Pictures of Shanghai twenty years apart, from Skyscrapercity.com (via Rolfe Winkler via BusinessInsider), representing the steep and rapid rise of China as a global powerhouse in many industries.
Investor’s Business Daily’s Doug Tsuruoka asked me and a few others about the potential rise of China as a M&A player in media in his article Chinese Media Going Global, Raising Censorship, Bias Fears. Read on here.
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Mad Men is one of my favorite shows on television right now and come Sunday night a new season will begin. AdAge had an interesting article today about what the ad world was really like back in the 60’s.
This one is coming to us courtesy of our friends at Adage.com
As the fourth season of “Mad Men” debuts on Sunday (just in case anyone didn’t know that), here’s a quick look at the advertising world by the numbers. Season four’s first episode takes us back to Thanksgiving 1964. We used our archivally-gloved hands and thumbed through the 1965 issues of Ad Age to find the leading national advertisers and agency reports to see what Madison Avenue looked like as Don Draper was carving his turkey.
In 1964, the world’s biggest agencies (by estimated total billings) were some familiar names: J. Walter Thompson Co., McCann-Erickson Inc., Young & Rubicam, Batten Barton, Durstien & Osborn and Dentsu Advertising. Ogilvy, Benson & Mather and Mather & Crowther would have ranked No. 14 as their newly merged Ogilvy and Mather.
Interpublic owned eight agencies, including McCann. Publicis ranked No. 50.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 110,200 people worked in the ad biz, including 41,200 women. Think more Joan Holloway, less Peggy Olson.
Three of Sterling Cooper’s clients were brands owned by the Leading National Advertisers of the day: American Tobacco Co. spent 5.9% of its sales advertising Lucky Strike and other brands; Gillette spent 15.1% ($45 million) of sales on advertising; and Richardson-Merrell Inc. spent a portion of its $15.5 million budget on a smaller Sterling Cooper client, Clearasil, thanks to Pete Campbell’s father-in-law.
The show airs Sunday on AMC, one of a bazillion digital channels currently on your cable/dish network as opposed to the three Don Draper would have been watching in 1964.
One of the things I love about the show is the fashion and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. For last season, we produced a clip about how to get the Mad Men style. Here it is below:
Great run down on Media Shift on the so-called content farms, including:
- Demand Media
- AOL
- Examiner
- Yahoo!
Interesting read on BusinessWeek.com about TBI and Henry Blodget. Lots of interesting tidbits, one thing that I found fascinating was this:
Ryan and Blodget soon figured out that micropublishing—creating advertising-supported content for a very small, precise audience—didn’t work economically; advertisers are more interested in reaching mass audiences than they are in pinpoint targeting.
Interestingly, while everyone talks about the value of niche, I agree with that finding. Not just to offer advertising of scale to marketers, but for economies of scopes. As I say to people, we do focus on one thing: video, but we cover it across many categories (auto to video games) and that has proven to be great… after many years of investment, which takes us to his next point:
Blodget concedes that TBI is not perfect. “It’s not amazing yet. It’s got a long way to go. But it’s pretty good,” he says. And if it gets great, and the world agrees, and if all that money being spent on print media finally migrates to the Internet, Blodget could end up like his pals Denton and Lerer, miles ahead of everyone else.
I ask him about the rumor that he hopes to be bought out by Rupert Murdoch or another Old Media titan. “I think that’s a definite possibility,” Blodget says. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all if ultimately it made sense for us to combine with them. That said, we’ve also built an infrastructure that can support a very big business for ourselves.”
Denton lays out the most optimistic scenario: “This is like the early days of cable,” he says. “High—surprisingly high—startup costs. But eventually advertisers move across, and the margins are lavish for the leading players in each category. Jezebel becomes Lifetime, HuffPo becomes MSNBC, and Henry becomes CNBC.” In that way, and that way only, Blodget would happily be right back where he started.
Indeed, while some people like to think that online businesses require little upfront capital (they might relative to traditional bricks and mortars businesses), truth is it requires a lot. We invested a lot of money before breaking even, but indeed, once you get to a certain level, you build a dominant position.
According to this MediaPost article, “Web video viewing still represents less than 2% of the time that folks in the U.S. devote to consuming video.“ I believe that.
RE: “Web video viewing still represents less than 2% of the time that folks in the U.S. devote to consuming video.”
I have always believed that traditional media companies, who own the super premium catalogs, should in theory remain in control online. It’s as Sumner Redstone states, content is king, because with new distribution opportunities the value (and commercial opportunities) for content increase”.
The challenge for them likes in the fact that while television advertising in the US is a $70B industry, all web advertising in the US is $30B with video accounting for $1B. In other words, there is no incentive to open up the content and distribute it online.
That last part creates an opportunity for new media video producers. The problem, however, for a majority of new media producers is that they seem to think that online should be synonymous with low quality… as I say we basically try to take a newspaper or magazine article and then inspire ourselves from broadcast standards and style to create something that is unique online, though most of what I come across in online video is just not what a marketer would want to associate their brand with.
This is why we have been able to charge licensing fees, something that no one else in the new media producer category can boast of. But ultimately, new media producers just need to realize that on main street, most users care about the stuff that comes out from Hollywood, whether we like it or not.
