Individuated news can help

So, the only fast growing print advertising medium of the past five years -- direct mail -- looks like it has trouble ahead. A new study from Borrell says that direct mail will lose more than 20 percent of its revenue to email marketing in the next few years.
What could help? Individuated news would be a natural partner to email marketing.

Direct Mail Doomed, Long Live Email
Gavin O'Malley, May 20, 2009 02:59 PM
After making quick work of print newspapers, and the Yellow Pages industry, "The kudzu-like creep of the Internet is about to claim its third analog victim," warns a new report from research firm Borrell Associates. The victim? "The largest and least-read of all print media: Direct mail."
"Direct mail has begun spiraling into what we believe is a precipitous decline from which it will never fully recover," Borrell predicts. More specifically, it is projecting a 39% decline for direct mail over the next five years, from $49.7 billion in annual ad spending in 2008 to $29.8 billion by the end of 2013.
If Borrell is correct, direct mail will fall from the premiere placeholder for ad revenue to the fourth -- behind the Web, broadcast TV, and newspapers.
The downturn is being caused by a perfect storm of worsening economics for printing and delivery and conversely improving economics for competing media, particularly the Internet. In turn, the research firm sees email largely filling the void being left by direct mail.
"Email advertising is indeed skyrocketing while its traditional counterpart plummets," Borrell notes. "In fact, last year, email advertising quietly moved to the No. 1 online ad category spot, surpassing all other forms of interactive advertising." Last year, advertisers spent $12.1 billion on email marketing, more than they spent on display/banner advertising or search advertising.
Borrell is predicting that email will continue to distance itself from other online advertising formats over the next five years, growing to $15.7 billion and remaining the preferred channel among many marketers. In particular, most of the growth in email marketing will be local, the report forecasts.
"We're expecting local e-mail advertising to grow from $848 million in 2008, to $2 billion in 2013, as more small businesses abandon direct mail couponing and promotional orders and turn to a more measurable and less costly medium, e-mail."
Still, the report goes on to warn opportunists that email marketing is not without its risks. "Managing large e-mail marketing campaigns require database marketing expertise, a savvy sales force, adequate e-mail management software, familiarity with the rules and regulations and a lot of patience."
The declines in direct mail have already begun to register at companies such as Valassis, which owns one of the nation's largest direct-mail businesses.
In the first quarter of this year, Valassis' "shared mail" revenue declined 12.7% year-over-year, according to Borrell. Two other direct mailers, meanwhile -- IWCO Direct and Transcontinental USA -- have announced layoffs and facility closings. Of particular note, Borrell credits the rise of coupons online with the demise of direct mail.
Last year, for one, 36% of adults picked up a coupon inside a store and used it, compared with 28% just two years ago. About 8% of all adults now report using coupons delivered via email or the broader Web.

Historic first

The first individuated weekly newspaper has been printed. (Individuated means that the reader self-selected the content prior to aggregation.)
Ted Agres, assistant managing editor for The Washington Times, called me to say that the weekly edition has been individuated for about 120 subscribers and printed. These copies should be mailed out this week and reach their readers by Wednesday.
This is an historic first.
Although Syntops and the Swiss Post published an individuated newspaper this spring -- it was an unpaid test. And we at MediaNews Group have published individuated news reports for visitors to a hotel in Denver. And Time Magazine offered free to volunteers an individuated magazine in May.
But, the individuated TWT newspapers are going out to paid subscribers.
The Washington Times offered to make a subscriber's weekly different from all the rest, if the subscriber would say what he or she wanted: more international news and less sports news or more cultural news and less columnists, etc. You get it.
Now the readers have chosen and the newspapers that range in pages from 20 to 60 pages each have been printed on an OCE Jetstream, variable data, inkjet printer in Boca Raton, Fla. (The non-individuated newsweeklies were 40 pages.)
A barrier has been broken. Who is next?
Congratulations, The Washington Times, on a long but fruitful journey.

New heights for newspapers

When I was interviewed last year by Dan Neuharth, the son of USAToday's founder Al Neuharth, I predicted a heyday for newspapers in the 21st Century. I'm glad to see that at least one other person agrees in public: Rupert Murdoch. In light of his decision to begin to charge for online stories I give you an interview in which he predicts new heights for newspapers in the 21 st Century: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/17/rupert-murdoch-internet-newspapers. Please note that Murdoch is not talking exclusively about the printed newspaper but newspaper content over the internet and other platforms.

Now, the cellphone will set you free

In the NY Times today, the report on the cultural fit of the cellphone in India. The seventh paragraph: "The cellphone serves, then, as a technology of individuation. On the cellphone, you are your own person. No one answers your calls or reads your messages. Your number is just yours."

The whole story: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/weekinreview/10giridharadas.html?ref=world

VERLA, India — Sometimes a technology comes along and crystallizes a cultural moment. Not since Americans and their automobiles in the 1950s, perhaps, have a people and a technology wedded as happily as Indians and their cellphones — small and big, vibrating and tringing, BlackBerry and plain vanilla.

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Times Topics: India

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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

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Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

And neither India nor the cellphone will be the same after the pairing. India now adds more cellphone connections than anyplace else, with 15.6 million in March alone. The cost of calling is among the lowest in the world. And the device plays a larger-than-life role here — more so, it seems, than in the wealthy countries where it was invented.

Of course, in so vast a country, India’s nearly 400 million cellphone users still account for only a third of the population. But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, becoming that rare Indian possession to traverse the walls of caste and region and class; a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states. And while the average bill, of less than $5 per month, represents 7 percent of the average Indian’s income, enough Indians apparently consider the sacrifice worth it: if present trends continue, in five years every Indian will have a cellphone.

What makes the cellphone special in India? It is partly that India skipped the land-line revolution, making cellphones the first real contact with the outside world for hundreds of millions of people. It is partly that, with few other machines selling so briskly, the cellphone in India is forced variously to be a personal computer, flashlight, camera, stereo, video-game console and day organizer as well. It is partly that India’s relative poverty compels providers to be more creative to survive.

But it is also that the cellphone appeals deeply to the Indian psychology, to the spreading desire for personal space and voice, not in defiance of the family and tribe, but in the chaotic midst of it.

Imagine what it was like — in the Pre-Cellular Age — to be young in a traditional household. People are everywhere. Doors are open. Judgments fly. Bedrooms are shared. What phones exist are centrally located.

The cellphone serves, then, as a technology of individuation. On the cellphone, you are your own person. No one answers your calls or reads your messages. Your number is just yours.

And yet the young Indian rebel, unlike his Western counterpart, does not rebel totally. He wants to savor his new individuality, but do so while sitting with his parents having dinner, listening to his grandmother implore him to get married. He listens, then taps a few keys on his cellphone to escape, then listens some more, and taps, and listens.

The cellphone appeals, too, because it plays into the Indian need to place people. Cellular differences today perform the role that forehead markings and strings around torsos and metal bracelets once did: announcing who outranks whom.

Small people have small phones, and big people have big ones. Small people have numerical-soup numbers, and big people have numbers that end in 77777 or something equally important-sounding or easy to remember. Small people have one phone, and big people have two. Small people set their phones merely to ring, and big people make Bollywood songs play when you call them.

The cellphone, in short, has made itself Indian. There are 65 times more cellphone connections than broadband Internet links, and the gap is widening. And so those who wish to influence Indians are not waiting for the computer to catch on, but are seeking ways to adapt the cellphone to the things Westerners do online.

Indian companies have invented methods, via simple cellphone text-messaging, to wire money to temples, pay for groceries, find jobs and send and receive e-mail messages (on humble phones with no data connection).

But the most intriguing notion is that cellphones could transform Indian democracy.

Even in this voting season — the results of a four-week election will be announced May 16 — Indians are famously cynical about their senior-citizen-dominated, dynastic, corrupt politics. The educated often sit out elections. But with cellphones becoming near universal, experiments are sprouting with the goal of forging a new bond between citizen and state, through real-time, 24-hour cellular participation.

In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, citizens who file a right-to-information request can now check its status via text message. Anyone who has been to an Indian government office, begging men in safari suits to do their job, will welcome this service.

A number of civic groups, meanwhile, have devised cellphone-based ways of informing voters about candidates for Parliament. If you text your postal code to the Association for Democratic Reforms, it will reply with candidate profiles like this:

CANDIDATE A Crim. Cases - No, Assets 175373142, Liab 0, Edu graduate_professional

CANDIDATE B Crim. Cases - Yes (1), Assets 445015617, Liab 2489959, Edu illiterate

A new interactivity is dawning in the news media, too. Now, via cellphone, citizens are talking back to the press, creating a continuous feedback loop between reporters and the public opinion they shape. Channels solicit text messages during broadcasts to air opinions and to poll viewers. Comments crawl across the screen as the talking heads talk.

In 2006, a court acquitted Manu Sharma, a politician’s son, of the murder of a model, Jessica Lall, even though several witnesses testified that they had seen him shoot her. This was nothing new in India. But a groundswell of text-message anger made its way onto television screens and compelled officials to retry Mr. Sharma. He was eventually convicted and given a life sentence.

Imagine the future: a young woman sits on her sofa. With a few taps, she checks that her tax return has been cleared. With a few more, she learns that her local legislator is a criminal, and she switches to the other candidate. She wires a campaign contribution by text. And then she notices on television a debate on her favorite topic, and listens to the arguments and taps hurriedly into her phone words that will soon scroll across the screen.

It is not Athens, but it would be a start: in the world’s largest democracy, government not by passive consent, but by something like a conversation.

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Wolf at the door

Can the wolf at the door understand that it's not the platform that is failing, it's the lack of personalized content?: http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/news/magazines-newspapers/e3ic3df7625da5868c128efd4cf4aa581b1

Oops

No advertising on the Kindle DX: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2009/tc2009056_655180.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_news+%2B+analysis

Personalize the E-readers

Many people are pontificating about the new super-sized Kindle and the other e-readers and/or plastic logic products -- but some people recognize that these new platform plays are really turf plays, efforts to control content and distribution. Read Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Daily News --http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/The_scoop_on_newspapers_giving_out_free_electronics.html --- for instance. He compares the new attitude to the old attitude: Get the Internet out of my backyard! But if Individuated News -- self-selected news -- were available on these new formats, the utility and power and compelling content of the web would be included -- instead of excluded.

An informed perspective

Manfred Werfel, as research director and deputy CEO of IFRA (the European press association), has been outspoken in favor of developing individuated newspapers. Read a recent interview: http://www.ifra.com/website/ntwebsite.NSF/wuis/4EFA05E5D76FF3AEC125722F0063D53B?OpenDocument&99&E&. His most compelling presentation is a 2007 powerpoint entitled "The Personalised Newspaper." If you would like to have a copy, email me at pvandevanter@medianewsgroup.com and I would be glad to email you the file.

Watching with bated breath

The Detroit changes have so much fodder for analysis. Today's word about the 30,000 e-editions is similar to what we are finding at many MediaNews Group newspapers -- people are beginning to pay and use e-editions in greater numbers.

Kindle super-sized

For those of us who love to read on the kindle: http://www.pcworld.com/article/164277/possible_jumbo_kindle_coming_wednesday_print_media_savior.html

The old state of the state

Or the state of the old state. A fascinating research report of the depressive kind. One small upbeat excerpt:"Newspaper publishers are looking to find new advertisers by devising niche publications that cater to individual interests." This from the National Press Club's Journalism at a Juncture.