A Mishmash of Topics

ADD or multitasking? Whatever it is, you’re getting a mishmash of topics:

The newsonomics of the surprisingly persistent appeal of newsprint
by Ken Doctor
… It’s print subscribers — now being priced up and upsold into all-access digital plans — who are responsible for the only bright spot in newspaper revenue growth. Though 85-95 percent of these subscribers are staying through these rounds of price increases, only a minority of them actually use the newspapers’ digital products much. They like newsprint.

I wonder why…

15 April 2007
Positioning Magazines for Baby Boomers
There are active and passive parts of our day. Without getting into too much psychobabble, as you get older the passive side needs more nourishment. It’s not really passive. It’s focused absorption. At some point you have to climb out of your frenetic digital nest and concentrate on one thing. It might be reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, listening to music, looking out the window.

Or immersing yourself in a magazine.

Or a newspaper.
                                   
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Late-life Metamorphosis
These boomers — born again as entrepreneurs — are the stars of their own second acts
By Hanah Cho
… For more than a decade, 55- to 64-year-olds have started more new businesses than any other age group, according to the nonprofit Kauffman Foundation, which promotes business ownership.

Sounds familiar. From my book ©2005/2007:

17 September 2009
Late Bloomer Boomers
… Many of these folks are writing fiction and non-fiction, becoming graphic artists and photographers, and playing and composing music. And just as many are doing astonishingly creative things in the business world, often as entrepreneurs.

Another book you should check out:

Creating Results surveyed hundreds of 40+ American consumers (Gen X, Baby Boomers and Silent Generation members) to find out:

• What turns them on — and what turns them off — when they visit websites.
• How websites and social media influence their housing decisions.
• Their concerns regarding social media marketing and social networks like Facebook.
• How attitudes have changed since the agency’s 2010 study.

The findings from this research have been collected in a new eBook, with analysis and insights to make your digital marketing more effective with Baby Boomers and beyond.

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Marketing to Caregivers
By Andrew Kaufman
… By understanding the daily challenges and decisions that affect the lives of caregivers (and their patients), you’ll start to identify how your organization can address those needs in ways that strengthen your brand and increase your exposure among this influential audience.

AARP Sends a Thank-You to Caregivers
By Jane L. Levere
AARP and the Advertising Council are beginning a new advertising and social media campaign this week designed to illustrate the many roles caregivers play and to thank them for this assistance.

Sounds like good ideas to me:

14 May 2010
The Daughter Trap
…What an appreciated relief it would be for a couple of major outfits to acknowledge and support caregivers.

Let’s hope I can focus next time around.

Smartphones & Tablets, Apples & Oranges

Clients and just about everybody else seem to be confused about advertising on all these new-fangled gadgets.

Added to the mix are odd, stupefying concepts like digital and mobile and native. Most of this stuff is gobbledygook, but I’ll try to separate the chaff from the chaff:

07 December 2012
What is Digital Advertising?
… The newest buzz-phrase has me completely baffled: Native Advertising.  One social media guru described it as advertising that is ‘baked into’ the content. I guess it’s sort of like the old Burns & Allen Show where  one episode had Gracie baking a cake using Betty Crocker Cake Mix, a sponsor…

Television is now digital, commercials are shot with digital cameras – so are all  commercials digital advertising?  Are digital spots on digital radio digital advertising?  Print ads are created on computers, usually rendered as PDFs, delivered digitally. Digital advertising?  Magazines, both editorial and ads, are digitally produced.  Digital advertising?

07 January 2013
Tablets
Moses and the pharmaceutical industry once had exclusive dibs on this word.  Nowadays, tablet commonly refers to a specific type of computer doodad technology.

… The mobile/social media soothsayers will have you believe that there is this unknown, magical mode of persuasion that has never been thought of before – and will reveal itself any day now. 

If you believe that, I have a Blackberry in Brooklyn I want to sell you…

23 October 2012
The Future Of Consumer Doodad Technology
… You should stop thinking about the next big thingamabob and whose will be best.  In five or ten years there will be all sorts of thingamabobs for just about everything.  You’ll have two or three or ten thingamabobs.  Tablets/Smartphones will be big, small, thin, simple, complex, active, passive, out the door in your purse or pocket, lost in your couch cushions.

What is mobile advertising?  It used to be placards on the sides of buses.  Some people still think so.

If I tuck a magazine under my arm and take it with me, is that mobile advertising?  If I’m home on my couch flipping through Flipboard on my tablet that I don’t take anywhere anymore because the thrill of brandishing it is gone, I just use it at home - would those big, almost full screen ads be traditional advertising?

I’ve written about this before:

01 May 2010
Foretellings
…That silly retronym “traditional advertising” will remain the premiere force for introducing people to a product or service, along with sustaining its shelf life. Television, print, radio, and billboard ads will continue to have the visceral power they’ve always had – if only for their sheer size, simplicity, and cutting-edge audio/visual qualities.  Advertising on smartphones will be considered an annoyance, invasive, and rather dinky…

And this:

15 April 2007
Positioning Magazines for Baby Boomers
There are active and passive parts of our day. Without getting into too much psychobabble, as you get older the passive side needs more nourishment. It’s not really passive. It’s focused absorption. At some point you have to climb out of your frenetic digital nest and concentrate on one thing. It might be reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, listening to music, looking out the window.

Or immersing yourself in a magazine.

Tablets are getting bigger, lighter, faster, easier to handle.

Those 6.4 ounces make all the difference when, as you recline while reading or watching a movie, you conk out and the iPad falls forward to bonk you on the nose. The Air won’t hurt you the way the old iPad did.

Smartphones will stop getting bigger – unless some evolutionary quirk transforms human hands to the dimensions of baseball mitts. 

Advertising on smartphones?  Only if you think something half the size of a matchbook cover will catch and hold anybody’s attention. 

Smartphones & Tablets.  Apples & Oranges.  Don’t confuse them.

$10,000 of Free Marketing Down Under

Gill Walker & the folks at Evergreen Marketing in Australia are offering $10,000 of their services for free:

Celebrate our 10th Birthday and win a $10,000 campaign
The winning organisation will get to work with the agency to best spend their $10,000 credit. On offer is a combination of agency hours and supplier services to help both develop and implement the campaign.

I’d take this seriously. Evergreen has an impressive portfolio.

Only a handful of days are left, so click the Enter Here button and fill out the form.

A few TV spots.

CMOs/Ad Agencies are sort of getting the message. Not that they quite know what to do with it after getting it, but efforts are being made. What a shock not to be portrayed as sick, daft, vapid, immature or stupid in any of these ads.

Oscar Mayer:

Cute, sassy. Not sure why this fellow would make fun of a male teenager with long hair.  This ignorance creates a queasy cognizant dissonance for folks fifty to seventy and thereabouts.

Tide Washing Pods:

Not sure why these two have to be retired.  They could simply have busy lives, appreciate the convenience.  It’s as if the advertisers are embarrassed using older folks in a commercial and feel the need to apologize and explain why.  You see, they’re retired.  Now it makes sense.

T-Mobile:

Age-neutral targeting starring Boomers (unlike another one).  A simple, clever campaign making everybody aware of T-Mobile’s global coverage plans.  I laughed out loud at this one:

Overall, pretty good spots.  A few tweaks from some or more older creatives would have helped.

Carmakers should be marketing their hybrids to…

Big surprise:

Carmakers should be marketing their hybrids to … baby boomers
Car companies have long pitched their rides to the young, but the biggest buyers of hybrid cars in the US are the 60-plus set…

The study found that these buyers most valued the pride and prestige of driving an environmentally responsible car…

As usual, I wonder why this is news:

21 December 2007
Green Boomers
Green boomers are more attuned to advertising, both positively and negatively. They pay attention to ads for products they plan to buy, but are more critical and therefore are more likely to believe there is not much truth in advertising. They also wish that advertising included more real product information to help make decisions.

How long have I been saying that? I wrote articles about it four years ago, must have posted about it here twenty times over the last 2½ years…

17 February 2011
Green Boomers Redux
… A few of these Green toy companies might get the smarts – and market their products directly to Baby Boomer grandparents.

16 May 2008
Coming Boom in Boomer-Friendly Transport
My point three years ago was that Baby Boomers were buying up those mid-priced boxy cars (even though they were being marketed to college kids and twenty-somethings) because they were easy to get in and out of, easy to see out of, and some had large dashboards that were easy to read. So why not build cars with these and more features for older drivers?

Along with ‘green’ – the auto industry had better retool with an eye on the 50+ market.

12 March 2009
Who’s gonna buy this car?

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Two excellent biz/marketing bonus reads by Jonathan Salem Baskin in Forbes:

Boeing Marketing Reorg Illustrates Hazards Of Innovation

Google, Facebook And The Rise Of Zombie Marketing