Andrew Douglas B2B journalist, turned PR man, specializing in new media.

Web can’t make emotional connection for marketers

I had a chat with someone over the weekend who works for a major non-profit organization — one that spends a lot of money on marketing each year.

They use a number of marketing channels, including TV, print, web, celebrity endorsements and door-to-door sales. The best return on investment comes from door-to-door sales. They’re salary based, not commission, although the pavement pounders do have sales targets to keep them motivated. Celebrity endorsements come in a close second to door-to-door.

My friend said that the marketing department decided to cut a big chunk of their TV spend recently. That’s because the web numbers were so strong and they felt online could pick up the slack. Of course, it’s much easier to judge the returns from the web and much harder to pinpoint how much is generated by TV.

But when the TV spend fell, so did the web numbers. He felt that the web is excellent at converting people from “shoppers” into “buyers” but that it’s much harder to make an emotional connection with someone on the web. It looks like TV and the web were working hand in hand, with TV being the conduit to the web. Without TV driving people to the web site, revenue dried up.

But really, how viable is TV anyway? First off, the TV audience is so fragmented. Secondly, at least in my household, we never watch live TV anymore. We even wait 45 minutes before joining Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday nights. By the end of the third period we’ve usually caught up to live TV by skipping all the commercial breaks using our digital video recorder.

Life is getting complicated for marketers who wish to make an emotional connection between consumers and their brand. TV might not cut it anymore but the web and its small-screen platform that encourages people’s short attention span ain’t workin’ either. Where do you find a mass audience these days?

These are fascinating times.

Netbooks offer powerful portability

The desktop is the lumbering, 360-pound offensive lineman. It's strong but overkill for most jobs outside of the most graphic or video-heavy assignments.

The mobile is the 5'10" quarterback trying to break into the NFL. It's agile and compact but just too small to be a realistic workhorse in all situations. It's good for reading tweets and other short blasts of information on the fly but not a good tool for consuming longer updates.

The laptop is the overpaid and aging wide receiver. It's pricey, overweight and doesn't really fit anywhere.

The netbook is the fresh, just-drafted superstar. It could change the franchise for the next 10 years.

Cheap, powerful mobile computing in a tight space -- like between your belly and the steering wheel or on an airplane's meal table -- has arrived. And with some off-the-shelf accessories you can use the same computer for your regular office computer.

Mary's HP netbook

Mary Feldskov is doing some project work for us in the Guelph office of McCormick. Yesterday she parked herself at her desk, pulled her teeny tiny HP computer out of her purse and started to work. It weighs 3 pounds -- about the size and weight of a hardcover book.

At 10 inches the screen is small compared to a desktop or laptop but giant compared to a mobile. Most of the major manufacturers sell a netbook souped up with all the gadgets including webcam, wifi and HD-quality screen. Some have regular-sized keyboards but others are only 90% of a regular keyboard. As Peter Gredig, content manager at Farms.com, pointed out to me the other day, buy a wireless USB stick and for $30 a month you can get the Internet basically anywhere.

They're pretty good under the hood. Here are the stats, as compared to a standard HP laptop on sale at Staples.

Sure some things are missing -- like a CD drive -- and the netbooks don't have the power of a laptop. But most of us don't use the full capability of our computers anyway.

That's my laptop on the left, but it shows how I work off two screens and a normal keyboard and mouse at the office. You could do the same thing with a netbook.

For a few bucks you can buy some cords to work off a large screen, mouse and keyboard when you're back at the office.

I've seen the future and it is good.

Anti atrazine goes viral

As they say in hockey just before the gloves come off... It is ON!

The fight to prove the safety of cosmetic pesticides is virtually lost. And the regulatory, science-backed system that approved all those products to begin with has been called into question. In Ontario, where I live, the provincial government has instituted a ban on cosmetic pesticides, basically thumbing its nose at the feds who regulate -- and have approved -- their use.

Now the guns have been turned on agriculture. I hope it's a fair fight.

The Environmental Protection Agency is taking a close look at atrazine, one of the oldest and most effective chemicals used in conventional agriculture. This news came across my desk in an article by Patrick Gallagher in the October 20, 2009 issue of the Ontario Farmer.

During the new evaluation the EPA said it would consider the potential for atrazine to cause cancer as well as non-cancer health effects. The agency will review a number of new studies that have been done since 2003 that indicate that atrazine may have some potential for causing birth defects, low birth weights and premature births.

I needn't say the obvious -- that only a fool would support the use of a chemical if it was known to cause cancer when used properly. If atrazine is proven by unbiased scientists to be deadly then of course it must be pulled from the marketplace.

But my fear is that there will be plenty of spin to future pesticide research and overwhelming pressure to come up with damning evidence that the risk of pesticides far outweighs any benefit. The pressure may come not only from the pro organic-agriculture front but also from anti-capitalism wing nuts.

The debate is already all over Twitter. Check out these tweets I pulled off TweetDeck just by searching on the word "pesticide" the other evening. They came within 19 minutes of each other:

Pesticides Exposure Linked to Suicidal Thoughts http://digg.com/u1Esnd

Pesticides Destroying 60 Percent of Honeybees http://bit.ly/VvnE7

Pesticide industry cheers EPA testing roll-back http://is.gd/4wAc7 #Pesticides

40% of US children have dangerous OP pesticides exposure http://is.gd/4wAST #Pesticides

Organizations that represent the industry better get out there fast. The debate is happening now. Farmers, consumers, communications people like me -- we all want a balanced discussion. That will take arming us all with facts.

And the key messages can no longer rely on the hackneyed "our world-leading, super-safe regulatory system will protect the population..." That's not enough. Look at how many people aren't getting an H1N1 flu shot this season because they distrust the vaccine -- a government tested, approved and promoted shot meant to save the population from sickness.

This isn't the time for more dry fact sheets that only the choir will ever read. Get your farmer face on and defend yourself. This debate is happening in the trenches. It's time to get dirty.

Pure profit: $830,000 in two weeks selling seed potatoes

Warning: Real potato farmers should stop reading here. This might ruin your week.

A San Francisco-based company just cleared $830,000 US in two weeks by selling seed potatoes. The potatoes are virtual but the money is very, very real.

Zynga is a developer of apps for Facebook and the iPhone. One of their biggest hits is... get this... a game about farming. Farmville lets users own and manage a virtual farm. Apparently it's very addictive. At least, the 20 million users who are currently playing the game must think so.

A screen capture of the Farmville game on Facebook

The game is free to play. The way the company makes money is through micropayments. People can spend real dollars buying tractors and things like seed, such as this special new potato that was released. The micropayments are small and allow players to improve their farms without having to earn the extras through normal play. This from a game strategy website:

For people who don't want to waste time waiting for the crop to grow, farm coins can be purchased with real-world cash using a PayPal account or credit card. The cost is currently 7,500 coins or 25 farm cash for $5; 15,800 coins or 55 farm cash for $10; 33,300 coins or 115 farm cash for $20; or 70,600 coins or 240 farm cash for $40. Players can also earn free farm cash or coins by taking part in special offers or questionnaires.

I've blogged about micropayments before. I've already purchased apps for my BlackBerry, such as the Nat Decants app that allows me to go to a wine store, choose a wine, and find recipes to match. That application cost me $3.

An editor of a major trade newspaper was telling me that micropayments could be the future of journalism. It's not hard to imagine a tiny Visa and MasterCard icon beside the headline on a publication's website. The only way to read the whole story would be to click one of the icons and have 25 cents charged to your card. Log-in once in the morning and stayed logged in, securely, all day.

Sure 25 cents ain't much. But multiply that by 100 readers. That's a day's wage right there.

Okay potato farmer. Unplug your ears. And if you were listening after all, just remember that all these virtual farm game players probably eat a lot of REAL french fries.

Refreshing farm business story on CBC’s The House

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's show on national politics, The House, is not the place I expected to hear a balanced and informative farm business story. But that's what we got on Saturday morning. The only downside is that they buried the lead.

The CBC is best at "retweeting" news releases from the left-leaning National Farmers Union, especially with stories emanating from the mother ship in downtown Toronto. Generally those stories bemoan the loss of the family farm and sell hard on organic agriculture. They don't usually cover agriculture from a business perspective.

The first half of the story focused on the boogeyman that is foreign ownership of farmland even though, "there are only a few examples of foreign investor ownership of Canadian farmland, mostly in the West and Quebec." The one example they gave is Hancock Agricultural Investments Group of Boston, owned by Canadian insurance giant Manulife, that paid $60,000 per acre of producing land when it bought a cranberry farm in Quebec's Eastern Townships.

The story piqued my interest particularly when it turned to interest rates and what their inevitable rise will do to agricultural in Canada.

And then, the bomb dropped.

It came during an interview with George Brinkman, the oft-quoted ag economist from the University of Guelph. "There is a strong parallel to the conditions in agriculture and the conditions in the US housing market just prior to the crash," he said.

Now THAT'S a quote.

Brinkman says that land prices are extremely high as compared to the value of the agriculture production.

High land prices and low incomes. Sound familiar? Brinkman says Canadian farmers invest four times as much capital per dollar earned as compared to US farmers. "There is a strong parallel to the conditions in agriculture and the conditions in the United States housing market just prior to the crash. The numbers have a lot of similarities. And the risk then is that we could have a serious correction in land values. As that occurs it works it's way through the whole agricultural sector."

His advice to farmers: Reduce debt load now, before interest rates climb.

My advice to the CBC: Keep writing farm business stories. It's a fascinating industry full of big business and family stories. And it's only going to get more interesting as the economy continues to evolve. You did a nice job on this one, even though you buried the lead a little. Keep it up.

BusinessWeek sold for a pittance

The print side of BusinessWeek magazine was sold for scrap. It's the content Bloomberg bought.

BusinessWeek, one of the premier business magazines in North America, was sold today for between $2-million and $5-million (U.S.). McGraw-Hill unloaded the magazine, with it's 912,000 subscribers, to Bloomberg after searching for a buyer since July. A major slump in advertising revenue was blamed on the magazine's poor performance as of late.

Let's set aside the shocking news that an 80-year-old publication with 400 employees and a paid circ of just under a million sold for so little. I still remember one of the finest editors I've worked with, Dave Wreford, saying BusinessWeek was a must-read.

Instead, let's focus on this paragraph clipped from the Globe and Mail story announcing the news:

The magazine will help Bloomberg add analytical content to its current offerings, which focus on rapid news reporting and giving financial professionals information through roughly 300,000 electronic terminals, Bloomberg president Daniel Doctor off said in a statement yesterday.

That says to me that Bloomberg bought the content, not the business model. Heck, they don't even seem interested in the publication's website. No, Bloomberg isn't buying a business on the cheap, banking on unloading it at a profit once the economy heats up. All they want is the content.

Now consider this. Twitter, a free application with no discernible way to generate revenue, is valued at $1 billion. And that's despite the fact that cracks are starting to appear in the company:

Interestingly, Twitter as a service is starting to stagnate. The user growth, according to the author, has plateaued at around 8 million new users per month. There are a decent percentage, 14%, who don't have any followers, and three quarters of Twitter users have fewer than 10 followers.

I'm not sure what the ramifications are for other media, especially those near and dear to my heart -- those in business-to-business publishing. Just hear this: Content is king, and queen, and knight, and court jester. It's everything.

And the world is changing... fast.

Think mobile

My former editor at Country Guide, Peter Gredig, now content editor at Farms.com, blasted me for my blog not being mobile friendly. He said he could barely read the small type on his BlackBerry. “Figure it out,” he said.

His message, that came to me as a direct tweet, sat in the part of my brain where I store seemingly impossible-to-solve tasks. They sit on the shelf and tend to grow.

My first response was to argue with him – buy yourself a better pair of glasses, I thought. Then I told him he’s given me an impossible challenge. And then I did what I often do when faced with a tough problem – I turned to Google.

It turns out that it was a simple fix. Mippin, a software development company, offers a free plugin to Wordpress. Visit my blog from your BlackBerry or iPhone now and Wordpress recognizes that you’re on a mobile phone and completely changes the layout to optimize my blog for your tiny screen. Try it out.

I've learned two things:

1. Open-source software is powerful and effective. I can't believe how easy it was to make my blog mobile enabled. It was less than 20 minutes from my first search on Google to the problem being solved.

2. I need to start thinking mobile. I need to consider the mobile implications of everything web-related I do for my clients.

Nice hit by dairy farmers in major daily

A National Post reporter tried his hand milking a dairy cow in front of the snazzy, Daniel Libeskind-designed Royal Ontario Museum.

The Royal Ontario Museum

It was a solid PR hit and the Dairy Farmers of Ontario marketing team should get a good slap on the back.

They drove "seven or eight" (I'm not sure why the reporter found it hard to get an exact count) dairy cows down to Bloor Street in Toronto. They had the executive chef of the ROM and reporters try milking. What a great gimmick to draw attention to their campaign.

It turns out the reporter, Matthew Coutts, grew up on the Prairies and knows beef cattle well.

More importantly, he seems to have picked up the key message perfectly:

"It seems some frozen desserts have been tricking us into thinking we are eating ice cream when it's really made with imported oil. I feel violated."

Good copy, great picture, a hit worthy of the old portfolio... but darn, they may have missed the web opportunity. I went to the Dairy Farmers of Ontario website and didn't find anything about the campaign, even though Norma Winters of the DFO was the speaker at the event. To be fair, maybe it was a Dairy Farmers of Canada initiative, where the logo and link did appear on their homepage.

Not to take away from the PR job but in this new media world, where the lines between PR and marketing are really starting to blur, it's important that everybody in the shop is talking. Direct mail, web, advertising and PR has to work in sync.

I sure hope they grabbed some video for YouTube and are tweeting about their hit.

It’s not print vs. web. It’s good content vs. bad.

I tend to emphasize the medium over the message -- saying that the web is killing print. Maybe I'm wrong.

I spoke at the Canadian chapter of the Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow group, CanACT, at the University of Guelph last night. My topic was Twitter but another theme came to the fore -- that with the web tearing down all the barriers to entry in publishing, good content trumps everything.

I was thinking of my favourite "journalists" of course. People like Gary Vaynerchuk, with his 852,000 followers on Twitter, and Shaun Haney, the farmer/retailer in Alberta who is building community on the web outside of a traditional publishing model of subscriptions and ad sales.

We talked about how that is exciting for students wanting to build a personal brand and how passion on the web can go a long way. But I also shared how scary it is for traditional journalists. Suddenly, everyone can be a competitor.

But when I slipped into bed last night, my bed-time reading was an old-fashioned magazine, Maclean's. And it was great.

I just bought a subscription to the national newsweekly a couple of weeks ago. It's one of the few magazines that is actually growing in circulation. Others, like Time and Newsweek, are crumbling. I love Maclean's for it's snappy writing, great story choices and smart columnists.

This from Masthead online:

"If for nothing else, you gotta love Ken Whyte’s Maclean’s for its covers. Sometimes they’re sensationalistic, sometimes they’re surprising, sometimes they’re just plain silly. And usually—and most importantly—they sell really well. In 2004, the year before Whyte came on, the newsweekly was averaging weekly single copy sales of 8,874 for the July-December period; last year, the average was 13,5531, a figure that’s even more astounding when you consider that the cover price has steadily increased, from an average of $4.99 in 2006 to $6.33 last year."

And then there's The Economist. One of my bosses, Len Kahn, drops a copy of the venerable UK-based pub on my desk every week. I must admit I find it hard to tackle, no matter how much I want to impress my boss. But I make sure that it sits on the top of my inbox so everyone knows how smart I could be, if I only tried harder.

The Economist, with it's unfriendly layout and distinctive writing style, has been charting big circulation gains over the past few years, according to Vanity Fair:

The Economist's circulation has doubled in the past seven years and its ad pages have steadily increased, even as it remains unusually expensive to both readers and advertisers.

They're two newsweekly magazines that are bucking the trend and proving that good content can beat back the dropping circulation plaguing almost every other publication in North America. And they're proof that maybe it's not print that's dying but rather good content that's winning.

Canadians are online but ad spend isn’t

Canada has one of the highest broadband penetration rates in the world and this National Post article says 70% of Canadians watch videos online.

I don't doubt it. I haven't watched TV in weeks and yet my wife and I haven't missed episodes of our favourite TV shows -- The Office and House. We watched them on the Global TV web site. They bank all the episodes and you can watch them on demand. It's handy and efficient -- and cheap.

But the shows are virtually ad free.

Much of my media consumption has moved online. And yet the ad dollars are not following suit. The world has changed but the ad spend hasn't.

Why? No one really knows how to interpret the numbers they're being presented from ad sales. Whether it's unique visitors, page views, or any other number, we're not used to dealing with such concrete (and often small) numbers. Knowing EXACTLY how many people see and act on your ad, by clicking it, is almost too precise. The numbers are often tiny as compared to the tens of thousands that see a print ad and they need a lot of background before they're understood.

Everyone was comfortable that print circulation was a good number -- even if we all flip past ads with nary a glance when reading the newspaper.

More from the Post article:

"From an advertisers perspective, there's not a good measurement system in place that gives you confidence that if you shift those dollars [online], you're still going to reach your goals," said Elisa Steele, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Yahoo.

"Most advertisers that we talk to really want to shift their spend, but to take that risk is a hard thing to do. They've got their formulas. They know how to measure it, they know how to bring in that next sale. Some of that movement is literally due to fear. It's an unknown"