blogging. Certainly this is a look into the future of journalism as many reporters in small to medium markets will find themselves writing, shooting stills, shooting video, recording audio and then putting it all together on the computer back home and this is what’s being taught in journalism school apparently.
A must read series of posts on Revolutions in the media economy by David Campbell (here) tackles photojournalism today:
We can’t approach this issue via some misplaced nostalgia for a golden age that if it did actually exist certainly no longer survives. Photographic stories or documentary have always been difficult to fund directly. If there was a time when the majority of photojournalists simply waited for well-paid commissions to produce important work, that time is no more. We have to doubt though whether the past was like that, because in reality few if any photographers have been able to sustain a career entirely through editorial projects they chose to do. Even Sebastião Salgado had to do corporate and advertising work to cross-subsidise work on the social issues he wanted to explore, and Simon Norfolk sells his prints to a wealthy clientèle through a fine art gallery in order to support his visual critique of the US military.
[..] If some of the great photojournalists had adhered to [journalism dies the moment one enters into a partnership with the subject] we would have been deprived of great pictures – think, for example of how a Larry Burrows needed the US military to get around Vietnam, or a Tom Stoddart required assistance from MSF to travel in Sudan. Of course partnerships vary and anyone concerned about integrity will have to work hard to maintain independence, but that applies in all situations. Aside from the fact the old editorial paymaster model is all but gone, the idea that taking money from corporate media funded by advertising, so that one can create content which will attract more viewers for that advertising, is free from all moral issues is…well, rather daft.
