2020 Public Relations & Marketing

E-Mail Security

Should we trust companies that want to sell our e-mail addresses? Do people care anymore? Click here for a story by Business New Haven in Connecticut.

Is There a Future for Newspapers?

Daily newspaper readership has gone from about 65 million 25 years ago to 65 million today...but the population has grown from 225 million to over 300 million. Weekly papers are growing, more ads are now online.....so where does this leave daily papers?

A recent interview with Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times says:

At present, the print edition of The Times supplies most of our revenue and profit. I don't expect that to change in a hurry. We have a variety of levers we can adjust to keep the print newspaper healthy. We can add features that attract new advertising. We can reorganize for greater efficiency. (One major example: consolidating New York area printing into a single, modernized plant.) We can raise prices. We can trim costs. And so on. But the Web audience is growing at a great clip, while print circulation is not. And online revenues are growing faster, too, albeit from a smaller base. If the trend continues, there's little doubt that -- "eventually" -- online becomes the main business. I think newspapers on paper will be around for a good while yet. They may in time become niche products -- like vinyl LPs -- for a particular loyal audience.

 

E-mail Marketing Effective?

On a recent survey performed by Forrester Research, about 92.1 percent of online merchants said they used email marketing to reach their own customers and of those, a little bit less than 93.5 percent said they planned to make that channel a higher priority in 2008. Some observers say that email marketing is commonplace, and unless something makes it stand out, it's often ignored, if not outright dreaded by recipients.

While e-mail marketing still works, consumers are increasingly demanding that ads be relevant, said eMarketer analyst David Hallerman. He noted that recent consumer surveys showed that half of online buyers had made purchased based on e-mail marketing. That may mean being timed perfectly for a buyer or that the message contains a compelling offer, Hallerman said.

Because what merchants think is relevant and what a consumer finds relevant may be different things, accurate tracking campaigns to see what triggers purchases is an important part of any e-mail marketing program. Today's email marketing landscape continues to evolve and with less attention on the e-mail and more on the marketing part of the equation.

Investor's Daily: Web 2.0

This is from Investor's Daily, May 8
(Click here for the full story)

Hollywood Hearing The Trumpet Call Of The Web 2.0 Era

Movie and tech folks met in Los Angeles this week to deal with this potboiler: Hollywood losing control over consumers. The rise of social networking, video sharing, blogging, Internet TV, mobility, instant messaging and more have given consumers tremendous sway over how they consume and share content.

"Consumers have more control than ever," said Derek Broes, senior vice president of digital entertainment at Paramount Pictures. "You no longer have an environment where you had them in one spot, like in front of the TV set." Broes spoke on one of the 75 panels put together at Digital Hollywood.

One thing to do, many of the 1,800 attendees agreed, is to work with the consumer. New technologies let users access and manipulate video and audio content in ways not possible just a few years ago. This change started with the arrival of Web 2.0, the second generation of Internet technologies that emerged after the end of the first dot-com boom in 2000 or so. And the explosion of blogging and social networking sites let many individuals influence mainstream media and public opinion more than ever.

Broadband Internet then advanced the situation by enabling distribution and viewing of movies and TV shows. According to one speaker, TV shows are now the most pirated content on the Web. Another technology that has put consumers in control of content is the digital video recorder. DVRs let users time-shift what they want -- skip commercials and watch shows when it's most convenient for them. Internet TV sites give consumers more options. More advertisers will gravitate to social networking and video-sharing sites as they get a better understanding of audience preferences. On social networking sites, users can post personal information that advertisers can use to narrowly target their pitches.