Cheapertising

Read this and weep: Clueless Newspaper Found in Adless Bar [Digital Daily]

Just a taste: “Newspaper advertising revenues, which fell almost 8% last year, have fallen another 12% since then, and company reports suggest they will fall 15% more in the next few months.”

In a new article titled New Metrics for Media from Strategy+Business, get up to speed on what results savvy advertisers are getting from the digital revolution. HINT: it’s less about reach and more about touch.

This just in from Graber Partners: Newspapers - Circulation Down, Online Visitors Up

Sorta gives a whole new meaning to “stop the presses.”

Just ran across this interesting nugget in the NYT – ”the NPD Group now counts Apple as the largest seller of music in the country, ahead of Wal-Mart. Apple, in fact, is on track to have greater revenue from selling music (and accessories) this year than the entire revenue estimated for the Warner Music Group.”

A technology company now is a leading music company. It’s similar to what I’ve been telling people about Google – it’s the largest ad agency in the world. Music, advertising…what’s next? 

Heard during an e-metrics webinar by longtime web marketer Jim Sterne: HIPPO – Highest Paid Opinion. HIPPOs can overwhelm any sensible advertising or marketing effort, online or off. Always be on the lookout for signs of them and take appropriate action.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of Turing’d, tune in to this post on Kevin Kelly’s provocative blog The Technium. Much of what he says applies to marketing and advertising, particualrly in research and media. But creativity is not immune. As evidence, I offer this website: theadgenerator.org. It’s rudimentary, I admit, but there’s something unnerving for a creative type like me when you see a program that can generate concepts every 3-5 seconds. I have no doubt that refinements are in the works.

For ad and marketing types looking to understand how to survive the digital changes taking place, Irishman Gerry McGovern is not a bad place to start. He writes and lectures about the need to understand customers and the words they care to hear in the Internet age. Check out his latest column: Finding is the new advertising One of my favorite quotes: “Bringing TV ads to the Internet is like the Pony Express trying to breed faster horses in order to compete with the telegraph.”

In another sign the good old days are now just plain old, one of the pillars of advertising is going with the flow. Check this out from Mitch Joel’s blog Six Pixels of Separation: When GM Shifts 1.5 Billion From Traditional Advertising To Digital Marketing… As Joel asks near the end of his post, “Is this the Perfect Digital Marketing Storm?”

From comScore via TechCrunch, some of the latest web trends in chart form. Examine at your own risk: The Web in Charts—Google vs. Microsoft-Yahoo vs. China 

If you, like me, ponder the future of advertising, I’d like you to reconsider one of the industry’s high-water marks. It routinely ranks in the highest echelon of TV spots – Apple Computer’s “1984,” which heralded the coming of the Macintosh. Looking at it almost 25 years later, the Mac now appears to have not only liberated users from the drudgery of a PC-topia, but also (along with the Internet) has freed consumers from having to sit back and take whatever advertisers and their agencies want them to watch. Maybe we should have seen it as the beginning of the end….