Virtual Properties

Agent/Broker can order advertisement packages and/or products. For example, a package may contain six (6) newspaper advertisements and one homes magazine advertisement. The advertising management application supports "build" rules, "content" rules, and "sort" rules. The "build" rules describe the way that advertising reports are built (for example, listings that have ad orders for the LA Times arranged by location, listing date, address, or price). The "content" rules describe the way that the specific advertisements are built (for example, if a listing has an order placed for the Sunday News, how many characters are allowed, does the ad identify the listing as having an open house and/or does the ad give directions to the listing). The "sort" rules allow Customer to modify the build rules so that it can sort reports sent to publishers to designate in which order properties will appear in the ads. The application supports one rule per advertising product. For example, if customer has eight advertising products, then there will be eight build, content and sort rules (one build, content and sort rule per product). The application also supports extensive reporting tools, by listing, agent, office, area, advertising product type or price. Finally, Main Street's™ optional dynamic pdf publishing capability can be used with the advertising application. This means that the ads can be output in high quality PDF format, among others.

Frank Ahrens on the SEC's investigation into media circulation scandals:

The Securities and Exchange Commission has asked several media companies to provide information about how they calculate paid circulation, an industry-wide inquiry that comes after circulation-inflation scandals at four large newspapers this year, the companies confirmed yesterday.

The probe, reported in yesterday's editions of the New York Times, includes the Times Co.; The Washington Post Co.; Gannett Co., publishers of USA Today and 100 other papers; Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Wall Street Journal and Barron's; and Knight Ridder, publisher of the Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer and 29 other papers.

Internetweek:

The non-profit site has also cost newspapers millions of dollars more in merchandise, real estate and other traditional classified advertising businesses, Classified Intelligence LLC said in a recent report on the self-service site's impact. Craigslist, which is a quarter owned by EBay Inc., has grown to a billion page-views a month.

Pew Internet & American Life just released a study on weblogs (online journals which are fast becoming a major source of news and information for Americans):

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

McKee Wallwork Henderson has published a useful list of 13 rules for more effective advertising. [PDF]

Frank Ahrens takes a look at the plight of daily newspapers, where, despite declining readers, the bulk of the real estate industry's advertising dollars are spent (here's a great graphic on the changes):

Frank A. Blethen, publisher of the Seattle Times, said his industry has some breathing room left. But not much.

"The baby boomers are going to continue to drive print [sales] for some time," he said. "The problem we have are the . . . 18- to 35-year-olds. They're not replacing the baby boomers."

Others are more blunt, if hyperbolic.

"Print is dead," Sports Illustrated President John Squires told a room full of newspaper and magazine circulation executives at a conference in Toronto in November. His advice? "Get over it," meaning publishers should stop trying to save their ink-on-paper product and focus on electronic delivery of their journalism.

Newspapers face a similar issue. Their high margin, very high overhead business model will likely not survive (this will take some time), BUT citizens still want information, in fact, due to the internet, we're foraging for information at much higher rates than before.

I also think newspapers have not adjusted to their reader's changing expectations regarding news accessibility, depth and content in the internet era. The traditional text article, designed for print no longer cuts it. Thus the rise of the blogs....

Watch the conversation (technorati).

Will the real estate industry continue to spend substantial sums on legacy newspaper advertising? Prudential Equity Group issued a report that found circulation quality and quantity continues to decline.

Jay Rosen:

But an industry that won't move until it is certain of days as good as its golden past is effectively dead, from a strategic point of view. Besides, there is an alternative if you don't have the faith or will or courage needed to accept reality and deal. The alternative is to drive the property to a profitable demise.

Chris Anderson on changes in traditional media (TV, Radio, Newspapers).

Rick Romell:

No provision of the advertising contract between Shorewest and Journal Sentinel makes any reference to circulation, the newspaper company said in a memorandum supporting its motion to dismiss the complaint.

"As such, the plain terms of the contract have not been breached," the memorandum argues.

Stuart Elliott:

Marketers were able to do what they wanted because they were given a bye from a corporate governance aspect by the C-suite," Mr. See said, using the shorthand term for leaders like chief executives. "But now," he added, "the C-suite sees marketing as the last bastion of uncontrolled spending, and it's being viewed as a risk, a financial risk."

"It's the old story of the C.E.O. who asks the chief marketing officer, 'What happens if I take 10 percent out of the marketing budget?' and the C.M.O. replies, 'I don't know,' " Mr. See said, "so the C.E.O. says: 'O.K., I'll take 20 percent.' "

John Nardone, executive vice president and chief client officer at Marketing Management, said the survey showed that it was more important than ever for advertisers to give their marketing departments the types of controls, models and "repeatable processes" they use in areas like supply-chain management and human resources.

Nikki Finke:

Then there are the declining circulations. “You’d think it would get cheaper because it doesn’t reach as many people as it used to.” Indeed, the Audit Bureau of Circulations keeps finding that something like half of the nation’s 38 largest papers report circulation declines. That’s why the Oracle from Omaha, Warren Buffett, has been quoted as saying recently that “the economics of newspapers in the United States are very close to certain to deteriorate over the next 10 to 20 years.” And this is coming from a self-described newspaper addict and savvy media investor.

Ad Age:

ABC's streaming-video experiment earlier this year on ABC.com will become a real offering in October, according to Anne Sweeney, Disney Co. co-chair-media networks and president of Disney-ABC TV. The network said the experiment was a success for advertisers given that research showed users had 87% recall of the advertisers involved. (Average recall of advertising on TV is about 24%.) Each program that was streamed was supported by a single advertiser.

Abbey Klaassen:

A study is about to give Madison Avenue a fresh pummeling: McKinsey & Co. is telling a host of major marketers that by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.

That shocking statistic, delivered to the company's Fortune 100 clients in a report on media proliferation, assumes a 15% decrease in buying power driving by cost-per-thousand rate increases; a 23% decline in ads viewed due to switching off; a 9% loss of attention to ads due to increased multitasking and a 37% decrease in message impact due to saturation.

"You've also got pronounced changes in consumer behavior while they're consuming media," said Tom French, director at McKinsey. "And ad spending is decreasingly reflecting consumer behavior."

The Economist:

"A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article). Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.

Robert MacMillan:

Tribune may be taking its time figuring out where it plans to be a year from now, but Editor James O’Shea at its largest paper, the Los Angeles Times, is taking its future into his own hands.
The Web will now be the LAT’s primary vehicle for news, reflecting a need to boost sales at what many people see as the future of news delivery and to try to fight what Editor Publisher called “an increasingly difficult economic climate for newspaper publishers.”

Here’s the LAT in its own words: “O’Shea employed dire statistics on declining print advertising revenue to urge The Times’ 940 journalists to throw off a ‘bunker mentality’ and view latimes.com as the paper’s primary vehicle for delivering news.”

How? Again, to the LAT: “O’Shea named Business Editor Russ Stanton to the innovation post and said the ‘Internet 101′ course would teach reporters, editors and photographers to become ’savvy multimedia journalists,’ able to enhance their writing with audio and video reports. He emphasized the need for speed in reforming an operation that he called ‘woefully behind’ the competition.”

Jon Brodkin:

The most popular Web search engines rarely deliver the same results when identical queries are performed on each site, and the disparity has increased over the past two years, new research has found.

In a study of 19,332 queries, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and Ask delivered the same top result only 3.6% of the time. The four engines never delivered the same top three results, even when the order of the results was ignored. Fewer than 1% of first-page results were shared by all four sites.

The search engines agreed more often in a study two years ago, in which the top result matched all four engines on 7% of queries.

“These differences contradict any notion that all search engines are the same and that searching one engine will yield the absolute best results of the Web,” the paper states.

Dogpile.com, a metasearch engine that combines results from the top search sites, conducted the study with researchers from Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University. The research paper claims the study highlights the value of sites that deliver results from multiple search engines.

• 69.6% of Google’s were unique to Google.
• 79.4% of Yahoo’s were unique to Yahoo.
• 80.1% of Liv’s were unique to Live.
• 75.0% Ask’s were unique to Ask.

Jay Meattle:

We are spending more and more time consuming information online. Logically, since time is finite online advertising spend should follow a similar trajectory with marketers allocating their ad budgets in proportion to where people are spending their time.

Michael Learmont:

We've yet to see evidence that TV viewers are abandoning the tube for the Web. But advertisers are getting ready to do so: Not because they don't like TV, but because strike-weakened ratings mean they need to find other ways to reach their audience. Andrea Kerr Redniss, head of digital buying and planning for Optimedia US, a unit of Publicis Groupe whose clients include T-Mobile and Sanofi Adventis, explains the upcoming shift.

Silicon Alley Insider: We've heard that ad dollars are going to leave TV because of the strike. When will that happen and where will they go?

Redniss: In some cases you are starting to see it now. TV's overall unique audience is down and ratings are down. Many of our clients are looking at the middle of February and knowing they are going to be significantly behind in terms of delivering [ad impressions]. We are looking to make that up in digital. If we can get the impressions on television, we want to stay there, but we are at a point where we are going to have to make some calls, take some dollars back and reallocate them.

Jon Udell:

For this week’s ITConversations show, introduced by special guest introducer Lynne Windley, I got together with Valdis Krebs, who’s been mapping and analyzing social networks since Mark Zuckerberg was in diapers.

I can’t remember how I first got to know Valdis, but this snippet from a 2004 interview — for an InfoWorld cover story on enterprise social software — gives you a sense of what he does and how he thinks:

IW: Social network analysis can reveal that highly connected people are more valuable than the org chart or salary plan suggests. Is this becoming a factor?

VK: Yes. I did a project with an investment bank, and they took into account who was most valuable in getting a deal done, and factored that into the bonus. I’ve had execs inside and outside IBM saying, “If this data is true, then I’m not paying the people who bubbled up to the top what they’re worth.”

Well worth watching.

Stephanie Clifford:

“I think finding out that it was McDonald’s was kind of a big shock for everyone,” said Geoff May, a player in Ontario who founded a Web site (olympics.wikibruce.com) on the game. “Obviously it’s McDonald’s, and not everyone likes them,” he said. “Personally, I don’t mind as long as we don’t get products forced down our throat. If we’re getting McDonald’s meals sold by characters, it’s going to be hard to suspend our disbelief.”

That’s part of the reason McDonald’s has remained behind the curtain thus far. A successful alternate-reality game relies on the players’ continuing interest.

“If an A.R.G. is too clearly corporate or commercial, the gamers will not want to engage,” said Tracy Tuten, an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, who studies new-media marketing tools. “It’s very important that the game be written in a way where the branding is not obvious.”

McDonald’s has been careful to reflect that, Ms. Dillon said. “Above all, we want to be credible, authentic and respectful to this new audience,” she said.

With that in mind, development of the game was given to AKQA, a San Francisco marketing agency, and Jane McGonigal, a game developer.