“Of the $368 billion marketers plan to spend this year, 32.5 percent will go toward digital; 30.3 percent to print,” Forbes says. “Digital spending includes e-mail, video advertising, display ads and search marketing. ‘It’s a watershed moment,’ says the study’s lead author, Outsell Vice President Chuck Richard.”
The study, which is due out today, also says that ad spending for magazines will rise this year by 1.9 percent and, quoting Richard again, “We should see far fewer closures and cutbacks among traditional media.”
“Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines; Jack Griffin, president of Meredith National Media; Ann Moore, chairman & CEO of Time Inc.; Charles Townsend, president & CEO of Condé Nast; and Jann Wenner, chairman of Wenner Media launched their ‘good news’ celebration video yesterday at the opening of the American Association of Advertising Agencies meeting in New York City,” Samir Husni wrote.
Five leading magazine publishers have joined for a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to “press the case that magazines remain an effective advertising medium in the age of the Internet because of the depth and lasting quality of print, compared with the ephemeral nature of much of the Web’s content,” the Wall Street Journal said Monday.
Time Inc., Hearst, Condé Nast, Wenner Media and Meredith will run nearly 1,400 pages of the ads in such publications as People, Vogue, Ladies’ Home Journal and other magazines this year.
“The five publishers say they have committed to run the first of the ads in the front one-fifth of their titles’ pages, and have agreed to run all subsequent ads in the first half.
“The ad space they are devoting to the campaign is valued at more than $90 million, based on public ad rates for each of their participating magazines,” the WSJ said.
Elsewhere, said the Journal, the Newspaper Association of America has run repeated ads to publicize the number of people who read a daily newspaper. As with the magazine campaign, the newspaper trade group says its ads are designed to counter the notion print is a dead medium. The local-TV industry’s trade group is starting an on-air ad campaign this month to encourage companies to advertise on their local TV stations.
Advertising Age takes a look at how European newspapers are charging for content online. “The consensus … is that a hybrid model is the best option for most businesses as publications seek to develop potentially lucrative relationships with paying customers without losing the volume that comes from offering free content.”
The top example: “Le Figaro’s approach, 14 months in the making, keeps the main newspaper content free but offers two other options at $10 and $20 a month. Premium users get access to in-depth information, special offers, twice-daily newsletters, roundtable discussions with journalists, the opportunity to see their own content on the home page of the site and a concierge service that can arrange everything from theater tickets to shirt cleaning.”
Premiums are key, the report says. “In 52 countries around the world, 71 percent told Nielsen that online content would have to be better than what is available free before they would pay for it, and 79 percent would not use a site that charges them if they can find the same information at no cost.”
On the deep end, according to Nielsen figures, local Sunday newspaper supplements show a 45 percent drop in ad revenue. Business-to-business magazines show a 33 percent plunge, and local magazines sank 24 percent. (Sunday supplements and local magazines. This is why we have time to write this blog.)
The bright spots were a 32.2 percent jump for Spanish-language cable television and a 15 percent gain for cable television. FSI coupons were up 12 percent.
In a trend that extends to 2006 at least, overall U.S. advertising spending was down 9 percent for the year last year. In 2008, U.S. ad spending fell 2.6 percent.
Financial analysts polled by Reuters are not optimistic about the McClatchy Company’s future despite the breathing room the newspaper publisher has made for itself by restructuring its debt through bond sales. One gives the company 18 months to two years to figure out how to make enough revenue online to sustain itself.
Things looked better in January when the company announced “encouraging fourth-quarter results,” Reuters says. Then the company put off its next major debt payment until 2013 by agreeing to higher interest rates.
“But McClatchy’s swaps have retraced all of January’s strengthening and are now 157 basis points wider than when its refinancing was announced, at about 1016 basis points as of Tuesday, according to data from Markit,” the Reuters report says.
“‘I think the market is smart enough to know that there are some fundamental issues here and what they’ve done is basically delayed the inevitable,’ said Shelly Lombard, analyst at independent research service Gimme Credit.”
“Despite the fact that McClatchy’s online revenues are growing rapidly, they are still a small portion of its overall business and are not expanding quickly enough to replace newspaper revenue, she said.
“On the positive side, Lombard said she does not expect McClatchy to run into problems for at least 18 months and probably two years, and investors can collect their coupons until then.”
G.D. Gearino, a former business editor at McClatchy’s News & Observer in Raleigh, provides a good explanation of McClatchy’s bond swap on his blog. He also points out that deep in the financial statements we find that “the new bonds, unlike the previous ones, are backed by McClatchy’s assets. Bondholders will be on equal footing with the banks. And one of those assets, of course, is The News & Observer.”
We saw the Reuters report mentioned on the Fitz & Jen blog at Editor & Publisher, where, in their daily market roundup, they point out that on Tuesday McClatchy “took the sector’s biggest hit percentage wise with its shares off 5.7 percent to $5.12. Reuters reported that credit default swaps for MNI indicate the market is nervous about the company.”
“Based on records kept by the U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Labor and tallies by various industry watchers, total employment in the newspaper publishing business has declined from 414,000 in 2001 to 309,000 at the end of 2009, a 25.4 percent drop over the course of eight years,” the report says.
Job cuts in newsrooms accelerated last year as “publishers finally decided they had cut other business functions to the bone, and reluctantly began cutting costs in the newsroom.”
The obvious conclusion: “if 2010-2011 doesn’t bring a big rebound in newspapers’ fortunes, coming years may see the quality and quantity of journalism suffer noticeably.”
“After evaluating two months of response, we’ve decided to end the program,” Elissa Vanaver, a company vice president and assistant to the publisher, said in the newspaper’s report. She would not say how much money the effort had raised.
Shortly after initiating the program, in which credit card forms linked at the bottom of articles on MiamiHerald.com and ElNuevoHerald.com enabled donations, Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal said it had “elicited an encouraging steam of gifts, ranging from $2 to $55.”
Vanaver said when the program was launched in December and again this past weekend that The Herald has no plans to charge for content online. The newspaper does charge $2.99 for mobile applications that deliver sports content, its report said.
Almost a third fewer TV commercials were skipped in a test of targeted ads conducted by the cable giant Comcast in Baltimore last year, Ad Week says. The ability to aim commercial spots at specific households “creates billions of dollars in the TV marketplace per year,” one official said.
The test used technology developed by Invidi to deliver “different ads within the same cable network commercial breaks to different household groupings, based on segmentation data provided by data-management firm Experian,” the report says. Viewers fast-forwarded through 32 percent fewer commercials.
“It was 65 percent more efficient to buy an addressable spot to reach the advertiser’s true audience, even factoring into the calculation a premium for the seller,” said Michael Kubin, an executive vice president with Invidi. And that efficiency, he said, “on a national basis creates billions of dollars in the TV marketplace per year.”
Kubin said this second test of the system proves it works and indicates that the next step is to bring it to the marketplace.
Coupons.com – which allows consumers to find coupons they want and print them out at home, download them to mobile devices, or transfer them to stores’ loyalty card accounts — says its digital coupon business grew 170 percent in 2009 compared to 2008, in terms of the volume of savings.
Meanwhile, a white paper released by the Newspaper Association of America and Kannon Consulting says newspaper inserts are in trouble, with big retailers like Sears demanding double-digit rate cuts and the CMO of J.C. Penney’s expressing concern that prepaid inserts don’t reach as many younger consumers. Media Daily News quotes from an analysis of the months-old proprietary white paper by the Poynter Institute’s Rick Edmonds.
The report, says Edmonds, “warned that inserts, which account for half of retail advertising, are ‘under siege.’ The industry, notoriously pokey in providing return-on-investment metrics or in facilitating ease of placement, needs to tone up its act in a hurry, the report suggests.”