Dec

9

Karl Rove in King Canute Saga

Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, Publishing, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

It is dawn in New York.  The rain is lashing down on a thousand Father Christmases on and off Fifth Avenue.  In the great tabloid tradition of this city I am going to write a story with a totally misleading and irrelevant headline.  In the great world of consumer publishing, it is the middle of the eighteenth century.  The rain is lashing down in London. They do not have Father Christmas yet, which is what makes that century so warmly special to me.  But they do have the bookseller Thomas Longman.  And he is worried about controlling his supply chain and his pricing.  So, often in consortium with his fellow bookseller/printers, he is about the business of controlling publication, unifying pricing, utilizing the ancient system of copyright in his interest, and in short, becoming a publisher.  And because he controls distribution he and his fellows triumph.

Here in NYC, his lineal descendents.  Carolyn Reidy of Simon and Schuster and David Young of Hachette, are working to hold onto that heritage.  From an article in today’s Wall Street Journal it looks as if they want to postpone eBook publication of major works until they have exhausted hardback sales.  They pitch the natural publication point of the eBook as after the hardback and before the paperback.  They say that eBooks reduce the sense of value and put pressure on hardback pricing.  They say that survival depends on the milking of first publication (and either WSJ or I may be misreporting them on this).

So consumers must be content with artificial deadlines for the emergence of works in certain formats?  Not in the Web they won’t.  This type of announcement invokes piracy (back to 1750) and gets everyone else wondering whether these publisher fellows are worth their value positioning in the supply chain.  Agents know how vital it may be to garnish first appearance publicity.  Amazon and Barnes and Noble are the eigthteenth century booksellers waiting in the wings to come out and re-assert market control – in the consumer’s best interests, of course.   And self-publishing may yet make a monkey of them all.

No-one has more respect for David Young than I.  When BookData (now Nielsen BookData) was a start up and I was one of its three founder directors, I identified him as a beacon of common sense, urging his fellow publishers to pay real attention to book identifiers and metadata online in order to ease a supply chain that creaked with misleading nonsense.  When a progressive moves retrogressively you may be sure that the perception of the problem is deadly serious.  But control is not the answer: control in networks has moved away from suppliers in favour of users. Publishers, in whom I believe profoundly, can only re-assert themselves by creating more, not less value.  But how?  By identifying with the reading community and giving readers what they want.  By rediscovering eighteenth century publishing.  I speak as one whose house has been taken over by some 13000 volumes, to the extent that I can never move again.

And Karl Rove?  He has, in good tabloid tradition, nothing whatsoever to do with this story, save that his memoirs, “Courage and Consequences “, is one the books whose eBook appearance  will be delayed by this move.  But come to think of it, he would be a good advisor to publishers at this time, with all of his experience in the King Canute role for US foreign policy.

Dec

9

Land of the Shrieking Sirens

Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

The sounds from the street below indicate that widows and orphans are caught in a house fire while outside their door a mugger is being apprehended and the victims of a bus crash are being taken to hospital by ambulance.  But actually none of these things are happening in this part of Manhattan: I am back in a New York hotel room accompanied by the normal night serenade of this great city.

In between the serenade, I wanted to keep thinking along the ” Is advertising still the future?” theme that I have been pursuing for the last month or so.  Earlier this year Chuck Richard at Outsell drew our attention to Demand Media as a future model, and I was delighted to be able to introduce its CEO, Shawn Colo, at the Outsell Signature Event in Ireland in October.  The idea that players like Demand create community and also take market share from content and media players is an attractive one.  Advertising agencies, media sales operations and content vendors will all have to give way if hybrids like this work – and they will work, as so often on the web, not by disintermediating the real world business cycle, but by “re-intermediating ” it online.

And then, at the Noah Conference, I heard Patrick Meininger, the VP of Business Development at Adconium, describe how the company had survived the “nuclear winter of advertising “.  The answer is very well, judging by its refunding (Index Ventures, Wellington Partners) and by recent announcements.  Adconium now claims to be the largest independent global audience and content network from a 2005 start-up position, and despite its locations, is strong in Europe (and getting stronger as a deal with Goldbach positions the business for Eastern Europe).  The purchase of part of Joost gets Adconium more into video, RedLever provides studio capacity (see the Demand example for a parallel),  and Frontline places the business for direct marketing.  So put lead gen, behavioural/psychographic/demographic analysis, cross media optimization, and a top level sales force of 85 to do the things that ad agencies never quite managed in the digital world  into a box, shake it around a bit, and out comes a company fit to operate a new model.  It has over €100m in revenue, is said to be profitable, and despite cutting its work force at the back end of last year seems to have come through the nuclear winter unscathed, with 309 million ad impressions a day and 322 million unique users per month.

So what does this mean for the Death of Advertising theme?  Only that new players like Adconium and Demand will create a marketplace in which advertising is about relationships in a community, where people will either want to be sold things that they require in a community context, or be willing to sell their identity for gain.  Huge expertise in placement and a great deal of trusted customer knowlege will be needed to make this work – and when it does we won’t call it advertising at all.  The losers will be ad agencies  and media buyers (which of these two will WPP or Zenith buy?) , and of course content producers, who will become increasingly powerless to maximize their audience advantage because they did not move sharply enough in the years 2002-2006 to identify their brands with communities and understand the new way in which network relationships work .

The widows and orphans appear to have been rescued now, so time to sleep.  It really is very tiring sitting in an airliner all day …

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