Author Archives: Steve Gray
See Big Data and glimpse the future of advertising
I’ve been getting a series of demos from Big Data providers as we at Morris Publishing Group work to figure out how we will offer Big Data services to local advertisers.
Just lately, we’ve been getting down into the details. For me, this brought a profound leap in comprehension.
It was like staring into a crystal ball and seeing a monumental event that’s about to change your life. Read the rest of this entry
Take a disruption lesson from Procter & Gamble
What could disrupted legacy media companies possibly have in common with Procter & Gamble — the huge and perennially successful consumer goods manufacturer?
One thing we have in common is that we both need to recognize and plan for the continuous loss of revenue from declining products.
We don’t think of P&G as needing to cope with fading products as an endemic part of its business. But 10 years ago, when I was leading the Newspaper Next project for the American Press Institute, I learned that part of their success lies in the careful planning they do to offset those declines.
We in the media business can take an important lesson from P&G’s approach. Read the rest of this entry
How legacy media reps can — and must — sell more digital
How can we sell more digital? In traditional media, that question has been pounding us for years.
It’s in our heads, in our meetings, in our training, in our budgeting. Few of us are growing our digital revenues at rates anywhere near the growth rate of digital spending.
And one of the toughest challenges has been getting our core sales reps to present digital advertising and marketing solutions effectively to their existing customers.
Four keys to leadership in times of change
When your organization needs large-scale change (and what disrupted media organization doesn’t?), how do you get it done?
Terabytes have been written about the strategies and tactics that legacy media organizations need. I’ve written my share, too, here at MediaReset.com. But I’ve seen precious little written about how to lead and manage effective change to carry out these strategies.
Finally — Big Data targeting on our own local media sites
For several years, local media companies have been in a nasty predicament.
We’ve worked hard for years to build sizable, high-quality local audiences on our websites. And we’ve worked hard to sell banner advertising on those sites.
But we haven’t been able to sell what savvy digital advertisers now want and expect: highly targeted impressions on our sites reaching only the individuals with the highest propensity to buy their products or services. Read the rest of this entry
Big media sales opportunity: Take Big Data to Main Street
What if your local media company had a product that could make local businesses say, “Wow! Can you really do that???”
That’s the Holy Grail of media sales — a solution that meets an urgent need for customers in a way they have never before thought possible.
I saw that kind of solution a couple of weeks ago. I promise you — it will be big. Read the rest of this entry
A 20-year story of employee ownership comes to an end
Twenty years ago, my family had a problem.
We were the sole and devoted owners of a successful stand-alone daily newspaper in Monroe, MI. But our principle shareholders — my father and his brother and sister — were advancing in years and had no solution in place to transfer ownership into my generation. It seemed we had two options. Read the rest of this entry
Visualize your new local marketing agency
When your comfortable, well-established business model is being disrupted, one of the toughest challenges is looking beyond your old business model to visualize what you must become.
In past posts on this blog, one by one, I’ve pointed out a host of new opportunities that are emerging in local media markets. In this post, I’m going to roll them up into a single new business entity we can visualize and work to develop. Read the rest of this entry
Direct access — a huge disruption of local media
For local news media, the most crippling disruption served up by the Internet isn’t in news — it’s in advertising.
And it’s not just other players getting the ad spending we used to get, although there’s plenty of that going on.
The more insidious advertising disruption is that local businesses need less and less advertising than they once did. Read the rest of this entry
How to make money on mobile
Sounds like a great session for a publishers’ conference, doesn’t it? It’s a big topic for local media businesses these days, as mobile web traffic surpasses desktop traffic for more and more newspapers, magazines and broadcast stations.
That’s why I spent an afternoon searching the Web recently. Read the rest of this entry
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