Ten years ago I worked with someone who told me almost daily that I was working in a dead medium i.e. print. He was the ‘web guy’. As far as he was concerned the web was going to wipe out all printed media. All of it. By 2005 at the latest.
He was wrong and I was right. I said printed magazines would always be around. My argument was that print still offered the best in portability, design, utility and feel. The two dimensional world of the news site or the ugliness of digital page-turn magazines would never replace the capacity of print. Besides, people have a romantic attachment to print – the touch, the smell, the ability to doodle in the margins.
Now, however, I am questioning my previous defense of the ‘dead tree’ publishing method. I have, of late, started asking if print magazines can be justified for much longer.

OH THE ENERGY
Not only is print expensive to produce content for, and to design, print, package and post … it takes forever and a day from the time the magazine is sent to print to the time it hits desks.
Then there’s the environmental issue. If you’re a tree hugger you’d baulk at the average magazine’s carbon footprint. Yes, magazines consume countless trees that would be better left creating oxygen for our lungs, but they also consume gallons of toxic ink, enormous amounts of energy – required to pulp the wood and turn the print machines – and then they are wrapped in plastic, loaded onto a truck and driven halfway across the country to a depot, where they are further wrapped in plastic and then carted off to a postal centre where each one is probably driven by a different vehicle to their destination. That’s thousands of little magazines all getting an individual lift to their final resting place, where many are simply scanned and dumped rather than recycled. Printing is extremely wasteful.

PISH POSH
Some publishers, successful publishers, reading this may say: “If you’re making a lot of money out of your print title, none of that matters.”
The truth is there are very few Irish publishers making a lot of money from printing magazines. Back in the 80s and 90s it was quite the business to be in, especially if you had the right political and business connections. Contract printing was for many small publishers simply a license to print awful magazines but plenty of money. Advertisers felt magazine display ads, TV, radio and outdoor were the only gigs in town. Now the web offers nearly infinite ad space and display ads have become a commodity. Ad networks that specialise in more efficient, targeted advertising can sell across multiple platforms. The instant, real-time information revolution means pushing a sales message at a consumer via print is increasingly irrelevant. If they want something they can search for it and receive thousands of real-time recommendations from their peers via social networks. Brands and advertisers have, as Unilever’s marketing chief recently admitted, found themselves behind the curve, no longer influencers of consumer behaviour. The consumer is now influencing them.

LITTLE IS EXCLUSIVE ANYMORE
Defenders of the traditional publishing status quo are in a panic and have a right to be. They have ‘done the math’ and know quite simply that the revenues from print advertising could never be matched by online advertising revenues. Digital euros for online publishers are small fry. Hence we’ve seen Rupert Murdoch put up his pay walls in the hopeful expectation that everyone else will follow suit, and quickly lose 65% of their online readership.
To say Murdoch is misguided is facetious. He’s correct in thinking that it’s too expensive to give his content away for free but he’s wrong in thinking that people who bought his newspapers will subscribe to his online content. Social media has transformed the way information is disseminated. Publishers like Murdoch previously relied on being the exclusive owners of news and other content. Social media has altered this power hold forever.
There is no longer such a thing as exclusive content. If you want to find out about anything a quick search, especially across social networks like Twitter, will unveil rich nuggets far superior than anything Murdoch’s services can provide.
The pay wall approach prevents further growth for an online publisher because it puts a wall between the content and those who might help to spread it. Murdoch’s real hope is that the pay wall will encourage people to continue buying his printed newspapers. This is wishful thinking in the era of the mobile web, smart phones and content applications.

LAST BITE IS THE DEEPEST
Irish magazines don’t just compete with British and American titles but increasingly with free titles and very sophisticated, rich media web sites, apps and mobile web products. Magazines Ireland represents 43 Irish publishers and says the 2009 ad spend figure fell by €24 million to €215 million. The 2010 and 2011 figures will be far worse.
Internationally we know subscriptions are falling for once giant magazines. Between 2002 and 2009, Newsweek lost 25% and Time lost 18% of its subscribers
The recession has bitten deep and cut to the bone in many cases. The publishers that survive the recession will still be left with an unrelenting reality – the continual juggernaut of social media and Web 3.0.
Ask any 16–25 year-old what magazines they buy. Ask any executive how many Irish magazines they subscribe to. Ask any publisher how many copies they distribute to doctors’ waiting rooms. Then go back to the 16-25 year olds and ask them what social networks they use and what websites they like. The writing isn’t just on the wall, it’s off the wall.

IT’S NOW ABOUT IDEAS NOT PAPER
Today there is more news and more writing and more information available to more people than at any time in history. People who defend the status quo are, in essence, just defending the medium. They are defending paper. They are not defending ideas or content, just the dead trees the ideas are written on.
There are faster, better and cheaper ways of disseminating information. Print will always have its place, but for many publishers it’s increasingly becoming a burden they can’t afford and are unable to sell.

The ability to personalise advertisements according to the preferences of individual users represents a fundamental paradigm shift in the advertising world.

Traditional advertising is based either on the current content that is being consumed or on demographics. Delivering more effective personalised advertisements requires an understanding of individual users and their motivations, that goes far beyond the broad demographics traditionally relied on to inform advertising campaigns.

To explore this concept of personalised advertising, we [the Amdocs Innovation Centre] carried out behavioural analysis studies in co-operation with some of our multinational mobile operator customers. Mobile operators allowed us access to fully anonymised user data covering the activity of over 5,000,000 subscribers over several months. From this data we created a behavioral profile for each user by leveraging a wide variety of available data sources such as mobile internet browsing history, mobile advertisement selections, previous purchases and anonymous demographics.

Targeting the right people isn’t as obvious as it may seem

Analysing the user interactions with different advertisements enabled us to automatically identify the most relevant advertisements likely to appeal to each user. Behavioral profiles allow us to identify the specific characteristics that drive users to select a certain advertisement.

It is important to realise that people are complex beings with a variety of motivations; relying on a user’s top interest to guide targeting can often be misleading. For example, and contrary to expectation, the most relevant factor for people clicking on an advertisement for a popular children’s toy was that the people were interested in fashion, current affairs, lifestyle and technology. It emerged that rather than the children themselves, that these were the mothers of children interested in these toy advertisements. Targeting advertisements at these women based on their top interests would have meant that they would never have received the advertisements for the toys.

To show the effectiveness of this approach we compared our personalised targeting to targeting based on demographic information such as age, home location and gender. We found that our techniques were five times more effective than the demographic targeting. Interestingly, combining demographic data with subscriber behavioral intelligence further boosted results showing that these two information sources are complimentary.

People are not stereotypes

One of the key discoveries of our research is that people are not stereotypes. Take for example user 1259bf8963 who, through their advertisement interaction, showed a keen interest in football and a noted disinterest in fashion. Going against the stereotype, user 1259bf8963 was actually female. If an operator had relied on demographics alone, user 1259bf8963, who we fondly named Patricia, would never have been targeted with football advertisements. Patricia’s case also highlighted the fact that often demographic information can be unreliable or contradictory. From her demographic information Patricia had a university degree, earned an exceptionally high salary, was married, had children and all by the ripe old age of 20. Perhaps Patricia is some kind of superwoman but we think this is unlikely.

Companies invest vast amounts of time attempting to identify their target audience. We believe, and our analysis shows, that the more you know about your consumers the more personalised the experience you can offer them. Our findings show that when trying to identify a target audience don’t rely solely on demographics, don’t stereotype and don’t underestimate the depth of user data that can be leveraged.

Bio

Dr. Evelyn Balfe is the Business Innovation Analyst in the Amdocs Innovation Centre in Dublin. Amdocs is a global leader in providing innovative software and service solutions designed to help companies build stronger, more profitable customer relationships.

When asked what sources of entertainment they turn to most often, 32% of US respondents cited the Internet. This puts the web second to TV and ahead of movies, radio and music. Conducted in March among 18-54-year-olds, the survey also reveals how consumers now see social networking as entertainment. Gail Becker of Edelman said, “The definition of entertainment has gotten broader,” and this reflects a “great democratisation of entertainment”. In other words – user generated content.
US consumers still don’t like ads. Well, you can’t blame them – anyone ever sat through the average US commercial break? Horrendous, right? When asked what they’d “be willing to sacrifice in order to get your entertainment for free”, the highest number of votes (47%) went to “advertisement-free entertainment”.

Here’s some very nice digital projection mapping from French trio, Superbien. While this kind of projection mapping is used mainly by artists and big brand advertisers to create spectacular outdoor ‘installations’, surely there must be a really good use for it in war zones? Think about it. Most of the wars being fought by Western forces, led by the US, tend to be in third world countries with largely rural, often fervently religious populations. So, instead of western troops bombing and machine gunning villages and towns, they could use projection mapping to ‘convince’ the people to respect and obey the invading forces. How? Project large images of gods and monsters on the largest and most important buildings in these communities, commanding the faithful into submission and reassuring them that with peaceful cooperation no harm will come to them. Imagine how impressive 3D projection mapping would be to people who have never experienced colour TV? Blow their minds. Better than blowing people to bits and hoping to win over hearts and minds afterwards, yes?

This is amazing, takes a little while to warm up but it’s probably the best example of 3D projection mapping we’ve seen. Samsung recently ran three nights of these kind of ‘installations’ in Amsterdam to promote its new range of 3D LED TVs. Mapped to an old building in Amsterdam, the projection cracks the building in half, sending debris shattering down before it fills up with water and then drains into a rain forest revealing the new TV. Now that’s advertising!

Here’s some nice pre World Cup creative by Nike. The above video gives a glimpse of how the ‘future’ unfolds for Wayne Rooney following a mistake in the last seconds of a World Cup game against France. The video below paints a much rosier picture for Christiano Ronaldo.

According to US tech site DigiTimes, the 4th Generation (4G) iPhone will start shipping in June of this year. 24 million units are being shipped – 4.5 million in the first batch and then 19.5 million units for the rest of 2010. The new iPhone will be revealed on June 7 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.
The new iPhone will adopt IPS (in-plane switching) panels with FFS (fringe-field switching) technology and a 960×640 resolution. In other words it will give the phone better viewing angles and much better resolution. The ebook reader feature will be better, even under sunlight.
Most importantly for those iPhone users who already suffer from poor power and battery life, the 4G phone will run a 512MB memory module from Samsung Electronics, doubling the memory capacity seen in the iPhone 3GS. The new phone’s screen will be 33% thinner which gives the iPhone the extra space needed to fit a larger battery (19% larger) than the one shown in the leaked pictures. The video above further speculates on Apple’s plans for the iPhone launch. It’s almost an industry in itself – second guessing Apple.