Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Category: marketing

  • Television’s argument for relevance

    Television’s argument for relevance

    One of the notable things about the media’s collapsing business model is how television has suffered nowhere near the same downturn in advertising revenues as the other channels.

    This has been baffling for many of us pundits so a series of interviews I’m doing with media executives on digital disruption was a good opportunity to discuss why television is holding the line where print has dismally failed.

    While the executive has to remain anonymous at the moment, the series is for a private client, their view on why television has so far avoided the advertising abyss is simple – accountability.

    We have something, as do my friends at other media companies, that YouTube and Facebook don’t have which is we create quality content. What will differentiate us is we have premium, locally produced content that is one hundred percent brand safe and one hundred percent viewable and, most importantly, is independently measured by third parties.

    My view is that advertisers in that environment is a much more powerful experience than advertising in Facebook or YouTube

    While many of us may laugh at Australian commercial TV being described as ‘quality’, it does appeal to audiences far bigger than the typical YouTube channel or Facebook Live stream.

    The advertising industry’s established systems also, unsurprisingly, work for the television industry in giving the sector accountability that the online services lack in a world where ‘click fraud’ – software tricks to report false web impressions – is rampant.

    Even more importantly for the new media giants is the ‘brand safe’ message being pushed by the incumbents. The advertising crisis for Google is real and the established players intend to exploit it.

    While the TV executive is pushing their own product, it’s clear the fight for advertising and marketing dollars is far from over.

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  • Counting the digital pennies

    Counting the digital pennies

    With media companies around the world struggling to make money, the publishing platforms on Facebook and Google promised to bring in much needed income streams. They appear not to have worked.

    Business Insider reports how US based premium publisher trade body Digital Content Next surveyed its members on their online platform income and discovered some disappointing answers.

    On average, premium publishing companies generated $773,567 in the first half of 2016 by distributing their content on YouTube. Content published to Facebook earned an average of $560,144 in the period, Twitter generated an average of $482,788, and Snapchat generated $192,819 for each publisher in the sample.

    To call these returns derisory is an understatement and it illustrates how the current media model is unsustainable as it’s impossible to sustain a basic newsroom, let alone produce investigative features with those sort of budgets.

    It isn’t just the media model that’s unsustainable, Business Insider cites the CEO of Digital Content Next, Jason Klint, who flagged in a blog post last year that all the growth in digital advertising is being accounted for by Facebook and Google – the rest of the industry is shrinking.

     

    Even Facebook and Google aren’t immune from the unsustainable model that’s currently in place, Klint points out that fraud and intermediaries further skew the model which undermines advertisers’ confidence in the platforms and online media in general.

    For the moment though, the intermediaries seem to be doing okay. Klint cites IAB research which claims AdTech companies are making 55% of the online advertising industry’s revenues while publishers are only getting half.

    That illustrates how the tail is currently wagging the dog with publishers and content creators losing out while middlemen who add little in the way of value get the bulk of the revenue. That too is not sustainable.

    We’re still in early days for online media and the models are still being worked out. While we wait for the 21st Century’s David Sarnoff many sectors are threatened including the advertising, marketing and PR industries. At least the publishers aren’t alone.

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  • P&G focusing on Facebook is bad news for media

    P&G focusing on Facebook is bad news for media

    Consumer goods giant Proctor and Gamble has announced they will be dialling back their targeted advertising on Facebook, as they discovered being too precise turns out to stifle sales.

    It turns out that big companies need scale, not precision, so to grow sales they need to be engaging with more people and not restricting their message to niche groups.

    Given the different natures of businesses it’s not surprising to see strategies that work for one group fail dismally for others, but it’s interesting how targeting turns out not to work so well for mass market products.

    The losers though in the P&G story are smaller websites as Wall Street Journal quotes the company’s Chief Marketing Officer as saying they will focus more on the big sites and move away from niche players.

    Mr. Pritchard said P&G won’t cut back on Facebook spending and will employ targeted ads where it makes sense, such as pitching diapers to expectant mothers. He said P&G has ramped up spending both on digital sites and traditional platforms. One category the company is scaling back: smaller websites that lack the reach of sites such as Facebook, Google and YouTube.

     

    Again we’re seeing the early promise of the web failing as economic power continues to be concentrated with a few major platforms. This is also terrible news for media organisations as big advertisers – P&G are the world’s biggest spender – focus on a few sites and increasingly ignore local or niche news publications.

    There’s also the quandary of where the content that Facebook’s users share will come from, with the advertising shifting away from media companies – new players such as Buzzfeed and Huffington Post as well as the old established mastheads – to Google and Facebook, there’s less funds to create interesting and shareable stories.

    P&G’s move is very good for Facebook’s and Google’s shareholder but the future media models still seem a long way off.

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  • The rise and fall of a social media influencer

    The rise and fall of a social media influencer

    Jess Miller from suburban Melbourne was a social media star. Two years ago at the age of sixteen she was earning $10,000 a week as ‘Pizza’ on Tumblr.

    Miller was a classic social media influencer, with 700 thousand young followers she was popular with advertisers then along came the payday of reposting fake diet pill testimonials.

    Miller started to make serious money. She’d already been able to make a little cash: fashion companies and some small Etsy stores paid her to post pictures of clothing on her blog, with a nudge to her followers to check out their sales. She’d earned about $4000 in this way.

    But then the big one came along. Two 18-year-old American social media entrepreneurs, Zach Lilley and Jeremy Greenfield – fans and friends of Pizza – approached Jess Miller and other top-performing Tumblr bloggers in April 2014 with a proposition for a money-making scheme. It used a decidedly old-school lure: diet pills.

    Lilley, Greenfield and their associate Dennis Hegstad ran a website called Exposely, which connected brands to people with strong followings on social media. Lilley and Greenfield used their social media skills to create diet pill ads that masqueraded as Tumblr posts, essentially fake testimonials from women talking about their weight-loss journey. Miller would re-blog these posts, and get a small payment if the user clicked on the link. If the user bought the pills, Miller would get $23 and Exposely would get $26. She watched the money roll in – to her mother’s PayPal account.

     

    Eventually the breaches their terms of service, not to mention ethics, became too much for Tumblr’s management and they deleted Miller’s blog along with a group of others in the scheme.

    Miller’s story illustrates the manipulation that is a big part of the social media influencer industry with behaviour that’s almost certainly illegal and most definitely unethical. It also illustrates the risks of basing an income or business on service where you can be closed down any time.

    For Miller, she seems relieved her time of fame is over. Those building their businesses around these platforms may not be so philosophical.

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  • Facebook and its mobile river of gold

    Facebook and its mobile river of gold

    It seems Facebook has found its river of gold with the company’s quarterly stock market statement reporting a 57% increase in revenues and a stunning 195% in net profits.

    Particularly impressive was mobile sales made over 8o% of the company’s advertising revenue, up from just short of three quarters in the previous years.

    For other online services, particularly Google, Facebook’s success on mobile must be galling as they struggle with the shift to smartphones.

    How long that growth can continue remains to be seen. For the moment though, Facebook is showing how to make money on the mobile web.

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