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Chrysler’s New Car Launch Spells Doom For Newspapers

Much has been written and said about how much Craigslist is contributing to the demise of the newspaper business. While Craigslist is single-handedly killing the print classifieds business, there are other storm clouds brewing that are just as worrisome for newspapers.

Car makers launching new models are increasingly putting more and more of their spend into digital platforms and newspapers are getting less and less. So it’s not just the auto classifieds that are disappearing, but the big newspaper display ads to introduce new models are becoming endangered species…

Chrysler is about to embark on a major launch campaign for a car called the Dodge Journey, but for the newspaper business they might as well nickname the car Dodge Doom. The upcoming advertising campaign serves as a microcosm on several fronts. It illustrates both why newspapers are seeing a drastic cut in revenues, and also why internet advertising revenues will continue to grow despite a weak economy.Chrysler is spending $35 million to launch the Dodge Journey which is the same amount they spent last year when they launched the Dodge Nitro. The big difference is not in the total ad spend, it’s where the money is going or not going. Two years ago, Chrysler allocated 5% of their launch budget to online/interactive media. This year, that number is 29% which marks the single largest online ad spend for Chrysler to date.

The reason the company likes online is that it gets so much direct feedback from web consumers — it says it has already made 400 changes to 2008 and 2009 models based on customer web feedback.

Television is still getting the most allocation at 54%, followed by 29% for online, 9% for print and 4% for radio. Of the 9% for print, the majority of it is going to magazines, not newspapers. Now you can begin to understand the gravity of the situation for the newspaper business. For a major automaker to spend $35 million to bring mass awareness to a new product and then subsequently choose (for the most part) to do it without targeting newspaper readers, is a major shift.

And let’s not forget Porsche is promoting its Boxster and Cayman sports cars this month. The campaign is using magazine ads, online banners, and micro sites. The company says that going into 2009 interactive and magazines will continue to be its focus. “Online is a big part of Porsche going forward,” said Marshall Ross, the chief creative officer of the Cramer-Krasselt agency developing the campaign. “If we can bring that personality online in a compelling way, you will see a lot more of it.”

Full article: Chrysler Is Spending Some $35 Million To Launch Its 2009 Dodge Journey Crossover Auto, But If Newspapers Are Lucky They May See Around $1 million Of That Spend

Internet as a video-centric medium

When Walt Mossberg speaks or writes, a lot of people listen and read. So when Walt Mossberg says the internet is fast transforming from a text-centric medium to a video-centric medium, it carries some serious weight and echoes genuine consumer behavior. Walt was recently asked to speak about the rise of online video at a Beet.tv power event at the Embassy of Finland in Washington, DC and had some strong opinions (no surprise there) about the current state of video delivery on the web, and where it is headed. To put the emergence of video in some perspective, chew on this – in December 2007 there were more videos streamed online than searches performed. Yes, you read that correctly. Video overtook search in December ’07 in U.S. volume. While revenues derived from online video are paltry today in comparison to search revenues, many see the writing on the wall – video advertising will eventually usurp television advertising and could overtake search advertising at some point as well.

Eisner predicted that within five years the internet will be as important content-wise as cable or satellite – Michael Eisner; ‘The Time Is Right’; Internet Content To Equal TV In 5 Years

Walt goes on to suggest that the broadcast business ie, television networks, Hollywood studios etc. are where the newspaper and magazine industry were 5 years ago. In other words, offline video creators, producers and distributors need to get serious about web video or watch their influence and revenues erode at an accelerated pace going forward.

Internet real estate report

VeriSign recently released their Domain Name Industry Brief and the annual numbers continue to show a growing appetite for new domain name registrations (internet real estate).

The Domain Name Industry closed 2007 with more than 153 million domain name registrations worldwide across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs), an increase of nearly 33 million domain name registrations since the close of 2006.

153 million is an astronomical figure no matter how you look at it. The .com TLD is still without doubt the ‘de facto’ extension on the web with approx 70 million registered names. Good luck finding a new .com name that isn’t totally obscure, mangled or long-winded. The aftermarket for .com’s should continue to experience torrid growth and higher valuations with scarcity becoming an ongoing and growing problem.Localization is also on the rise as country-code TLDs are becoming more and more popular. Part of this localization trend is connected to the scarcity of .com’s ie, 1 million .ca’s vs. 70 million .com’s – this means you are almost certainly going to find better .ca options for a new registration. In addition, both companies and individuals are wanting to brand themselves with a name that resonates within their own country. Germany (.de), China (.cn) and the UK (.co.uk) are currently the 3 largest ccTLDs on the web.

2007 ended with a total base of just over 58 million ccTLD domain name registrations. The ccTLDs as a whole experienced 33 percent growth year over year.

It should be noted that total registered .ca domain names are expected to double over the next 3-4 years (900K today to 1.8M by 2011-12).    

TED 1, YouTube 0 – Robin Williams rescues conference

Imagine you are organizing a conference and in the middle of a panel discussion there is a technical glitch that stops the proceedings. Stressful, to say the least. Now imagine if that panel included the likes of Sergey Brin from Google, Queen Noor of Jordan, Watergate-buster Carl Bernstein, Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert and Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda, and furthermore, imagine if the entire audience was jammed with people just as digerati and influential as the aforementioned panelists. Yikes!

That’s exactly what happened last night at the annual TED Conference in Monterey California. In the middle of that panel discussion which was being recorded by the BBC, a technical glitch reared its ugly head and stopped the panel in its tracks. Some say silence is golden, but in the case of a conference with a live audience – it is deadly. But then something crazy happened. Like a dream come true for the conference organizers, a famous comedian by the name of Robin Williams stands up from the audience crowd and starts doing an improv comedy act. The audience is in stitches of laughter for 10 minutes while the organizers work out their ‘issue’. Technical glitch? What technical glitch?As crazy as this story sounds, I think this aspect of the story is even crazier. Where is the video clip evidence of this? I know the TED Conference is somewhat secretive, but c’mon! An audience full of technology leaders and tech-savvy people with their multimedia handsets and iPhones and not one, I repeat, not one video clip of this has been uploaded to YouTube. Shocking!!

TED 1, YouTube 0

Dumb pipes, smart pipes

As mobile devices like the iPhone gain in prominence and usage, one has to wonder if the telecom company’s worst nightmare is indeed coming to fruition. Will flat-rate data plans and sexy mobile computing interfaces turn telecom carriers into a bunch of dumb data pipes? While I can understand on a very ‘old skool’ business level the fear of losing grip over their customers mobile user experience – was this not inevitable? Which is precisely why the iPhone is seen as both a boon and a boondoggle for cellular carriers.

On the one hand it’s a boon because better devices will lure new customers and speed adoption of mobile data consumption. On the other, it is a boondoggle because without the constraints of a limited/controlled experience the customer no longer needs to be shackled to the paltry content offerings and archaic tools the carriers want to force-feed to their customers handsets.

Q: What does this ultimately mean for telecom companies?
A: Extend your brand – acquire content companies / destination brands.

Scott McNealy, former Sun CEO (now Chairman) appears to agree.

Telecommunication companies need to go beyond just providing bandwidth and look into acquiring Internet destination sites … I think the telcos have to make sure they don’t get marginalized to being just bit providers and bandwidth providers … There will be some very interesting challenges of who owns the subscriber and who owns the financial and advertising rights to those individuals. … Stay tuned, the landscape’s going to change enormously..

via network world

TechCanuck Podcast: Episode 16

* I’m sooo late cross-posting this here. My bad. This podcast episode was released on dailypixel.ca on Jan. 31 – if you didn’t know already 😉845621-media_httpwwwdailypixelcaimagestechcanucklogojpg_gaAxmsdJqICuAfj
The 16th episode in the TechCanuck Podcast series has been released. Canadian tech geeks David Peralty and James Cogan discuss and debate a wide range of digital talking points. See below for a brief description of what was covered in this episode.

TechCanuck Podcast Series – Episode 16

Direct MP3 Download (right-click for download to desktop)
Recorded Date: January 31, 2008
Runtime: 25 minutes, 44 seconds
Filesize: 8.80 megabytes

Links

Talking Points
a) Automattic has been awfully busy of late. Closing a $29.5M round of funding and now there’s news of Prologue – a Twitter-like publishing service. Let’s discuss this latest flurry of news, and of course – where is this ultimately going for Automattic?
b) Let’s talk about the ‘R’ word. It seems the United States is plunging fast and furious into a deep recession. What does this mean for online publishers, bloggers and advertising in general? Will the recession have a material impact on the pocketbooks of those who rely on internet advertising to pay their bills?
c) Macworld has come and gone and we’re left with the MacBook Air. Is it just Hot Air or is there substance behind the world’s thinnest laptop computer?d) Closing thoughts.
Music Credits
Fade In: Zombie
Fade Out: Tycho Music

Vanity license plates and domain names – comparable?

How is this for a headline?“If The Number ‘5’ License Plate is Worth $6.8 Million, What Is Your Domain Name Worth?”Is it crazy to compare the recent auction frenzy for vanity license plates to the burgeoning domain name aftermarket? According to Traverse Legal, the answer is ‘yes’. I don’t totally ‘get’ the value in vanity plates especially when they are suggesting that a numbered ‘1’ vanity plate would potentially fetch more than ‘sex.com’ sold for. When you compare the potential impressions and reach on a ‘sex.com’ domain name with that of a localized license plate, one has to wonder how these two entities could possibly share a common value? An eye-catching story nonetheless.

Domain names and license plates share some common characteristics. Both allow only one person to own a particular word or number. The supply of good words, vanity words and generic words is finite. Demand for those strong generic or descriptive words is high. Where does supply meet demand on the price curve? Domainers can learn from what is happening in a similar market for – of all things – vanity license plates.The number “5” license plate sold for $6.8 million dollars in Saudi Arabia and another 300 vanity plates sold for another $56 million at last week’s auction. It is estimated that the number “1” will be auctioned next month for up to $20 million dollars.

Can you zig when everyone else zags?

I love hearing about people or companies who are not afraid to zig when everyone else or the market is zagging. Independent thinking, especially in large corporations, is often valued or encouraged until it actually needs to be put into action. At which time, the power hierarchy and the ‘save my ass’ mentality usually prevents the independent thinkers from ruling the day. A ‘follow the herd’ strategy is often the inevitable end result.Enter Goldman Sachs and an interesting story published today on Bloomberg. When just about every major financial services company in the U.S. is getting killed by the subprime mortgage crash, Goldman Sachs has singularly made billions.

When almost the entire market was taking a ‘long’ position on subprime mortgages, Goldman Sachs stood alone and ‘shorted’ it. It’s a fascinating story filled with no shortage of intrigue and conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, here’s a rare example of a company that wasn’t afraid to plot its own course despite everyone around them moving in one clear direction.

What’s odd about the subprime crash is Goldman Sachs Group Inc. A single firm took a position contrary to the rest of Wall Street. Giant Wall Street firms are designed for many things, but not, typically, to express highly idiosyncratic views in the market.By the end of 2006, the people creating and selling subprime mortgages and other so-called CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), had put Goldman Sachs in exactly the same position as every other Wall Street firm. Left to their own devices, traders in subprime-mortgage bonds would have sunk Goldman just as they sank Merrill Lynch, Citigroup Inc., Bear Stearns Cos. and every other major Wall Street firm.

Enter two smart guys who trade Goldman’s proprietary books to argue to the CEO and chief financial officer that the subprime market feels soft and that Goldman should short it. This they do, in such massive quantities that they more than offset the long positions in subprime held throughout the rest of the firm, leaving Goldman short the subprime market and in a position to make billions when it crashes. End of story.And it’s a good story. But consider what it implies. Their own traders and salespeople in subprime mortgages and related securities had put Goldman in exactly the same position as every other Wall Street firm: long subprime mortgages. The only difference between Goldman and everyone else was that Goldman had, in effect, an entirely separate enterprise, sitting on top of the firm, with the power to reverse the judgment of its own supposed experts in various markets. They were able to do this, apparently, without ever saying a word about it to their own traders. Instead of telling the fools trading subprime mortgages that they are wrong, and that they should unwind their positions, they simply offset their trades.

source: Bloomberg  

TechCanuck Podcast: Episode 15

845617-media_httpwwwdailypixelcaimagestechcanucklogojpg_hFztdbzJnCksbhCThe 15th episode in the TechCanuck Podcast series has been released. Canadian tech geeks David Peralty and James Cogan discuss and debate a wide range of digital talking points. See below for a brief description of what was covered in this episode.

TechCanuck Podcast Series – Episode 15

Link: Direct MP3 Download (right-click for download to desktop)
Recorded Date: January 3, 2008
Runtime: 28 minutes, 30 seconds
Filesize: 9.79 megabytes
Talking Points
a) Facebook terminates Robert Scoble’s account and it’s World War III in the blogosphere. Is Facebook’s desire to keep your data on Facebook justified, reasonable, necessary or is it not playing fair in the game of Web 2.0 where data is free-flowing and off-site mashups are the norm?
b) The blogosphere is all atwitter over Twitter’s business model or lack of one. Does it have one? Does Twitter need one right now?
c) New Year’s predictions – Internet advertising slowdown? Blogging jumped the shark? Google a content producer? We discuss.
d) Closing thoughts.
Music Credits
Fade In: Zombie
Fade Out: Tycho Musiccross-posted from dailypixel.ca