In this issue:
President’s Letter: It’s About Trust by Jim Elliott
Greenwash Prevention by Linda Thomas Brooks: Introduction to the Institute for Advertising Ethics and the Greenwash Prevention Toolkit
Interview highlights from SIIA Alert by Ronn Levine: Jim and Ryan Elliott discuss what has been learned and accomplished during 40 years in business.
In this issue:
New COO at the Elliott Co., Ryan Elliott
Highlights of 2023 FIPP World Congress by Alastair Lewis
New service from Readex Research — Media Usage Research
Preliminary information about BIMS 2024 in New Orleans, February 29 — March 1
BO SACKS: Would you care to address programmatic?
Jim Elliott
JIM ELLIOTT: Yes, the race to the bottom? Publishers may welcome the incremental revenue, but it comes with a big cost. Sometimes that cost is loss of direct business. This is not insignificant. It also creates issues of brand safety for advertisers, and it often results in advertising that is inappropriate to the editorial content. And then there is the issue of fraud…and emerging third-party restrictions.
President’s letter by Jim Elliott, President of James G. Elliott Co., Inc. and Ads&IDEAS
Data Driven Digital by Eric Kammerzelt, CEO, Parameter 1 LLC Excellent overview of factors affecting digital advertising
Reminder about the 44th FIPP World Media Congress scheduled in Lisbon-Cascais, Portugal from June 7-9, 2022.
https://www.fipp.com/event/fipp-world- media-congress-2022/
By Jim Elliott, President and Dennis Connaughton, General Manager October 25, 2021
In this issue:
President’s Letter
Surprising positive effects of Covid-19 on some B2B lead generation programs
The need to do the right research in the right order before launching a new publication
FIPP-hosted interviews with industry leaders and sales experts
By Jim Elliott
May 4, 2021
Jobs to be Done (JTBD) theory is a powerful way of thinking that can help us understand customers and markets. I first learned about JTBD by reading books and articles by the late, highly esteemed Professor Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School.
Prof. Christensen popularized the idea of Jobs to be Done, which says that the customer is the wrong unit of analysis; more powerful insights can be found by examining the job that the customer is trying to accomplish. That’s why people with the same demographic profiles will exhibit different buying behavior. The behavior is driven by what those people want to do.
I recently watched an outstanding recorded webinar, “How to define your market using Jobs-to-be-Done.” https://strategyn.com/webinar-define-your-market-using-jtbd/ This was presented by Tony Ulwick, Founder of Strategyn, who introduced the concept to Prof. Christensen. Strategyn.com includes a lot of valuable information: JTBD Theory, JTBD Framework, JTBD Examples, and JTBD Playbook.
So, what does this have to do with our business? A friend of mine, who is President and CEO of a famous legacy company, engaged Strategyn to help create a strategy to transform that company into a successful digital company. He reports that the strategy is highly effective, and he gives a lot of credit for their current success to Jobs to be Done theory and Strategyn.
By Jim Elliott
Our good friend, the sales consultant Steve Grossman, (www.linkedin.com/in/stevegrossmanassociates) recently commented that the question sales leaders should be asking is not when salespeople should return to their offices, but when they will be able to visit customers in their offices.
I just got back from my first prospective client visit in a year. Neither the publisher nor I had met with anyone in person since the lockdowns began. Now that we are vaccinated, it seems safer. We had a great meeting, and he really seemed to appreciate my traveling halfway across the country to visit. We were masked and socially distanced, but it was much, much better than a Zoom call.
When we can find a way to do it safely, I am sure the advantage will go to the selling organizations that are among the first to visit customers in their offices.
Jim Elliott and John French of French+Elliott recently led a FIPP Insider Webinar to present valuable answers and information you can use. Their presentation was enriched by current interviews with these major industry figures:
Thomas Kemp, CEO of Northstar Travel Media
Reed Phillips, Chairman at Oaklins International
Dr. Samir "Mr. Magazine" Husni, founder of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi
AnnMarie Wills, CEO of Leverage Lab
Eric Kammerzelt, CEO of Parameter 1
View the one-hour webinar at https://youtu.be/BzE6ENHnA4k
By Tony Silber
Sales disruption has been accelerating for a decade. Now the pandemic has thrown in new challenges.
Read MoreBy Mike Winkleman
As COVID-19 reshapes business, accelerating trends already in the works, at least one silver lining may be emerging— a reduction of the type of soul-deadening, innovation-sapping, playing-it-safe, inertia-prone process that has kept so many organizations from moving forward
Read MoreTrade shows are an essential part of the sales process for many marketers. Well, at least they were until yesterday. Now, trade shows are being cancelled and postponed by the thousands, worldwide.
John French, former president of Primedia and Jim Elliott, president of the James G. Elliott Co., have successfully navigated companies through epidemics and recession. As they found during the SARS crisis, leaders can mitigate the pain and even find opportunity.
Read MoreThe advertising industry has experienced unprecedented disruption. Search and social platforms are valuable distribution channels, but they’ve concentrated massive amounts of ad revenue in the hands of just a few companies. The Facebook/Google duopoly alone accounts for close to 60% of digital ad spend.
Social media and news-aggregation apps have transformed the content consumption patterns that long sustained media brands. Now, instead of fully engaging one-on-one with their favorite magazines and newspapers, people snack on stories from among clusters of media brands via Apple News, Google News, Twitter and the like. Or they follow their favorite brands via social platforms—once removed, effectively—and the platforms gain much of the behavioral intelligence that’s gathered, along with the ad revenue.
Here’s the good news. We’ve just completed our third survey of advertising buyers and one thing remains crystal clear: Media brands are still essential to agency buyers. Opportunity abounds for media companies that adjust to the new ecosystem. We’re pleased to share these findings with the Ads&Ideas audience. Following are some highlights. —Jim Elliott
Read MorePresident’s Note
The magazine industry has felt the nonstop impact of disruption and displacement since the late nineties. Like railroads, telegrams, and more recently, the music business, print media faces an evolutionary emergency as consumers shift to newer technologies and new modes of consumption.
Magazines were blindsided by digital media 20 years ago. Just as they’ve tried to pivot, some new disruption emerges. The result? An extended period of struggle, as ad revenue dwindles, massive rounds of layoffs sweep the industry, and many titles close.
The dynamic now playing out before our eyes can be explained in the context of the “first-curve-second-curve” model of business economics. The model, created by the author, consultant, and futurist Ian Morrison, says that the first curve is a company’s traditional business—all of the activities that led to a company’s success to begin with. The second curve is the future—new technologies, new capabilities, new talent and new audiences. The second curve is the inevitable paradigm shift that makes the first-curve business model obsolescent and ultimately extinct.
The key is to succeed at the first curve while simultaneously jumping to the second. For magazines, the last 25 years have been a continual journey to the second curve. In this report, Ads&Ideas Editor Tony Silber explores the impact of media-industry disruption on ad sales using the “first-curve-second-curve” model, identifying in the process some of the self-imposed impediments that media companies may be grappling with.
Read MoreIn March, I attended the FIPP Digital Innovators’ Summit in Berlin and left with the realization that advertising-related problems in Europe are the same ones we’re facing in America: media fragmentation, a failing business model, fraud, and the emergence of social platforms that distribute our content for free and control the ad spend. This led to a decline in ad dollars for virtually all content creators. The myth perpetuated by the platforms was if you build a social presence-, the audience—and business model—will come. It turns out the only business you built was theirs.
The roots of this situation go back years. It’s taken us 25 years to understand it. Consumers need to pay for content. And that’s not what Google and Facebook want. They alone account for more than 60% of all digital ad dollars spent. But now, at events like the Digital Innovators’ Summit, we’re seeing signs of new approaches.
I spoke with FIPP CEO James Hewes about the media and advertising environment. Here’s a transcript of that conversation, edited for length and clarity by Ads&Ideas Editor Tony Silber.
Read MoreHow research can help avoid major mistakes in new-product development
At some point in your career, chances are you’ve gotten a call from a salesperson excited about a new product their company has developed. But chances are also that it was developed with the seller’s needs in mind, not yours. In the media business, new-product development is an insular process. It’s frequently driven by insular executives—people who rarely speak to customers and don’t understand timing or the pain points in the market. They just know they’re under pressure to produce revenue, so they push out a flawed idea.
The result is predictable. The salesperson ends up behind the eight ball. The client doesn’t have the budget. The idea doesn’t sync with their current priorities. They lose trust in the media brand, which they believe has lost traction in the market.
In the end, it becomes an “Oh, no, here comes Bob,” dynamic, when a formerly valued partner (the salesperson) becomes a nuisance to be avoided.
That’s devastating, but it doesn’t have to be that way. With a little bit of planning, any sales organization can raise its game to ensure its product development syncs with what the market needs. I recently spoke with Jack Semler, the owner and CEO of Readex Research, about this common and potentially crippling sales mistake. Here’s our conversation, edited for brevity by Tony Silber.
Read MoreThe ad-sales business has gotten much more complex in the last decade. Media companies are scrambling to adapt as marketing budgets get smaller and ad campaigns get shorter—even as media product lineups have vastly expanded, forcing salespeople to master new technologies—and sell more stuff.
But in ad sales, as elsewhere in life, you are what your numbers say you are. For companies seeking continued revenue growth, and looking to impose tighter cost management, one alternative is to partner with a proven outside sales firm.
Read MoreTony Silber interviews Todd Krizelman of MediaRadar
What does it mean when more than 20,000 advertisers stopped placing ads in print media in the first four months of 2018? Perhaps it’s more ad spend flowing to digital channels and the Facebook/Google duopoly, right? You might conclude that it’s bad news for print media and part of the rise of digital.
Wrong. It’s something more complex, and it serves as a clarifying moment for print-media companies and their sales teams.
There were 151,825 advertisers in print in January-April 2018, according to an analysis by MediaRadar, down by 13 percent from the 172,155 print spenders in the same period in 2017. But the catch is that those advertisers didn’t move to digital. Rather, they stopped advertising altogether.
This intriguing analysis doesn’t support the narrative of a decline of print media. Here’s a transcript of our conversation with Todd Krizelman, edited for length and clarity.
Read MorePresident's Letter
Steve Grossman, a well-known Chicago-based sales consultant, first contacted my company to measure our interest in taking over ad sales for a group of consumer titles, which eventually happened. It seemed odd that this important role had been assigned to someone outside of our industry; we tend to work mostly with publishing specialists. However, as we worked together, I realized that most of the challenges I hear about from both small and large publishers are not really unique to publishing sales.
Yes, there are some distinctive characteristics of the ad sales business, such as multi-channel sales points with client and agency involvement, but Steve had run into similar problems in other industries. I thought that our readers might benefit by exposure to sharp thinking from someone who is not “in the bubble” with us. Steve agreed to share his thoughts during an interview we held in January. Here is an edited version:
Read MoreMedia consulting and strategic planning for publishers.
www.jamesgelliott.com
www.adsandideas.com
Copyright © 2023, James G. Elliott Co., Inc.
