The biggest commotion at the AMA Richmond panel discussion today was when Jason Roop, editor of Style, asked Scott Christino, retail and national manager of the Times-Dispatch, about where Brick drew the line between subjectivity and ads disguised as news. The audience, previously subdued, went into a low, humming buzz, whispering “What’s Brick?” We’ll get to that later.
The panel was Christino, (T-D Guy); Aaron Kremer, youthful owner of richmondbizsense.com (Web Guy); Don Richards, vp and gm of Channel 12 (TV Guy); Roop (Style Guy); and Bob Willoughby, general manager of Cox Radio (Radio Guy).
Round 1. Style Guy is thrilled to be in publishing and journalism right now. Good journalism is, like the Colbert Report, truthiness combined with fun. TV Guy yada yada. Web Guy says richmondbizsense has 3,000 daily readers. Radio Guy is all about making marketing work. T-D Guy, who wears a pencil behind his ear the whole time, reminds everyone the T-D is also three websites that offer “electronic solutions.” Advertising is like diet and exercise. Done regularly, your business will have a long and healthy life.
Round 2. Radio Guy says consumers are time-starved and radio is the only portable electronic media. (Huh? Everyone at Panera is carrying laptops and iPhones, not radios.) It has low production costs, offers websites, and client endorsements. (I assume he means all the announcers telling you how much they love their mattresses, or poor Glenn Beck shilling investing in gold. Even the mighty Limbaugh does endorsement ads.) Radio can become part of your story! Even stations with low ratings have loyal, responsive listeners. Style Guy (reading my mind) pipes in with the iPhone KO. Twitter, Facebook…all portable electronic media. Score 1, Style Guy.
TV Guy says they’re always fighting the impression that TV advertising is expensive, when they’re actually “pretty flexible.” (i.e, we’ll take what you got now). “We were wireless before wireless was cool.” Even with all the media available, TV still reaches 80 percent of homes weekly, same as always.
Web Guy says he has a niche audience, and his niche is “salivating” over his website. He gets the who’s who in Richmond business. Plus, he has low overhead. No legacy expenses or pensions. Since they only do web ads, they are the master of web ad technology.
Round 3. T-D Guy says the Richmond Chic column in the Sunday Flair section is barely disguised advertising that produces big sales after an item appears in the column. Radio Guy fesses up that the air talent have deals to promote products. (No kidding?!) They all agree it’s important to keep the news clean of advertising to maintain reader trust. Style Guy crows they have more readers than ever between the paper and online and Style strives for news purity, even though it is sad when adside co-workers lose commissions because of it. So sad. TV Guy assures us that the viewers know it when they see ad placement where it shouldn’t be.
Did we all know it when 30 Rock made the goodness of McDonald’s McFlurries a critical plot point?
Radio Guy backtracked that “people are really not coming to us for news.” T-D Guy moved forward that news is never impacted by advertising. “There’s a wall, but there’s a door on that wall…” conceding that without advertising, nobody gets paid. Style Guy steps in for the take-down. “Brick?” (Which is not above letting restaurant owners write their own reviews at times.)
The AMA audience has never heard of Brick. There is a what-is-this-thing-called-Brick buzz. Is there a magazine that will give them all the editorial support they crave and they didn’t know about it? Where is this Brick? The cornered T-D Guy flounders and turns to his reinforcements, for lo and behold, T-D Director of Product Innovation and Strategic Marketing Frazier Millner is in the audience. She is always in the audience when anyone from the T-D appears anywhere, and they always default to her. She pops up like a jack-in-the-box. “Non-core product,” she declares. (I’m going to use that excuse whenever I do anything unethical from now on. Non-core product!!) I couldn’t hear what else she said because my table was still aroused and rumbling about what-is-this-Brick? Brick should have been at the door, passing out cards. A fortune in advertising and product and story tie-ins was there for the taking!
Score 2 for Style.
Round 4. Audience member wants to know where marketeers can park their good news. Style Guy has two products, Giving and Belle, the latter soon to be a monthly, as avenues for success stories. T-D Guy says there’s not so much good news, except for the Public Squares they host. “I never saw an organization so open and engaged with the community,” he gushes.
Style Guy comes back with Style is a free publication so they know their readership wants it if they pick it up. Advertise with them and you’re “fishing in a well-stocked lake.” TV Guy says TV ads deliver with emotion. The average household has as many TVs as it has people. Everyone is watching what they want. Is TV also a well-stocked lake?
Young Web Guy said he thought his readers were going to be young, you know, with-it Web 2.0 types, but instead they’re older business people. Surprise! We oldies gotz mad web skillz! Web is the only media outlet actually growing. Radio Guy says 93 percent of everybody listens to the radio every week, and 70-something percent listen every day. (I miss the exact figure because a cell phone went off, which meant time-out for a round of cell phone jokes.) Radio advertising can be more creative. (It’s all happening in your mind!)
Cranky audience member says the mainstream media is relying too much on blogs and RSS feeds from dubious web sources for their online content and it’s confusing his clients because the blogosphere is not known for its truthiness. Style Guy says we’re not doing that. We all look at T-D Guy. (Hey, inrich.com, we're talking about you). TV Guy changes the subject. They get swamped with press releases which are useless to them. PR people need to develop a relationship with the assignment editor. Find out what they need. Give them only what they need. Not what you want. (This is the second time I've heard this. Nobody wants press releases.)
Round 5. What does the future hold? Style Guy can’t imagine newspapers will ever be completely dead. Good journalists will always be needed. TV Guy reminds us that 30 percent of people online are watching television at the same time. Web Guy channels Bette Davis. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. People will go to “where [the news] is well-written, well reported and they can trust it.”
Most of them agree that local content is the savior, and putting that local content behind a paid wall will save them. Like a peep show. Put in a quarter and turn the crank. See the local lady take off her clothes. Whoops. Show over. If you want to see more, pay another quarter. Radio Guy says local news is “more impactful to local communities.” I love being impacted. The conclusion: the media outlet that gets that and invests in the community will survive.
I would score this meeting Style: Win. TV: Place. Web: Show.
