Gannett

Just as the digital marketing world has increasingly provided agencies and advertisers with a trove of audience data, the print world is slowly responding. While advertisers can only track these differing print niches with differing coupon codes, or a spectrum of differing 1-800 call-in numbers, print at least can be niched in some ways, even though it doesn’t offer the intensive harvesting of data that digital does. Of course, the various e-alternatives, from “online” to tablet to smartphone, are offering advertisers the ability to say “I’ll take this, but not that” and to mix and match print and digital buying as never before. While advertisers could do some picking and choosing before, they were often flying blind and these new categories of circulation counting — verified circulation and branded editions to “requested” or “targeted” delivery — give them better data on which to make those choices. Consider the data advertisers get with this first report just the beginning of new sets of metrics to come.

Am I the only one who doesn’t get Gannett’s branding campaign? Yes, the Gannett math — $33 million saved in furloughs, as much as $27 million potentially to be granted in exec bonuses — seems sadly clueless, but what about the money the company has spent on its branding campaign. New logo and then, in the TV ads, I’ve seen, ticking off the diverse Gannett brands — from newspapers to broadcast stations to recruitment site Career Builder, rich media ad player PointRoll, elevator ad play Captivate, the MomsLikeMe network. Narrates CEO Craig Dubow, “What you may not know is that they are brought to you by one company.” I’ve seen the ad on local TV (which makes no sense), though it seems mainly targeted to media buyers through Advertising Age, Adweek, Brandweek, and Mediaweek. Why would ad buyers increase ad buying at any of the individual properties because of the corporate ties? Maybe, it’s also a reinforcement of the brand and the company for Wall Street, as financial analysts question future performance. Overall, though, it reminds me of Knight Ridder’s big investment in green-and-blue rebranding, not too long before its demise, money, then, as now, that could be better spent on innovation itself.

Axel Springer’s conclusion: “Digital advertising will play an important role, but without paid content, publishing houses with a big editorial infrastructure for daily quality news will not survive.”

They ran into these realities of the newspaper business:

1. You can have the best technology in the world, and it’ll be a slow sell to publishers.
2. The news industry is small, and getting smaller.
3. The revenue streams are smaller, and JO’s share of them is smaller.
4. Nothing — meaning no one thing — is going to “save journalism.” This is a long-term struggle, and the Press+ notion — a good test of the market in my view — is simply a piece of the puzzle. We’re all like kids with blocks, and we’ve got to endlessly figure out how to reconstruct the hollowed-out cities of journalism.

Once you’ve clustered — centralized to the max the administration, circulation, advertising, production, finance and newsroom tasks of all of your own owned properties, you look next door to other companies, for fresh cluster bait. (Wait a minute, wasn’t that the plot line in Aliens or The Blob?)

In addition to this super-clustering, there’s one other big benefit of merger: getting rid of one company’s corporate overhead. Savings here could amount to $25 million or more – annually — for the mid-sized companies in possible play.

That’s right. You’re no longer a “user”, a hateful term if ever one were invented, or a “visitor,” or a brother from another digital planet. Overnight, you’re a customer again.

In this psychology, a news company has put a value on what it produces. You, the customer, now are being shown that value. Maybe a year, or two, or three, from now, you perceive that value — forgetting all about those days of “free” — and value your relationship to the Morning News’ news, whether you access it by paper, phone, tablet, or TV screen.

The big hope: When you are ready to forsake pulp itself, you’re accustomed to paying for digital — you’re a customer of all, clearly — and do so without thinking twice. (And if the Morning News can save big bucks on not having to print and deliver a paper to you, and tens of thousands of your neighbors, it can significantly cut costs, increase profits, and maybe grow its news-gathering capability.)

What percentage of unique visitors will actually pay for online access?It’s going to be a tiny percentage — maybe one to five percent of all those uniques, the majority tossed onto sites by search. If it’s less than one percent, paid metered models may be of little consequence. At two percent, especially for the big guys, like The New York Times with its imminent launch, the numbers gets meaningful and model-setting.

Will the cats of newspaper industry be successfully herded? After pouring millions into his Alesia project, Rupert Murdoch gave the retreat order to his would-be Roman warriors, killing the tablet-oriented paid news portal initiative. Though his News Corp is the biggest news company in the world, it still a little less than six percent of the business, by revenue. News is among the most splintered of industries, and that makes getting a critical mass of news suppliers agreed on anything quite difficult. Next up in the effort is the AP-led “rights consortium.” As much as it is an assertion of rights, it is as much about a new drive to capture significant sums of new revenue through smarter application of content-tracking technology. Expect the consortium or new company to go forward by December with double-digit funding in the millions. Of course, News Corp is unlikely to play, while the New York Times and Gannett may chart their own separate paths. Finally, NAA (Newspaper Association of America) task forces have been meeting to try to get industry consensus in two areas: 1) mobile formatting and ad standards; and 2) e-preprints, trying to transition that Sunday circular revenue online.

So what we have here is a trend that’s held true from boom to bust through tepid recovery: newspaper companies’ continue to be the laggards, losing market share in ad revenue, by the week, month, and year.

80% The percentage of U.S. cell phone users still — how can it be ?!? — not using a smartphone. That’s a big market for lots of people, including news companies.