December 6, 2004
profit, loss, etc.
Brilliant stuff from Henry Copeland:
Sure, I love newspapers and magazines. I spent a decade working for them and read ‘em every night before bed. They are filled with wonderful, brilliant people. They do amazing things.
But corporate publishers are born and bred to do certain things, most of all make money for their shareholders.
Unlike people, who can pursue lots of ends at once entertain conflicting impulses, publicly traded businesses (and those that aspire to be) are simple machines, are wired to one dimension of stimuli — profit and loss. Over the last four-hundred years corporations evolved a range of mechanisms and strategies for doing this. Chains of management, lines of reporting, memos, meetings, conference calls, quarterly reviews: these are the sinew and nerve cells of all corporations.
And the multi-billion dollar pension funds and mutual funds who determine share prices of corporate publishers care about Pulitzer prizes only insofar as a Pulitzer prize or three increases the value of their shares. Afterall, the investor’s first responsibility to their own investors is to make money. A pension fund manager can’t say to 76 year old Uncle, who has entrusted his life savings with the manager, “sorry, you won’t be able to afford to fly to to pay the heating bill this January because we invested in the wrong publisher. But cheer up! The good news is one of the publisher’s newspapers won a Pulitzer prize!”
More later…
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Not brilliant stuff at all (Hugh and Henry). All too obvious.
And although magazines and newspapers do have wonderful people in them — I’ve worked with a few — they are also prone to What Kind of Editorial Will Best Support the Advertorial?
The eternal love/hate of it all is — what will pay my mortgage, tickets to the game, my 1.7 kids’ dental bills and all those horrible dates/break up stories you draw periodically Hugh?
When you can start getting people to pay for all of this great stuff on these great and not so great Blogs then something will change. Trouble is, no one wants to pay for a conversation — unless their job depends on it.
Be part of the conversation or die out from lack of oxygen [Hugh Macleod-lite TM]
SO, my position in all this? It’s not about being the best. It’s not about endlessly trying to be innovative or fresh or shocking.
It’s about being Essential.
Essential brings people to it. Essential isn’t just a long cue at the hot new club (that’s fashion). Essential is I NEED this to survive. Essential is — information, experience, communication that is the foundation for planning, building and achieving OTHER THINGS. It is the catalyst for stuff OUTSIDE the Essential.
The Essential is not a circular, a self-contained, ring-fenced poem to itself. It is an enabler.
And therefore if you are Essential, people WILL pay, because they will see a return.
Discuss. [Because I need some sleep!]
I call this the “9 out of 10 doctors…” theory.
There is nothing more foolish than thinking you have all the answers.…
“9 out of 10 doctors prefer ___“
In the old days advertisers could get away with this because the TV/radio/paper ads were the only disseminated method of opinion for consumers to make choices.
If the ads were run [to death] in a targeted slot people remembered the brand and trusted the doctors, but today, because of the internet and tivo and blogs and all this crap, out of 1 million views, maybe 100 people will remember the name the next day and of those 100 a large group will quickly check public opinion online.
Lets look at an example, Sony. 10 years ago they could say and charge anything for their products. (and they did) Today they are outsold by Apex, a cheap ass knock off brand that has all of zero advertising.
hmmmmm.
Not quite what I was trying to get across, but I see where you’re coming from in terms of what old advertising templates attempted (and maybe succeeded at) for a while.
Essential is still the word for me. Because it doesn’t imply best. As you say, something which is a product can be reproduced and usually at a cheaper and cheaper unit price hence killing off or at least greatly reducing your original profit.
But if you recognise that what’s unique are people and not products — surely the strength of blogging — and then market that as your product… that’s something tough to replicate. And if what those people are doing (as I said before) actally empowers you to do something that you really want/need to do (rather than just look good) then I think you present something different.
Maybe it’s culture I’m talking about.
Advocacy might be the word.
Advocacy Definition: “A way of advancing a particular point of view. It is characterised by a lawyer in a court room who presents arguments purely to sway the judge or jury in favour of his client. As far as possible, facts failing to conform to his side’s case are ignored. It is the job of the opposing lawyer to raise such points. An advocate, doing his job properly, will, without actually lying, try to use any legal technicalities to keep inconvenient evidence away from the jury and may seek to give a false impression.“
Ahem.….
An advocate, doing his job properly, will, without actually lying, try to use any legal technicalities to keep inconvenient evidence away from the jury and may seek to give a false impression