Slow Brand

According to PaidContent a group of five leading print publishers have banded together on a $90M+ campaign called the “power of print” launching with ads in their various publications. PaidContent cites an article by the Wall Street Journal today on the launch of the campaign, an article which is behind the WSJ subscriber-only paywall but in the preview  the first few paragraphs mention that the campaign will include over 1400 print ads scattered across the publications of the five publishers.

This is not how to save print media nor is it the best use of $90 million

Instead the publishers should be rethinking their print publications and using that $90M towards the following.

• Hiring better writers with more diverse views. I’m a longtime New Yorker subscriber and in the past year I have seen a significant decline in the quality of the writing. Furthermore the lack of diversity of perspectives, especially in the reviews they publish has become really glaring. Even though I have been a subscriber for 20+ years I am thinking about not renewing my subscription when it expires, especially if the current decline in quality continues.
• Investing in cultivating new advertisers and in adding greater value to current advertisers. For over a decade I have been suggesting that print publications – from monthly magazines to daily newspapers – should have long ago extended their print advertising relationships to the web. Perhaps in the 1990’s and even early in this century many advertisers in print publications did not have related web presences but today it is a rare ad which does not feature a web URL and an even rarer advertiser who does not have a web presence. But even without making every ad a link to the relevant advertiser, print publications have missed out on many great opportunities by not extending ads into the web. Many print publications are bought for the ads as well as the content – in a few cases almost entirely for the ads (see many fashion magazines).
• Do not retain content sections just because they are traditional. All parts of every publication should be rethought and be up for revision in the light of the changes brought by the web. The New Yorker, for example, should consider editing down the front events pages and remaking them into a highly curated selection of just events, restaurants, art shows and movies which the editors recommend to their readers. Perhaps make the comprehensive listings available as an online extended service (and do not hide this behind a pay wall) but focus the print edition on just what will be lasting, what matters, what are truly don’t miss.
• Invest in editors. Invest in writers. Invest in photographers. Online there are a seeming infinite number of writers and other content creators, print publications should invest in and cultivate great writing. Don’t publish filler content or throwaway articles, invest instead in great editing that makes content tighter. Invest in great photography that tells a story and captures a look or a moment.
• Frame the content of the magazine in great design but do not over do it. Wired magazine has, at times, had great articles but the ever present “design” of the magazine often hides the value of the content and makes it harder to read. Furthermore by having a different design for many articles the overall costs go up for little added value to the reader – in fact by having to figure out how to read each article anew the value to most readers goes down.

Most importantly, however, advertising the “power of print” via only ads in other print publications is preaching to a currently shrinking population. Instead the publishers should be looking to ways to engage with the rest of the media landscape – increasingly that means digital – find a value-adding role for each print publication within that ecosystem.

And do not confuse the form with the mission of the publication.

Great publications have a mission which can and should extend well beyond a single physical form. The physical editions however frequent should be a reminder of that mission and serve to further it, but shouldn’t be the only part. The editors and writers and other creative parts of the publication alongside the advertising and commercial relationships should all act together towards a common goal. For a magazine such as Vogue it might be a celebration of fashion, for the New Yorker it might be a celebration of the diversity of New York City (and the inhabitants of that city – culture, politics, business, fashion and more).

Print publications today have many audiences – subscribers, newsstand buyers, readers of shared copies found in doctor’s waiting rooms. But they also are part of some community – whether fashion or a city or an industry. But very rapidly those communities around the globe are finding new means of communicating and magazines which are stuck in the past will and are being left behind.

2010 is a great year for print.

I have been thinking about print in the age of the web for a long time, earlier this year I thought about (and still may) starting a print publication of my own, tbnl magazine, but three items from the past week really struck me as to why I think 2010 could, contrary to most opinions, be a great year for print.

Item 1: McSweeney’s Panorama.

Item 2: a gift subscription to the amazing cookbook series from The Canal House

Item 3: podcasts from the best new magazine of the decade, Monocle.

Item 4 (bonus): a whole bunch of innovative print examples especially from the comics industry but also from other places  in the past few months – DC Comic’s Wednesday Comics series in broadsheet newsprint among others as is Andrew Sullivan’s recent self-published book of photos from his reader’s windows.

Item 1: McSweeney’s Panorama

Panorama is a huge experiment in what can still be done in the broadsheet, newspaper format. All told it is 320 pages of newsprint (w/two magazine inserts) as well bonus posters and other materials. Approximately 350,000 words, 218 contributors, 10 sections, 120 broadsheet pages, 22 comics, 3 posters went into the publication.

In a very fascinating insert to the publication, McSweeney’s details the overall costs for Panorama. They had a print run of 20,000 copies at a per unit printing cost of $5.57. With just one part-time ad sales person (first time McSweeney’s has taken ads) they sold $61,000 worth of advertising from a combination of local & national advertisers. Their unit costs factoring in editorial & art expenses as well as printing costs were $7.98/unit.

Their payments to contributors was about $40,000.

All told they published Panorama with a total direct capital of about $235,000, most of which they expected to recoup on the first day of selling Panorama (~1500 copies sold at $5/copy, 18,500+ at ~$16/copy)  when they expect to net about $300,000. Along with the $61,000 in ad sales that means a rough expectation of around $170,000 in profits. This is likely a bit high as the few 1000 copies sold in retailers would have some margin for those retailers.

I have not yet finished my copy of Panorama – indeed so far I have just skimmed it, read a few articles and took in the overall design and layout. There are many sections I think are exceptional and many which I think fall a bit short – the magazine background of many of the contributors shows with many pages and sections reading more like an enlarged magazine than a newspaper (specifically they rarely if ever have multiple stories on the same page – a design model common in newspapers but uncommon in magazines)

That said the overall process which McSweeney’s demonstrated with Panorama shows that there are still the mechanical and structural elements capable of publishing an amazing example of newsprint publication (as well as supplemental magazines) including much of the distribution all at costs which could be manageable for a small team to publish on a regular basis – likely with a higher print run than 20,000 copies, fewer pages, fewer special inserts and thus a far lower per unit printing costs (and also editorial costs).

In short McSweeney’s is demonstrating that there could be a future for newsprint if groups of creative people come together to explore it. A future which would probably be far more niche than today’s dailies but less niche than small local neighborhood weekly papers. The Onion is, perhaps, an example of what this future could look like – a niche paper with a mix of national and very local content and so strong of an advertising base that they give the paper away for free.

Item 2: The Canal House cookbook

My sister and brother-in-law (well technically they aren’t married but have been living together for a very long time and just days ago had my niece) gave me a subscription to The Canal House cookbook as a holiday present this year. Eventually the website may be a great resource for foodies, but for the moment the focus is the self-published cookbooks with plans for 3 cookbooks a year.

The books are $19.95 each or you can buy (or gift) a subscription for three issues for $49.95.

The physical design of the books is beautiful, one of the two woman behind The Canal House is a world renowned food photographer and co-founder of Saveur Magazine. Prior to The Canal House her photography had been a part of many other successful cookbooks.

They could have probably sold a traditional cookbook to a traditional publisher. Instead they have decided to self-publish.

So why do I think The Canal House illustrates the future of print?

To start, consider the economics. Every 1000 subscribers they sign up for the three book series represents $50,000 in revenue.

What about the costs?

They print each cookbook in China, so are likely not using a print on demand service, thus they do have to balance inventory and print runs, but here are some rough estimates:

- per book printing costs: $5-7/book ? (I suspect this may actually be on the high side though their book is full color)

- shipping costs $5-10/subscription (my subscription included the first two books shipped in one package for a cost of $3.16 + the shipping envelope)

Say that the total (rough) costs for a three-book subscription are $30 for printing, shipping & packaging. That means $20/subscription profit or $20,000 per 1000 subscribers.

Very few authors get advances which are more than $100,000, in fact very few get advances which are more than $50,000. The Canal House has two co-founders so any advance would have to have been split between them.

Doing it all by themselves if they sell 10,000 subscriptions they will, roughly, net $200,000 in profit or $100,000 per co-founder.

If they sell more than 10,000 (or if my cost estimates are high) they will make far more.

And very likely, given how great the first two cookbooks are, they will see many subscribers renewing for future subscriptions. So instead of negotiating a new book deal each year (very few publishers would have expected to get three books from a set of authors in a given year) they are building a business which will be sustainable for years to come.

I think there are likely dozens (perhaps 100’s) of other food authors as well as active food blogs/communities who could adopt a similar, print driven revenue model. Take the best articles, the best recipes from a given period of time and print them along side of tested recipes and beautiful photography and sell them. Ideally mostly via a subscription model which allows you to very closely estimate the print numbers you need in advance of actual printing (allowing you to negotiate with the printer and take advantage of volume discounts, per unit printing costs go down very quickly with volume).

My sister’s boyfriend, Peter Meehan recently published a major cookbook (Momofuku w/David Chang). They went the more traditional route with a major publisher, a large advance and a well supported and well attended press tour. Their hard work has been rewarded with a cookbook that cracked the top 100 on Amazon (as high as #32) and which will likely sell out the initial print run of at least 50,000 books (for a $40 book – yes that’s $2M at full retail pricing).

However they are by far the exception – a cookbook by a non-TV chef rarely sees numbers anything like what they are seeing.

Most cookbook authors, like the vast majority of authors of any genre, make fairly little from their writing.

Thus in 2010 I would suggest that any food writer thinking about making a cookbook consider strongly the DIY route enhanced by leveraging the web & social media to generate pre-sales (and/or adopt a subscription model such as The Canal House has) and use that to lower production costs while retaining far more revenue than traditionally received under a usual publisher’s contract.

Of course to do this well requires that you have access to great photographers, editors, writer and recipe editors/testers. Many websites, such as the fantastic Serious Eats would seem well positioned to do just that.

Item 3: The Monocle

I have been a huge fan of The Monocle since I discovered it a bit over a year ago. In a year which has seen many magazines close and print publications around the globe scale back their ambitions and international coverage, Monocle consistently creates a compelling if also hard to summarize global mix of coverage with original reporting from across the globe. The mix of a strong focus on design, combined with global coverage of the world including interviews with world leaders, extensive photojournalism and stories which cover the globe in depth and with richness and depth makes Monocle a long, but very compelling read.

It is also a great argument for the power and value of great design and the print format to tell a compelling story all while also demonstrating a very 21st century business model.

The components of the Monocle business model which, I think, are worth noting as components of the future of print in 2010 and beyond are:

1. A high value (and equally high priced) monthly print magazine. Monocle has a $12 list price in the US and subscriptions in the US are actually a bit more costly (75 pounds sterling) than buying the magazine at retail – depending on the variations of exchange rates
2. By focusing on a global audience but with a definite luxury and high design focus Monocle attracts global, luxury advertisers whose advertising budgets are less impacted by economic shifts. Additionally these advertisers seek specific audiences over mass reach.
3. Monocle has a retail component – with actual retail stores in London and LA as well as an international online store. In the store they sell design collaborations with select companies from across the globe as well as limited edition books and prints. These range from postcards to dining room tables to travel bags. Over the summer they had a pop-up store along the Mediterranean coast as well.
4. A growing range of audio and video podcasts. Supplementing and enhancing the magazine the Monocle’s online audio and video content is of an exceptionally high quality. Their video series are often sponsored by premier sponsors via tasteful (and short) embedded ads while the regular audio series serve primarily to be an audio discussion of the content of the current and future magazine issues.
5. Regular special reports and inserts into most of the issues of the print magazine. These special reports on Travel, Aviation and many other topics are both great original content and highly targeted publications which attract specific advertisers who might otherwise not advertise in the regular issues of Monocle.

Monocle may not be an easily duplicated model. It is certainly a high cost, high value publication with editors and reporters across the globe and very likely a very high travel and expenses budget along with very high production value. But at a time when many magazines claim hardship and are closing Monocle stands as a reminder that it is still very possible to build a great (and by all appearances successful) magazine even in the 21st century.

Item 4: Examples of innovative print experiments

Though I have always been a geek and was aware of trends in comics growing up it wasn’t until earlier this year that I started to semi-seriously collect comics. What drew me to comics in 2009 was a combination of new media (podcasts/video podcasts such as iFanboy and Major Spoilers) and an interest in looking at how the comics industry has been responding to the challenges of the 21st century.

What I have found in 2009 in looking at the comics industry is a range of lessons which offer, I think, much to be hopeful about the future of Print in the 21st century and especially in 2010. Yes there are fewer big hit comics (though more than you might expect – with some breakout graphic novels especially manga titles making bestseller lists this year as well as many smaller titles selling out and getting reprinted multiple times).

But beyond questions of volume of sales what I am most encouraged by in observing the comics industry is the range of innovations I see there – with companies large and small exploring different mediums, form factors and many different publishing schedules and business models. The physical products come in a wide range of shapes and sizes, at a range of periods (from “one-shots” to bi-weeklies to monthlies to bi-monthlies, quarterlies etc). In addition to the comics sold in any comics store the industry also has branches selling – very successfully – comics in large bookstores (graphic novels and especially manga) as well as at school book sales around the country (Scholastic sells millions of comics books in such book sales every year – the colored editions of Boned for example sell exceptionally well).

And while there are exceptions, for the most part the comics industry creates physical print products which explore the limits of print. This summer, in a prequel of sorts to what McSweeney’s has done with Panorama, DC published a 12 issue weekly series, Wednesday Comics. Each issue was printed on large format newsprint and told 15 different serialized stories each told one large format page per week. Overall it was a celebration of the history of comics – a return to a classic format which predates the comicbook as we know it today.

A few years ago there was a book published which reprinted the Little Nemo comics from the early part of the 20th century in their original, large broadsheet format. Earlier this year the second volume of those Little Nemo reprints was published, Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splendid Sundays, Volume 2 which is also gorgeous.

As 2009 ends there are many other examples of innovation in print happening. One in particular which I have enjoyed observing the process around is a photo book which blogger Andrew Sullivan published this year featuring a collection of photos from his reader’s windows. To launch the book he put out a call to his readers to pre-commit to ordering the book, in turn this allowed him to place an initial print order of 3000 books sold to those who had pre-committed at the lower price allowed by printing so many copies at once. That print run having sold out, the current books are available as print-on-demand from Blurb for a higher per book price.

A last example of where innovation is happening in print – is in the art print business – 20×200 is an innovative gallery in NYC and website which makes art prints available at prices starting at $20 (200 small format prints of each work are typically made available at a $20 price point). When 20×200 launched they would typically have 200 prints of a work at $20 and 2 prints of the work at $2000. In the past year they have expanded the range of price points and print sizes and now for a given work they may have as many as 4 or 5 print sizes, always in limited quantities. Some works could net over $75,000 or more if all of the prints sell out – as they frequently do.

What makes 20×200 work as with many of the examples I have listed is the curation behind each of these projects. As I noted in 2008 and still believe today the future of media is curation.

photo by Ewan Spence

I am spending the afternoon at my friend Ross Dawson’s Future of Influence Summit here in San Francisco (it is also running simultanously in Sydney Australia) I will have much more to write about this topic in future posts, but as I walked here this morning I was thinking a great deal about how brands are built today.

Telling great stories is the best way to build great brands

Here in San Franciso in the past year the local food scene has seen dozens of innovative, small scale food related businesses being created. Many of them are broadly speaking food carts, others are chefs who only cook a few nights a week, or other new forms of food and craft driven businesses. At the same time dozens of more traditional food businesses have opened in San Francisco. However I have observed that there are some common traits to the new businesses which are emerging with strong brands compared to those which have only a minimal if any brand recognition.

A great example here in San Francisco, though far from the only one,  is 4505 Meats, which is a local food business started by aclaimed chef Ryan Farr. He is building a fantastic business making a range of locally sourced meat products – Pork Chicarronnes which are available for sale in cafes and specilized markets throughout San Francisco and he is growing in acclaim for his handmade sausages, hot dogs and when he makes them hamburgers. He sells these products directly at the Thursday Ferry Bulding Farmers Market as well as select food festivals around town, but he is also increasingly a supplier of choice for many other small scale, innovative local food businesses.

In the process he is building a great, local brand, one which I suspect will only continue to grow in value in the years to come.

And his blog as well as the design choices he makes, including selling limited edition lithograph prints, all tell his story – that of food products made from very carefully sourced local providers made with care, old faashioned skill and a great sense of taste and quality control. He charges fair prices boh directly to customers at the markets and clearly to the many local businesses who are gladly doing business with him. As a result his business is growing and his brand is growing as well.

Take a look at how he is using twitter – follow him at @chicharrones – he’s using it to promote his events & specials exceptionally well.

And here in the Bay Area he is far from unique, there are some dozen or more similar, small scale, innovative food related businesses who are using Twitter as in many cases their primary form of marketing and advertising to promote their appearances, daily specials and over time to build up their brands – often in no small part by helping to promote each other’s businesses.

A few notable examples – but look at any of their Tweet streams for more are:

@adobohobo – a local food cart that makes Adobo Chicken (and occasionally other dishes), tasty, fairly priced street food.

@eatrealfest – a local, first time Street Food Festival which drew over 60,000 people to Oakland for three days of street food and farmers markets. They promoted the event throughout the Bay Area via posters and postcards but also benefited extensively from the social media usage (especially Twitter) of so many of the businesses who were selling at the festival, many of whom sold 1000’s of dishes in a single day.

@cremebrulecart – a local chef who makes a range of flavors of creme brule which he sells in parks and at events throughout the Bay Area, I’ve yet to see him fail to completely sell out at an appearance, his product is very tasty and fairly priced and not surprisingly quite popular. In addition to using his growing Twitter followers to announce where he will be, he is also using Twitter to get people to come out to help keep a favorite local park clean through volunteer efforts.

@missionstfood – a local Bay Area business which started as a food cart, then moved to their current format where they take over a local Chinese restuarant in the Mission area of San Francisco on Thursday and Saturday evenings. Each evening a different guest chef creates the menu, much of the proceeds of the evening go to a different charity (chosen by that evening’s guest chef). They use Twitter to promote the menu and over the course of the evening to inform people about what they have sold out of at the moment. They draw over 200 people most evenings, many of whom gladly wait over 1 1/2 hours for a table and they almost never have an empty chair from the moment they open until just before they close for the evening (usually having sold every dish they were ready to make). Just a few weeks ago they expanded further to now have a regular daily business, Mission Burger, selling beef & vegetarian hamburgers and occasional specials from within a local Mission market.

All of these small businesses along with dozens of others are using emerging media, such as twitter, as a core part of how they tell the story of their brand, in many ways using these tools to help them build and define a brand as it emerges in partnership with customers. While many of the businesses I have linked to have active online blogs and websites and many are increasingly attracting the attention of the media both online and offline, they are also using tools such as twitter to help them tell their own stories.

I was recently invited to the private Beta for Linkaholix (follow this link for my referral if you want to join). Linkaholix is a site dedicated to indicating things that you like – from brands to books to albums, restaurants and more. While entering in a range of things I’m passionate about, I have been struck by a simple yet puzzling observation.

Even many of the biggest, most popular online savvy brands do not make it easy to find their logos online or to refer to them in an authorative manner.

So a short note to suggest that when you think about your Brand presence online, don’t neglect some of the absolute most basic elements, adding brand collateral in a uniform manner online and making it very clear where your presence is based (i.e. which URL a fan should link to directly when referring to your business) as well as making it easy for an individual or a business to find the right logos and other related photos – such as of your retail businesses, your brands in use, your packaging etc. Consider as well making all of your brand marketing and advertising available online in easy to link to or embed formats.

I would much rather use the right logos and images when I’m promoting a brand I enjoy via an online service. This isn’t just a matter of following a brand on Twitter or joining a fan page on Facebook, though both of those actions are also relevant signals. Instead this is a matter of when I am blogging here on this site, or when I’m using a great service such as Likeaholix to capture short notes about why I like the things that I like, I would like to present those brands in the best possible light and to use the most accurate and correct images and videos possible.

As a challenge to you, try to find the logo for Revision3’s show Co-op which is a show I love on gaming.

They have a truly great logo for their game – 8 bit icons in a logo type font that captures a great deal about who they are and what they are about. A great image that I can’t easily share here as I still haven’t found a image of the logo online as just the logo in a form I can copy & use elsewhere.

I am at Ad:Tech San Francisco all this week, my third Ad:Tech SF I have attended, I’ve also attended multiple Ad:Tech’s in NYC.  I attend as a blogger and journalist, as well as an interested analyst, consultant and entrepreneur. Every year i seek out who is, in fact, delivering really innovative and valuable services and every year I find myself puzzled by most of the exhibitors. 

This year I have had a bit of an “Aha” moment this morning and early afternoon, namely that for the majority of this show the definition of what is a “publisher” is stuck in a model of about a decade ago, a model which in turn is based on a fairly simple modeling of non-Internet media properties to the web. 

Namely that a publisher, in this context, is a company which offers up lots of media content – usually text (with links) but increasingly also video (pure audio is another approach but one which gets only minimal coverage). This model plays mostly into a volume game – where “content” is stretched over multiple pages, each page is layered with more or less well “targeted” advertising (in a variety of formats) and where “traffic” is in turn generated in large part via ad buying – where the name of the game is to pay less for the traffic than is generated via revenues from that traffic. Organic search traffic is vital as other than the costs associated with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that traffic would usually be lower cost than nearly any other form of traffic. 

Into this model of publishing with little variation (minor for sites which are video versus textually based) steps most of the companies who exhibit at Ad:Tech. 

1. Traffic businesses - whether Search Engine Optimization i.e.SEO firms or platforms on which ads can be run to generate traffic often these firms are search engines – Google is one example. To be fair, many of these businesses are here for a number of reasons, Google for example is also showing off their Website Optimizer and Google Analytics products. 
2. Ad server providers as well as Ad Networks who offer to serve up ads for the publisher. The ad server providers provide mostly raw technology to serve the ads, the ad networks also in theory provide ads to serve. Targeting companies may help or be partnered with these providers to help determine which ads to show to whom. Ad Optimizers (such as my friends at Rubicon Project) offer services for publishers by optimizing ads from multiple sources (directly sourced, various ad networks) including ads of multiple forms. Some ad networks offer ads of only one type – common variations are Cost per Thousand Impressions or CPM - usually banner ads or other visual ad formats such as some video ads, Cost per Click or CPC - often seen in text link ads though occasionally also banner ads, Cost per Action or CPA - generally paid after some transaction is completed such as filling in a form or registering and a few Cost per Lead or CPL - which are similar to CPA ads but generally represent further qualification of the individual completing the actions to define that person as really a true lead for the business.
3. Affiliate Networks - in some ways similar to ad networks but with an important variation. Where an ad network usually offers a rane of creatives, sometimes priced in a variety of ways, an affiliate network offers a series of offers which a publisher can share and for which the publisher will be paid based on transactions completed. These transactions can be newly registered users, purchases online (or occasionally purchases offline), subscriptions ordered etc. The archetypal example of an affiliate program is Amazon.com’s Associates program but there are literally hundreds of programs as well as dozens of networks of programs.
4. Service providers to publishers - exhibiting here this year are a number of companies who offer payment processing and other services for web publishers, in most cases intended for websites who might be using online advertising to generate traffic but then need additional services to close a transaction and get paid. 
5. Service providers to ad agencies (and the occasional direct brand) - there are a number of companies here who are showing off tools to help manage advertising campaigns from the ad buying perspective, tools that might, for example, help decide where to place ads across a number of networks and at what price points and to manage the spending. In most cases they may also help track results from the online advertising such as clicks and other metrics. 

And those are the majority of the firms exhibiting here at Ad:Tech San Francisco 2009. There are a few exceptions, the occasional digital agency, law firm, magazine or industry organization and there are a few variations of firms in the mobile and video spaces who offer specific tools or additional functionality. 

What most share, however, is a myopic view of what is a Publisher.

Publisher, as assumed by most of the companies exhibiting here at Ad:Tech,  is a website which has lots of “content” across a number of pages. In most cases this “content” is text and around that text (or before/after it loads or via modifications to the text) a range of ads and offers can be presented. Most publishers are defined as having some amount of traffic, measured in page views (and often in unique users in a given month) where the unit of a “page” is generally an HTML page. Video sites may talk in terms of the videos viewed and occasionally the number of minutes spent viewing those videos. Most of the publshers are assumed to have sites which are crawled by search engines and in turn in most cases are assumed to generate a great deal of traffic from search engines (though the best publishers also have a lot of natural or direct traffic – i.e. actual people who go directly to that site on a regular basis. 

What is mising from this view is a world of new media, the worlds of applications and services where increasingly more and more of the time and attention of Internet users is spent. 

The majority of so called Web 2.0 companies, for example, would not be considered a publisher by this definition, much of what occurs within such applications is opaaque to search engines, it requires someone to be registered and logged into the service and is usually customized for that individual user. Her content, her friends, her last move, her family’s finances. 

Many Web 2.0 businesses do work with Affiliate programs, whether on a one off basis or via an affiliate network. To the extent that the applicaiton they offer leads naturally to transactions by their users this can be a natural and productive fit – and indeed many of the affiliate networks offer some degree of hooks into their systems which web applications can utilize. However this is not a good match for all applications. 

What I do not see, or at least haven’t seen often, are ad network designed to accomodate the needs of really dynamic, rich applications. Networks which accept API calls in place of embedded Javascript, and which accept with that API call information about the user – or better yet group of users – to use to customize and target the ads to be shown.

In yesterday’s email to Salon.com subscribers a new blog, The Brand Graveyard was announced. It will be a blog about dead brands, about companies (or perhaps individual brands from companies) which have “died”. To start they have posts on Circuit City, Mervyn’s, Fortunoff, and a guest post from a journalist formerly at The Rocky Mountain News. Each post is a short summary of the end of a historic (at least so far) company, starting with a brief lesson on the history of the brand then looking quickly at what appears to have been the cause of the demise. 

In a related trend TechCrunch in 2008 started tagging posts with what they call the Deadpool when they wrote about a company or a brand owned by a larger company which was, in their opinion, no longer a viable and active brand. At times they have written posts taking a brand “out” of the Deadpool usually when a new investor has purchased the brand and restarted the activity which had been placed on hold. These posts, though often depressing, are also some of the most interesting reading as like The Brand Graveyard they often follow a similar pattern of a quick summary of the history of a brand then an update about what went wrong and why they are now placing that brand into the Deadpool.

I have been tracking this trend of trumpeting the Death of invididual brands and a related trend among some of claiming a broader death of Brands generally. John Winsor has a recent blog post on The Death of Brands It’s not about the Cow in which borrowing a metaphor from Seth Godin he asks if Brands are Cows then perhaps it is time to think of Farms not just Purple Cows. It is an interesting question, but I think the conclusion it reaches misses a more fundemental issue.

Namely that Brands today, or more specifically probably brand managers and management more broadly, have underinvested in building, sustaining and maintaining their brands while simultanously abusing their brands and the concept of Brand more broadly. 

Why do I claim this? 

Look at the advertising present today on TV (both Network and Premium, national as well as local). Then look at the ad pages in many mass (1M circulation or higher) magazines. Finally look at the ads present in the dwindling number of newspapers. Also the brand focused advertising (mostly display) across the web. 

I see a trend of fewer and fewer Brands investing in all of these forms of advertising – from fewer national TV ads (or Radio) to fewer ad pages in many national magazines to fewer national campaigns (or local for that matter) in newspapers. Related forms of advertising such as Billboards are also, though this is entirely based on anecdotal observation, increasingly event focused (marketing to attendees at a convention in a given town for example) or purchased with only minimal thought.

However I am basing this solely on my own observations and second hand reading of others – I would love to find a source for specifics on TV, Radio, Magazine, Newspaper, Online and Outdoor brand advertising purchases month over month and year over year. If such as source also tracked Brand/Product placements inside of media (TV shows, Online content) even better. 

Some  proposed solutions for Brands

Brands should simplify. Across the board Brands of all types have an unfortunate trend towards creeping complexity and overloading. Brand extensions and additional products under the same branding are one aspect of this. Another is a proliferation of additional elements and definitions in the brand presentation (see any marketing content by Microsoft of the past couple of decades)

Brands should differentiate. A Brand should stand for something different from competitors. Brands should not strive to be all things for all people, rather inherent in defining the Brand should be how it is different – including what other alternatives it is different from (other products – including from the same company, alternative ways to spend similar money or time etc) All people who are involved with the Brand should be able to clearly and consisely define what is unique and different about the Brand – they should be able to from this definition help decide if the Brand is right for a given person. And the correct answer here is NOT that there is a way to answer in the affirmative for all people.

Brands should invest in clear messaging. Today there are more, not less, ways for a Brand to get a message out about the Brand. Smart Brands, Slow Brands, are Brands who take these opportunities not to invest only for short term, immediate results but look for results multiple sales cycles outward. This framing, around the sales cycle for a given Brand could help define the right ways for a given Brand to invest. 

What other suggestions can you offer for Brands today to avoid being placed in the DeadPool?

I first encountered Open Space as a meeting format in the mid-1990’s in Chicago. I was a member of the Company of Friends, a group of readers of the magazine Fast Company which gathered together on a monthly basis. In Chicago the monthly meetings were held as Open Space meetings.

Since that time I have facilitated and opened many Open Space meetings and helped with seemingly countless other Open Space events or events held in the spirit of Open Space, if not always in the most formal of manners.

I highly recommend that everyone interested in Open Space visit Harrison Owen’s site Open Space World (.com) and the sister site Open Space World (.org) , a site managed in part by my good friend Michael Herman. And of course, I’ll cut to the chase in this review and also suggest that you buy the book (hint the image above is a link to Amazon and yes, I’ll get a very small affiliate fee if you click that link and buy it)

So what is Open Space and how does it apply to Slow Brands?

The short answer is that Open Space is a methodology for holding meetings which is incrediably powerful, seemingly simple, and yet also somewhat counterintuative. The meetings start without any formal agenda, instead the participants set the agenda, usually there are no speakers and little formal structure yet a lot can and does happen.

Harrison Owen’s book goes into great detail about all aspects of opening and holding an Open Space, his focus is generally on a fairly formal process which starts from an assumption that the space is opened by an inviation sent to a group of people who share a common and usually pressing interest.

Here in Silicon Valley, however, a hybrid type of meeting started a few years ago and has spread rapidly all over the world. These BarCamps while structurely often very similar to Open Space’s usually involve a large group of people with some shared interested, but usually from many different organizations and often brought together without a large specific or pressing purpose. As a result BarCamps tend to be held in a somewhat less formal manner than an Open Space as Harrison Owen describes them.

In my own practice I also generally modifty the formal aspects of Open Space in a few key areas.

But getting back to Slow Brands, what lessons can be learned from Open Space?

A key part of Open Space is the Four Principles and One Law.

The Four Principles

Whoever comes is the right people

Whatever happens is the only thing that could have

Whenver it starts is the right time

When it’s over it’s over

The One Law

The Law of Two Feet

All that may sound a bit cryptic, even contradictory for a method of holding a meeting (how do you schedule such a meeting if discussions will take however long they have to take and that’s defined as being just fine?)

But underlying all of the principles and the law is a respect for others and a appreciation of quality over quantity or formal process. A lesson all brands, but especially smart, Slow Brands, would be wise to learn and ponder.

How can you think about your brand, your corporate identity and messaging, not just as something formal and sent down from above (i.e from the company to customers) but as part of an ongoing process?

If you get the chance to participate in an Open Space I encourage you to do so, if you find yourself planning a meeting, especially a meeting around a pressing and important topic and find that you are bogged down in agendas, schduling, and formal structure, consider the seemingly slower (but actually often faster) option of an Open Space.

And yes, though it is not my primary  service, I am occasionally available as a facilitator for Open Spaces (or can if I’m not available suggest fantastic facilitators).

A few days ago I attended part of the iPhoneDevCamp which was a fantastic event gathering together a large group of creative people and which was well supported by a range of sponsors. One of the sponsors had a small table where they were both demonstrating and selling an iPhone accessory they make, an external battery for the iPhone with a bunch of very clever additional features. It has an LED light (i.e. a fixed flash for your camera and also useful to have), is designed to work with the regular iPhone dock and chargers, has a USB passthrough to recharge other USB devices at the same time, and holds a charge sufficient to recharge the iPhone twice. All-in-all a fantastic product and though not super cheap, well worth the show special price of $75 and I’m sure lots of people will pay their higher regular price, especially when they come out with their next version for the iPhone 3G.

So what is the problem?

Note what I was unable to do in the above paragraph, I couldn’t refer to the product either by the product brand name or by the nameo of the company, neither brand is present anywhere on the product itself. Now personally when it comes to my clothing and appearance I look for items which don’t shout a company brand, I try to choose carefully those brands whom I associate with my personal image – for example I’m mostly only wearing t-shirts with logos of companies or organizations I support and in most cases really do use myself.

I could not however refer to this product or the company because though they used a very nice material to construct the product the neglected to spend the likely relatively small additional amount to embed their name &/or logos anywhere on the product. Earlier today as I used the device to recharge my iPhone which was dangerously close to running out of battery charge after a long day away from home I wanted to tell my Twitter followers about the product – but was prevented from usually doing so by this lack of branding.

So what is the moral here? Consider how your customers will use your products and without being too blatent don’t be so restrained as to make it hard for existing customers to refer others to your brands and products – indeed you want to make that process of telling people about your company and brands as easy as possible. This also suggests avoiding unpronounceable or really difficult to remember how to spell brandnames or the sometimes used avoiding a word brand at all (i.e. “the artist formerly known as Prince” who after a while decided having a name for people to refer to might afterall be useful).

Oh, what is the product and company? After a lot (and I do mean a lot of poking around and searching I found it). It is the iV from Fastmac. A great product but horrible branding (well complete lack of branding).

I am a serious food lover, have been for many years. I am lucky to have grown up in a household where we ate dinner together as a family every night and where my first memory of dining out was when I was 3 and learned to use chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant. And while I imposed Chucky Cheese on my family on many a birthday as a child (my family has a tradition where the person celebrating his or her birthday picks where we ate dinner as a family typically dining out) my parents also exposed me and my sister to a very wide range of cuisines and flavors as we grew up.

Before we moved to Chicago I remember teaching the parents and teachers at my 2nd grade school how to make Guacamole from scratch. I was a bit precocious but as I recall it also tasted quite good the way I made it (which I had learned from my mom).

In college I threw serious dinner parties every few weeks, typically where I cooked all the main dishes, friends baked dessert, and everyone helped clean or prep. Each week I would cook a different cuisine using a mix of recipes from cookbooks and the Internet (this was pre-web, so drawn from USENET or occasionally Gopher). But at almost every meal I would also improvise, adjusting a recipe to taste or often making up an entirely new dish from the flavors of a given cuisine and ingredients I bought. I had learned to cook from a combination of observing my Mom and my Dad as they cooked (and they both cooked as I grew up) and from a few “Home Economics” courses I took in the 7th grade.

Since college I have continued to be a very serious cook and dine out a great deal. In Chicago I was a highly active poster to Chowhound (in the days before CNET purchased them and upgraded the site’s software) and then on a website friends of mine set up after being frustrated by the forum software of Chowhound, LTHForum (the name stands for a Chinese restaurant we love in Chinatown, Little Three Happiness called that because there is a second and much inferior Three Happiness restaurant right across the street). The group of us and the forum grew quickly and we not only posted about food we also gathered together on a regular basis for meals and events all through out Chicagoland.

In Chicago and especially since I moved to San Francisco I have also become quite adept at the art of organizing large group dinners. Typically I pick the restaurant and very often arrange for all of the food, often ordering everything and arranging for a family style or at least a prix fix meal to maximize everyone’s enjoyment.

Why do I mention all these details about my past and present life?

Because, and this is where it gets tricky, even with all of that which I have claimed (assuming you have read this far) you still do not have any particular reason to trust me, my suggestions, my cooking or my reviews.

Yes, I claim to be good, even an expert but that claim, by itself, no matter how often I repeat it is just words, just an unverified assertion.

In contrast for the most part anyone who has eaten at one of my dinner parties begs me for invitations to future events. People who have taken my suggestions for dinner locations and/or been to a meal I have organized, generally let me help them again in the future. To a lesser degree people who have been following me on Twitter for a long time have noticed that amongst my random rants and discussions I also twitter about food a great deal. Mini-reviews, observations about places I find, and occasionally small rants and even some raves.

With every event I organize this list of people grows, people who both trust my recommendations and in many cases refer people to me for advice and assistance.

In the next post in this serious more discussion on how to best build (or rebuild) your personal brand, especially as you also shift your job functions.

Coke, Coca Cola, and diet Coke are some of the most recognizable and most valuable brands in the world.

Entire web communities invest time analyzing the subtle changes in the packaging of soda across the planet.

But even great Brands, brands which have for decades defined how to build, manage, extend, and maintain a great brand make mistakes.

Take this can of diet Coke I photographed this weekend.

Notice how it has the phrase “Live Positively” along the side of the can? This same phrase can also be found on the current versions of other sizes and shapes of diet Coke found here in the US at present.

I wondered, what happens when you do a Google search on the phrase “Live Positively”?

Turns out you find a mix of self help sites and for the most part, sites for people who are living with HIV. This phrase has been used for a long time now by HIV support groups here in the US and indeed around the planet.

For diet Coke it was, I think, intended as part of their packaging and branding around support for women’s health and in particular a focus on healthy hearts which is the current main focus for diet Coke’s advertising on TV.

So I went to the diet Coke home page. I thought I might find some more information on this phrase at the official site, however I was wrong. Couldn’t find it. The home page is mostly tracking codes for various scripts and a primary and almost entirely flash driven graphical site. You can view the current diet Coke TV ads, can download a few images of posters, and can get some information about the myCokeRewards program which currently includes an offer for a red designer dress which diet Coke has had made as part of their support for healthy heart awareness in women.

Reading over the site I noticed that the entire marketing and branding present in the site had a built-in assumption that anyone interested in diet Coke was a woman. So apparently a male, such as myself, was not at all the target audience for any of diet Coke’s brand messaging.

More to the point, though historically Coca Cola has built some great examples of Slow Brands, brands driven by an iconic imagery, consistent and patient messaging, and living up to and exceeding brand promises and expectations for decades upon decades, with the rise of the internet at least the diet Coke arm of Coca Cola does not appear to be getting how to invest in a brand in a digital world.

Getting back to that phrase. Though it is present on the diet Coke cans, I have not been able to find any official diet Coke presence than explains it or makes reference to the phrase. One article from the Beverage Institute mentioned a “Live Positively team” but I can’t find any other reference to the team and diet Coke on the web.

A number of bloggers have noticed the phrase on their cans and bottles of diet Coke but even these discussions are in the search engine results interleaved with other sites which were focused on HIV/AIDS but happened to also mention diet Coke on a given page.

Today any Brand should take the time to search on the other uses of messages which will be a part of your Brand messaging offline and online and see how your messaging ties into the existing uses of a given phrase. While it perhaps is not diet Coke’s intent, perhaps Coca Cola should have made some donations to and given support to some HIV/AIDS support groups around the globe perhaps as part of an overall campaign to help people, likely emphasizing women if indeed diet Coke is intended to be branded mostly for women consumers. In that case the overlapping meanings of the phrase would have echoed the Brand messaging.

As a consumer while some parts of the soda industry have remained iconic and slow, the packaging and marketing of the core products has often seemed to no longer be consistent or slow. Seemingly every time I am in supermarket today (at least here in the US) the packaging and marketing for both Coca Cola’s family of brands and Pepsi’s family of brands seems to have changed, on a nearly weekly basis.

In fact I noted that I could tell that the little corner store near my house had bought the soda they were selling a long time ago because the packaging on it contained contests which had ended months prior.

I am highlighting diet Coke here because it is an example of an iconic Brand, a great Slow Brand of the past, which I think is not entirely succeeding in the new, online driven world.

What other examples of historically great, Slow Brands, can you think of which have stumbled online?