Bartz at Yahoo Q4 Earnings Call: First Take

[Posted by David Card]

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On her first earnings call, new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz sounded in control (no Jerry Yang), identified some of the same assets I think are Yahoo's strongest, and re-affirmed she wasn't there to sell the company. While Bartz understands Yahoo should be the leading information source on the Web -- you know, a "media company" -- she still sounds a little naive about Web media and consumers in general. (Revenue will be down 10% in Q1, and Yahoo refused to give guidance for the full year.)

• Among Yahoo's core assets, Bartz identified its broad and loyal audience, and its leadership position in 11 categories (home page, news, finance, etc.). She knows that Yahoo is the leader in online branding advertising, that that is a good thing, and yet that it's going to be tough for a little while.
• She said an outsider could too easily arrive with preconceived notions. Like that search should be sold off? However, she stumbled badly trying to make the case that having search and display could be synergistic.
• Bartz sounds like an ops and product manager. That's good; Yahoo needs both. But she's not convincing on advertising yet, other than recognizing Yahoo's advertiser and agency relationships are valuable. She said she hadn't spent enough time with the whole sales team to judge them, but that she thought Yahoo's ad sales management was sharp. She's going to a sales meeting in a couple weeks to drink beers with the sales force. That sounds good, too.
• She equated good products that will "delight" Yahoo auds with integration, relevance, and customization. Well, two out of three ain't bad. She said some people equate innovation with constant change, but that was wrong: Yahoo users don't need constant change.

When asked about products for youth audiences, Bartz interpreted that to mean social networks. She said kids will grow up and then they'll learn to depend on Yahoo Finance, because they'd have less time to "throw pictures up...because they're off the dole." Amusing, perhaps, but Yahoo -- strong in Music, entertainment news, and fantasy sports -- shouldn't take its eyes of that particular ball. And it's not just kids that use social networks.

It bugs me a little that she used the hackneyed trope that fickle youth has moved from MySpace to Facebook, so "who knows what will capture them next." First, there's no evidence audiences replaced MySpace usage with Facebook, though the blogerati would have it so. There's a lot of overlapping usage, and MySpace still has the numbers in the US. But the real point is that MySpace is making a living on the performance-based display ads that Yahoo can't make a profit off of, while at the same time it builds out branding-friendly inventory around entertainment.

Neither MySpace nor Facebook targets with super efficiency, but they're on the job. And both are way farther ahead than Yahoo at figuring out what real social marketing will look like: i.e., tapping communications, behavior, influencers, and word of mouth. Eventually, Yahoo will have to deliver that kind of marketing, whether on its own properties or someone else's.

Blow by blow coverage at AlleyInsider, and BoomTown.

How Much Does Hollywood Hate Itself? Part XIII

[Posted by David Card]

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And I thought last year's Oscar noms were "obscure." Here's this year's list of Best Picture nominations, with their domestic box office $$ according to Box Office Mojo:

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button $104 million
• Frost/Nixon $9M
• Milk $21M
• The Reader $8M
• Slumdog Millionaire $44M

And last year's:

• Atonement $51 million
• Juno $144M
• Michael Clayton $74M$49M
• No Country for Old Men $74M
• There Will Be Blood $40M

I'm puzzled why Hollywood continues to think quality and popularity are opposed. This year, the top grossing movie was the Warners Batman sequel, The Dark Knight that did $531 million at the box office. Sure it was a superhero movie, but it was on many critics' Top Ten list (and will be on mine) and delivered a very dark, post 9/11 zeitgeist. If you don't want grim, a well-loved cheerful alternative could have been Disney-Pixar's Wall-E that delivered a slightly preachy green message atop a classic all-ages story of love and friendship. Wall-E pulled in $224 million, number five in the US.

I'm trying to say that the industry's top awardsfest -- itself a still-huge entertainment event -- should be equally about art and commerce. This is pop culture, people. There is no shame in rewarding classy success.

I'll be writing about the continuing importance of hits for marketing later this year. Long-tail, bah, humbug.

Saving the New York Times?

[Posted by David Card]

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It's a rare day indeed when I agree this much with Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget. But his plan to fix the NY Times seems right on the money to me. In a nutshell, cut costs, raise print subscription prices, and charge for the online edition. That last one will raise eyebrows, but there's a way to do it that would likely only cut traffic in half, and still keep the Times' stories on the top of the news agenda. (Hint: copy the Wall Street Journal's syndication and navigation strategy.)

Both marketing leaders and publishers should read Blodget's post, at least to get the conversation started.

Here's some relevant research -- geared more to publishers than to marketers -- on online syndication, SEO, etc.:

Best Practices in Networked Media

Aggregation

News and Search

Let me know your thoughts. Should the Times charge for online? Will that enable enough qualified readers to raise online CPMs? Would you pay (more) for that audience?

Mobilizing, Part II

[Posted by David Card]

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If you're a marketer or a media company thinking about mobile audiences, here's a little perspective. (See this report.) While there will be plenty of on-the-go laptops with broadband access in the US, they'll be dwarfed by the number of 3G mobile phones. Broadband phones will reach critical mass -- 15% to 20% of the population, 40 to 50 million users -- if not mass-market reach, by 2010.

That means marketers should remain experimental, focusing campaigns on mobile experiences that are small-screen and SMS-like and that take advantage of local and social information. 3G coverage will vary by carrier, and by region, so you'll get reach in major metro areas first. And of course, the demos will skew a little young, but you knew that. Learn from SMS more than from the Web, and don't forget what worked back in the bad old days of dial-up walled gardens.

Taking A Look At 2009 Marketing Budgets

[Posted by Laura Ramos]

Happy New Year, Everyone! Looking over my holiday and Christmas greetings this year, I was struck by the change in tone from 2007 and how everyone's wishes for a "happy" new year seemed more sincere and profound in light of the current economy.

In our Predictions 2009 research, published December 23, Forrester analysts who cover B2B and technology marketing predict that marketing budgets will take big hits early in 2009, with typical decreases in the 15% to 25% range. To investigate whether this prediction is tracking current experience and to look at the impact of the economy on this year's B2B marketing spending, Forrester teamed up with MarketingProfs to field a survey that explores 2009 budget plans and looks back at 2008 effectiveness.  Marketing executives at the helm of firms that sell primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) to businesses will find participating in this research relevant because we look at budgets across a range of online, conventional, and emerging social media. We also ask about how you see the effectivenss of tactics changing year over year.

The survey is currently in the field.  If you would like to participate, please click on this link. We have over 400 responses thus far, so please feel free to add your input and opinions. Reply to this post with thoughts and feedback about the survey and I'll address anything that comes up. All participants (who supply their email addresses) will receive a copy of the results.

Here's wishing you a more prosperous new year.

Tags: B2B marketing, marketing budgets, budget survey :: Add to del.icio.us

Predictions 2009: Online Media

[Posted by David Card]

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Finishing up -- a little late, natch -- my Predictions 2009 report, so I'll tease the ideas here for comment. It's more about themes than outright predictions, so I'll add a few obligatory ones at the end.

These are the five catalysts for near-term change, the forces that are driving the online media business for the next 12 to 24 months:

• Recession plus Profitability demands. I've already posted on our ad forecast. We still expect 15% growth in US online spending in 2009, but that's driven by search. Display will be half that rate. Online media will have to stay excrutiatingly close to marketers' needs. On top of a crummy media economy, we're hearing that a lot of organizations are demanding profitability from their online operations. So, ironically, it might be even tougher for cross-media media brands.
• Social Media & Marketing. It's still the new new thing. Social marketing will still be cheap, and still won't scale. Think loyalty.
• Portal Meltdown. The portal is dead; long live the network. The business model that dominated online media since its inception has run its course. Social networks haven't replaced it, though. "Invisible" networks, that share services and audiences behind the scenes are more important than "visible" networks that drive audiences across related properties.
• Platforms. Because of the above, platforms and syndication are the new power tools for online media. But some of the bigger platform players (e.g., Amazon, eBay) aren't media. Or are they?
• Emerging formats: mobile & video. No one will make money on either in 2009. But cautious investment in both will position the strong for the longer term.

These change agents have morphed a bit -- but not totally changed character -- from the ones we were living with for the last 24 months (see Figure 4).

Requisite Flippant Management/Merger Predictions

You might have seen my nutty prediction for resolving the Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL thing.

I still think Apple should buy TiVo. Or Netflix should.

I like a Washington Post-NY Times combo. But it won't happen. And neither will NYT-News Corp.

Google still can't do anything other than search. And nothing offline, unless you count mobile. That means online brand advertising in 2009 is still up to the "traditional" media companies and agencies.