Reading over my recent posts and predictions for this year, it would seem that I am something of a dark horse, predicting massive upheaval and hardship to come. I'm not. It is already happening and is going to happen in increasing levels until the mistakes and excesses of the last decades are purged out of the system.
That chaos is creating a lot of personal, professional and corporate pain. It would be cynical to pretend otherwise.
But...
This is also a time of enormous opportunity. Publishing made some gambles that entrenched it into business models that were generating ever dwindling long term viability, and the only way out of that trap is for it either to fail or for it to move decisively in another direction. Large corporations are brilliant at stable, long term group activities, and terrible at generating creative action. That requires decisive risk taking, individual thinking and stubborn self-confidence. Just what a group of newly out-of-work professional content makers can provide.
We need hungry, nimble, highly efficient and professional small teams that can work together to make salable material that the audience finds meaningful in a way that is much deeper than just supporting increased consumption.
At our disposal are all the new internet and digital technologies that have evolved over the last decade. Let's experiment, take risks, succeed, fail, and most of all, learn.
Print isn't going away, either. It just needs to be held more precious. The printed and bound book is just too beautiful of an object to disappear.
This morning The Wall Street Journal reported that the Commerce Department just revised their month old estimate for fourth quarter GDP contraction last year from 3.8% to 6.2%. The slide is steepening.
I don't think the old publishing economy is going to come back, folks. Let's get to work on making a new one.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Crisis in Editorial Photography
By the square inch, photography is one of the most cost effective and exciting ways to generate content. Run an incredible image full bleed and double truck with some minimal overlaying text and you have two awesome pages. It plays to the strength of the medium and is the future of magazines.
And yet, we have arrived at a place in the business where publications would pay a photographer about $400 for the day to make that incredible two page spread while charging well above $100,000 for advertising to run on those same two pieces of paper.
How did we get here? Let's rip the band aid off of that sore subject and look at what lies underneath.
The industry-wide business pressures in the periodical publishing industry over the past decade have had a massive impact on the business of editorial photography, to the extent that it has been impossible for years now to make a decent living at it.
In my last post I examined how the publishing industry, with some exceptions, came to rely almost entirely on advertising for revenue, and how that is bringing the entire industry down. If you haven't read that, it would be good to read it here before continuing. Those pressures have everything to do with where photography as a business is today.
The popping of the tech bubble in 2001 brought the party in editorial to an end. Into and through the late 90's it was standard to commission a story to one photographer who would then fly all over the country shooting for a piece. It was a good time to live just about anywhere and have an agent in NYC or LA who could keep you in work.
That changed after the bubble burst when massive short term budget cuts came through the publishing world. Publications generally report earnings quarterly, which means they need short term results. Cost cutting is the fastest way to increase revenue. You simply stop money from going out. It was easy to cut photography costs first because photographers were not on staff and the spending reduction showed up immediately in the revenue stream.
Large publishing companies then revised their boilerplate photo contracts, reducing their day rates and increasing their standard copyright ownership. On every job, photographers wanting better terms were forced to push back, negotiating higher rates and redacting parts of the contract that they didn't agree with. Eventually many wore down and either gave in or gave up on editorial photography as a significant source of revenue.
Previously it had been possible to create a career in editorial photography. There was a class of photographers who could maintain a studio, feed a family and have a career based almost entirely on editorial clients. Increasing economic pressure since 2001 has all but eliminated this group.
Apart from straight photojournalism, editorial assignments have largely become a means of showcasing one's work to a publication's advertisers. There is so little money to be made shooting editorial that many photographers see it merely as a free way of getting a large number of publicity cards sent out under the brand name of a publication.
Rob Haggart has posted a moving letter from a young photographer who details his experiences and failures in the New York City photo industry here. Rob concludes with this:
What we need are content models that minimize or avoid advertising entirely while returning a profit. We need publications that target a narrow and deep demographic while charging enough to operate independently. New tools and new technology are going to make this possible. More thoughts on that to come soon.
And yet, we have arrived at a place in the business where publications would pay a photographer about $400 for the day to make that incredible two page spread while charging well above $100,000 for advertising to run on those same two pieces of paper.
How did we get here? Let's rip the band aid off of that sore subject and look at what lies underneath.
The industry-wide business pressures in the periodical publishing industry over the past decade have had a massive impact on the business of editorial photography, to the extent that it has been impossible for years now to make a decent living at it.
In my last post I examined how the publishing industry, with some exceptions, came to rely almost entirely on advertising for revenue, and how that is bringing the entire industry down. If you haven't read that, it would be good to read it here before continuing. Those pressures have everything to do with where photography as a business is today.
The popping of the tech bubble in 2001 brought the party in editorial to an end. Into and through the late 90's it was standard to commission a story to one photographer who would then fly all over the country shooting for a piece. It was a good time to live just about anywhere and have an agent in NYC or LA who could keep you in work.
That changed after the bubble burst when massive short term budget cuts came through the publishing world. Publications generally report earnings quarterly, which means they need short term results. Cost cutting is the fastest way to increase revenue. You simply stop money from going out. It was easy to cut photography costs first because photographers were not on staff and the spending reduction showed up immediately in the revenue stream.
Large publishing companies then revised their boilerplate photo contracts, reducing their day rates and increasing their standard copyright ownership. On every job, photographers wanting better terms were forced to push back, negotiating higher rates and redacting parts of the contract that they didn't agree with. Eventually many wore down and either gave in or gave up on editorial photography as a significant source of revenue.
Previously it had been possible to create a career in editorial photography. There was a class of photographers who could maintain a studio, feed a family and have a career based almost entirely on editorial clients. Increasing economic pressure since 2001 has all but eliminated this group.
Apart from straight photojournalism, editorial assignments have largely become a means of showcasing one's work to a publication's advertisers. There is so little money to be made shooting editorial that many photographers see it merely as a free way of getting a large number of publicity cards sent out under the brand name of a publication.
Rob Haggart has posted a moving letter from a young photographer who details his experiences and failures in the New York City photo industry here. Rob concludes with this:
The industry is shrinking right now so getting in on the ground floor has got to be nearly impossible. The pros fight over the scraps now. Is there a path anymore where you can grow and make mistakes and still make a living?Breaking in right now might be nearly impossible. But there has to be more than just scraps for the future of the industry. Or we are going to have to make more. There are a lot of talented people available for the task. There is a large audience, and there is significant demand.
What we need are content models that minimize or avoid advertising entirely while returning a profit. We need publications that target a narrow and deep demographic while charging enough to operate independently. New tools and new technology are going to make this possible. More thoughts on that to come soon.
Friday, February 20, 2009
A Brief, Incomplete, and Slightly Revisionist, History of the Publishing Crisis
By the mid 90's publishing was becoming a corporate venture. Time Inc was swept up into Time Warner. Conde Nast and Hearst, while still privately held, were expanding their holdings. The economy was growing. Advertising dollars were plentiful. In general publications looked like a good investment. Publishing is a mature industry with a proven track record and steady revenue.
Then came the tech craze.
Suddenly the business rules seemed to evaporate overnight. Long term steady, predictable, modest growth looked positively lame. Everyone knew someone who quit their job, went to a tech firm, took their salary in stock, and cashed out in a year to live a life of leisure, retiring at 32. It was intoxicating. Money seemed to be falling out of the sky. When Cisco was returning 30% growth annually, a magazine company's very respectable 3-5% growth was ignored.
With the tech growth also came an upsurge in advertising dollars. And here is where the industry starts to go off track. In publishing there are three basic sources of revenue. Advertising, newsstand sales and subscription rates. In balance, these create a reasonably stable platform. But they don't, can't and won't generate the kind of growth that the tech sector was showing.
Since ad money was flooding the market, publications who wanted rapid growth were willing to lower subscription rates to get it. Ad sale costs are calculated based on the advertising rate base, which is a promised number of readers that the publication can deliver to the advertiser. If you have 1 million subscribers, you can sell them to the advertiser, guaranteeing that 1 million people will receive their ad. If you have 1.5 million subscribers, you can charge a lot more for that same piece of paper in the publication. Newsstand sales are not as predictable as subscriptions, and so they don't factor in as strongly to the rate base.
The fastest way that you can increase your profitability is to raise your rate base. Each ad page goes up in price and you become a more desirable publication to advertisers who want to reach your demographic.
So, the choice seemed to lie between the modest incomes coming in from subscribers versus the large potential from advertising. One industry response was to drop subscription rates and sell subscriptions dirt-cheap in order to drive up the rate base. Those publications that did this brought down the overall market sense of what a subscription should cost. Soon almost everyone was dumping subscription revenue to generate higher ad revenue. And it worked. With a cost.
Selling subscriptions cheap meant that consumers were buying them casually and without much loyalty. The readership was becoming diluted and publications had to appeal to broader audiences to keep the rate bases up. Who cared? Ad money seemed to be everywhere. Magazines were launching like sailboats at a regatta.
Then the party ended, suddenly and hard. The tech bubble burst.
In 2001, at the height of the tech bubble, Steve Chase at AOL bluffed his way into buying Time Warner with AOL stock in what would become the single largest erasure of corporate wealth to that date in history. On the morning that the merger announcement was made, Time Warner stock peaked at well over $100 a share. Long time staffers who had been paid bonuses with company stock deposited into their 401K accounts were millionaires on paper. But they couldn't sell the stock. By the time the merger went through a few months later, the tech bubble had burst. The deal looked bad before it was even finished. Within a year AOL Time Warner stock bottomed out at just over $8 per share.
On the ride down, all across the industry the pressure was on to continue to generate increased revenue. Since subscription rates had already been slashed, raising them wasn't much of an option. Newsstand sales are what they are. Not a great source for growth. So again, ad sales are the place to find it. But ad dollars were harder to get. Much harder.
Now the pressure seemed to increase on the content side of things. Publications were handed financial growth targets and told that if they missed them, heads would roll. When you are looking at quarterly targets, you have only a few months to get results. You have to act fast and in the short term.
Subtle pressure on the content side of the publishing world resulted in content catered to attract advertising--not content catered to the consumer. The magazines were generally seeing the consumer as a means to an ad sale, not as a customer. If you were heading up a magazine at a large company, kudos at the corporate retreats came from being profitable, not from experimenting with amazing content and satisfied consumers.
Recent memories of the dot com craze kept up hopes for an economic resurgence that might restore the ad driven logic that now dominated the industry. And soon the housing boom started to take over where the tech craze left off.
As this was happening, the Internet was growing rapidly too, pulling advertisers away from the publications and pushing publications online into an environment where the logic said that content should be free to the user and all revenue should be from advertising.
There were some magazines who resisted the pressure to dilute their subscriber base in pursuit of ad profits. And they will survive this intact. The two at the top of the list are People Magazine and The Economist. Not coincidentally, they are the two most expensive consumer magazine subscriptions available. They also have some of the most passionately devoted readers and they spend a lot of money and energy to know their readers and to deliver exactly what they want. People is also the most profitable publication in history.
What is being worked through in this current crisis is a basic orientation towards content. Is content a kind of bait, to lure consumers to the publication in order to make ad sales? Or is content a marketable product in its own right, worth the price and worth charging for? The first view of content is dying a very painful death. And with it a lot of economic blood is being and will be shed. The second view of content is very boring and old, but it is the future of the industry--again.
Then came the tech craze.
Suddenly the business rules seemed to evaporate overnight. Long term steady, predictable, modest growth looked positively lame. Everyone knew someone who quit their job, went to a tech firm, took their salary in stock, and cashed out in a year to live a life of leisure, retiring at 32. It was intoxicating. Money seemed to be falling out of the sky. When Cisco was returning 30% growth annually, a magazine company's very respectable 3-5% growth was ignored.
With the tech growth also came an upsurge in advertising dollars. And here is where the industry starts to go off track. In publishing there are three basic sources of revenue. Advertising, newsstand sales and subscription rates. In balance, these create a reasonably stable platform. But they don't, can't and won't generate the kind of growth that the tech sector was showing.
Since ad money was flooding the market, publications who wanted rapid growth were willing to lower subscription rates to get it. Ad sale costs are calculated based on the advertising rate base, which is a promised number of readers that the publication can deliver to the advertiser. If you have 1 million subscribers, you can sell them to the advertiser, guaranteeing that 1 million people will receive their ad. If you have 1.5 million subscribers, you can charge a lot more for that same piece of paper in the publication. Newsstand sales are not as predictable as subscriptions, and so they don't factor in as strongly to the rate base.
The fastest way that you can increase your profitability is to raise your rate base. Each ad page goes up in price and you become a more desirable publication to advertisers who want to reach your demographic.
So, the choice seemed to lie between the modest incomes coming in from subscribers versus the large potential from advertising. One industry response was to drop subscription rates and sell subscriptions dirt-cheap in order to drive up the rate base. Those publications that did this brought down the overall market sense of what a subscription should cost. Soon almost everyone was dumping subscription revenue to generate higher ad revenue. And it worked. With a cost.
Selling subscriptions cheap meant that consumers were buying them casually and without much loyalty. The readership was becoming diluted and publications had to appeal to broader audiences to keep the rate bases up. Who cared? Ad money seemed to be everywhere. Magazines were launching like sailboats at a regatta.
Then the party ended, suddenly and hard. The tech bubble burst.
In 2001, at the height of the tech bubble, Steve Chase at AOL bluffed his way into buying Time Warner with AOL stock in what would become the single largest erasure of corporate wealth to that date in history. On the morning that the merger announcement was made, Time Warner stock peaked at well over $100 a share. Long time staffers who had been paid bonuses with company stock deposited into their 401K accounts were millionaires on paper. But they couldn't sell the stock. By the time the merger went through a few months later, the tech bubble had burst. The deal looked bad before it was even finished. Within a year AOL Time Warner stock bottomed out at just over $8 per share.
On the ride down, all across the industry the pressure was on to continue to generate increased revenue. Since subscription rates had already been slashed, raising them wasn't much of an option. Newsstand sales are what they are. Not a great source for growth. So again, ad sales are the place to find it. But ad dollars were harder to get. Much harder.
Now the pressure seemed to increase on the content side of things. Publications were handed financial growth targets and told that if they missed them, heads would roll. When you are looking at quarterly targets, you have only a few months to get results. You have to act fast and in the short term.
Subtle pressure on the content side of the publishing world resulted in content catered to attract advertising--not content catered to the consumer. The magazines were generally seeing the consumer as a means to an ad sale, not as a customer. If you were heading up a magazine at a large company, kudos at the corporate retreats came from being profitable, not from experimenting with amazing content and satisfied consumers.
Recent memories of the dot com craze kept up hopes for an economic resurgence that might restore the ad driven logic that now dominated the industry. And soon the housing boom started to take over where the tech craze left off.
As this was happening, the Internet was growing rapidly too, pulling advertisers away from the publications and pushing publications online into an environment where the logic said that content should be free to the user and all revenue should be from advertising.
There were some magazines who resisted the pressure to dilute their subscriber base in pursuit of ad profits. And they will survive this intact. The two at the top of the list are People Magazine and The Economist. Not coincidentally, they are the two most expensive consumer magazine subscriptions available. They also have some of the most passionately devoted readers and they spend a lot of money and energy to know their readers and to deliver exactly what they want. People is also the most profitable publication in history.
What is being worked through in this current crisis is a basic orientation towards content. Is content a kind of bait, to lure consumers to the publication in order to make ad sales? Or is content a marketable product in its own right, worth the price and worth charging for? The first view of content is dying a very painful death. And with it a lot of economic blood is being and will be shed. The second view of content is very boring and old, but it is the future of the industry--again.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
How Deep is the Dive?
Consider the following few paragraphs from yesterday's breaking news email bulletins from The Wall Street Journal.
Keep in mind that the Fed is so adverse to delivering bad news that it delayed announcing that we were in a recession until a full year after it had started. And, in case you missed it, the Fed's prediction for the worst unemployment levels for 2009 were hit in January, forcing them to revise and downgrade their forecast.
In other words, the worst unemployment numbers that the Fed would predict for this year have already been surpassed and we are not even two months in.
What does this mean? If there is not a clear intrinsic value attached to your publication, one that readers are themselves willing to pay for, you can't survive. Ad dollars are going away. Period.
The only good news here is that we the consumers win because publications--magazines and newspapers--are going to be forced to deal directly with us personally as customers and clients, rather than with us as a means to charge for advertising. We win in the long term because we get what we want to read and see. Not what looks good next to the advertising.
The demand for news, culture, entertainment, opinion, is as strong or stronger than ever. It is the business model for delivering them that is fooked.
February 18, 2009
WSJ NEWS ALERT: Fed Sharply Downgrades Economic Projections
Citing a "continued sharp contraction in real economic activity," the Federal Open Market Committee on Wednesday said it is expecting GDP to contract by up to 1.3% in 2009, a larger drop than it had forecast in October.
The Fed's latest projections also show the FOMC expects unemployment this year could rise as high as 8.8%, higher than its October projection of 7.1% to 7.6%. January's unemployment rate hit 7.6%, according to the Labor Department.
Separately, the Fed said in the minutes from its meeting Jan. 27 and 28 that members saw no indication that the housing sector was beginning to stabilize.
WSJ NEWS ALERT: Housing Starts Tumbled in January
Home construction fell a seventh straight month during January and a sign of future building tumbled as high inventories and the recession sent builders into further retreat. Housing starts decreased 16.8% to a seasonally adjusted 466,000 annual rate compared to the prior month, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, much worse than Wall Street expected. Year over year, housing starts were 56.2% below the pace of construction in January 2008.
Keep in mind that the Fed is so adverse to delivering bad news that it delayed announcing that we were in a recession until a full year after it had started. And, in case you missed it, the Fed's prediction for the worst unemployment levels for 2009 were hit in January, forcing them to revise and downgrade their forecast.
In other words, the worst unemployment numbers that the Fed would predict for this year have already been surpassed and we are not even two months in.
What does this mean? If there is not a clear intrinsic value attached to your publication, one that readers are themselves willing to pay for, you can't survive. Ad dollars are going away. Period.
The only good news here is that we the consumers win because publications--magazines and newspapers--are going to be forced to deal directly with us personally as customers and clients, rather than with us as a means to charge for advertising. We win in the long term because we get what we want to read and see. Not what looks good next to the advertising.
The demand for news, culture, entertainment, opinion, is as strong or stronger than ever. It is the business model for delivering them that is fooked.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Prediction #2: Local Newspapers
Last month I made 10 predictions for the future of publishing in 2009. Periodically I will post follow up information on how I am doing.
In prediction #2 I said that in 2009, half of all local newspapers will go out of business. The other half will be swept up into conglomerate organizations modeled after Clear Channel, the ubiquitous radio station programming company.
Clear Channel buys up local radio stations in small markets and then operates them remotely. The content is programmed from afar and there is minimal staff kept on within the local markets. This gives Clear Channel an enormous amount of power within small markets because they frequently control the main radio stations and can orchestrate their content through smaller markets all across the country. Imagine that newspapers start to take on this same model.
Editor & Publisher is now reporting that five Northeast newspapers have formed a consortium where they will share content. They are working out a system where they will swap coverage of news, sharing it electronically with each other on a daily basis. The newspapers are: The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.; The Record of Hackensack, N.J.; the Times Union in Albany, N.Y.; The Buffalo (N.Y.) News; and the Daily News of New York. The obvious next step, once this seems to be working, is to start eliminating redundancies within the five papers.
If this conglomerate works many other papers will be looking to follow suit. If AP, Reuters and other big reporting agencies can spread their stories across the media spectrum, then why can't the distributors, the papers themselves, team up to do the same?
In prediction #2 I said that in 2009, half of all local newspapers will go out of business. The other half will be swept up into conglomerate organizations modeled after Clear Channel, the ubiquitous radio station programming company.
Clear Channel buys up local radio stations in small markets and then operates them remotely. The content is programmed from afar and there is minimal staff kept on within the local markets. This gives Clear Channel an enormous amount of power within small markets because they frequently control the main radio stations and can orchestrate their content through smaller markets all across the country. Imagine that newspapers start to take on this same model.
Editor & Publisher is now reporting that five Northeast newspapers have formed a consortium where they will share content. They are working out a system where they will swap coverage of news, sharing it electronically with each other on a daily basis. The newspapers are: The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.; The Record of Hackensack, N.J.; the Times Union in Albany, N.Y.; The Buffalo (N.Y.) News; and the Daily News of New York. The obvious next step, once this seems to be working, is to start eliminating redundancies within the five papers.
If this conglomerate works many other papers will be looking to follow suit. If AP, Reuters and other big reporting agencies can spread their stories across the media spectrum, then why can't the distributors, the papers themselves, team up to do the same?
Friday, February 13, 2009
Jon Stewart Schools Cable Journalism
Let’s be clear: Jon Stewart is best interviewer on television, because he is the toughest, the smartest, and the best informed in the business.That is the real lesson of his week-long assault on CNBC, Rick Santelli, and Jim Cramer, which culminated in last night’s extraordinary evisceration of the Mad Money man.
-Charles Kaiser on CJR
Before his career in television, Cramer was a hedge fund manager. Last night Stewart played clips from an untelevised 2005 interview with Cramer in which he clearly describes how to manipulate the markets, bending or breaking SEC regulations to make short term money. Most telling is a segment where Cramer describes how to artificially depress Apple stock, presumably buy it, and then profit from the subsequent bump. Which is illegal. Big time.
Then there is this in the third segment, where Stewart is talking about the existence of two markets, one in which the public is encouraged to invest for the long term and the other in which huge piles of cash in the back rooms of investment companies are moved around in high risk deals making a ton of profit at the expense of the public investor:
Stewart: These guys were on a Sherman's March through their companies, financed by our 401k's, and all the incentives at their companies were for short term profit, and they burned the fucking house down with our money and walked away rich as hell, and you guys knew that was going on...Pundits today are telling Stewart to go back to comedy. That's because he just schooled them in how an interview gets done. Everyone is all over this story, but there has hardly been a single useful review of the interview yet. Even the Times blew the coverage with "Wow, comedian does serious interview" coverage but with little in depth examination of what Stewart said. If you haven't already, watch the unedited interview for yourself. It isn't hard to see why Stewart keeps winning journalism awards.
What is the responsibility of the people who cover Wall Street? Who are you responsible to? The people with the 401k's and the pensions, and the general public, or the Wall Street traders? And by the way, this casts aspersion on all of Wall Street when that's unfair as well. The majority of those guys are working their asses off. They are really bright guys. I know a lot of them. They are just trying to do the right thing. And they are getting fucked in this too.
Cramer: True.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Prediction #3: The Future of Magazines
Newsweek is attempting to reinvent itself and its business model in an effort to charge more for its services and increase its reader generated income. NY Times article here. This is a good plan. At least it is as good as a plan can be in these times. Through the redesign, Newsweek will work to emphasize photography, also a good strategy. Playing to the strengths of the medium.
In the end, magazines are going to have to provide a product that is compelling enough to the reader that they will pay fair value for it. And that value has to be enough to cover its production. This is a step in that direction, and I applaud Newsweek for going for it. What we can hope to see is stronger, more targeted titles with higher subscription and newsstand prices. How high? I dunno. The market frequently pays $15-20 for 80 page over-sized matte finished high end photo magazines. Imagine if they were produced by an organization as strong as Newsweek.
In other news, Time Inc reports 20% drop in advertising revenue. Ouch. How many magazines can survive that, and for how long? Time Inc is the one stop shopping source for magazine advertising. If they are hurting that bad, how bad must it be getting for competitors? AdAge article here.
In the end, magazines are going to have to provide a product that is compelling enough to the reader that they will pay fair value for it. And that value has to be enough to cover its production. This is a step in that direction, and I applaud Newsweek for going for it. What we can hope to see is stronger, more targeted titles with higher subscription and newsstand prices. How high? I dunno. The market frequently pays $15-20 for 80 page over-sized matte finished high end photo magazines. Imagine if they were produced by an organization as strong as Newsweek.
In other news, Time Inc reports 20% drop in advertising revenue. Ouch. How many magazines can survive that, and for how long? Time Inc is the one stop shopping source for magazine advertising. If they are hurting that bad, how bad must it be getting for competitors? AdAge article here.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Sustainability Redux
“Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we’re living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets...”
This morning Thomas Friedman in the New York Times starts to explore the idea that the economy cannot outstrip the environment and that the future of the economy might just be found in what is good for the future of the environment. You can read more about that here and here.
One of the challenges for us as photographers is in finding ways to use a medium that is so immediate and local to depict global networks and systems. We have mastered the decisive moment, which is very limited in space and time. The subjects of the economy and the environment require entirely different strategies, where success is measured over decades and/or in abstract numbers. Much of the picture is found in the interstices between the photographs, or outside the frame entirely.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Dear Tropicana
Dear Tropicana,
I was sad to hear about the failure of your recent 35 million dollar packaging redesign. Kudos for you for recognizing it and going back to your old brand immediately. It takes a lot of guts to walk away from a 35 million dollar mistake.
You see, while you may think that you own your brand, it really belongs to those people who by the millions buy and use your products on a daily basis. Your juice containers sit on tables all across America and have become colorful punctuation marks in countless kitchens and dining rooms. The constant presence of your products has become a part of our lives. It seems to me that you didn't discuss it with us when you decided to redesign the orange juice container.
Things have changed recently in the advertising/branding world. Consumers now have the power in these things. It is a two-way conversation between companies and their customers. Why not recruit the real owners of your brand?
There is another way to approach this. It is fully transparent and virtually guarantees success. Give me a call. I'm sure that for a fraction of 35 million we can work something out.
Best regards,
Aric Mayer
I was sad to hear about the failure of your recent 35 million dollar packaging redesign. Kudos for you for recognizing it and going back to your old brand immediately. It takes a lot of guts to walk away from a 35 million dollar mistake.
You see, while you may think that you own your brand, it really belongs to those people who by the millions buy and use your products on a daily basis. Your juice containers sit on tables all across America and have become colorful punctuation marks in countless kitchens and dining rooms. The constant presence of your products has become a part of our lives. It seems to me that you didn't discuss it with us when you decided to redesign the orange juice container.
Things have changed recently in the advertising/branding world. Consumers now have the power in these things. It is a two-way conversation between companies and their customers. Why not recruit the real owners of your brand?
There is another way to approach this. It is fully transparent and virtually guarantees success. Give me a call. I'm sure that for a fraction of 35 million we can work something out.
Best regards,
Aric Mayer
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