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Courtesy of BoSacks & The Precision Media Group
America's Oldest e-newsletter est.1993
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BoSacks Speaks Out: Print should be a shinning beacon in a sea of criminality
Last week I wrote a sobor article about the state of digital fraud invading our lives, our families, our jobs and our psyche. I wasn't wrong, as each day new intrusive assaults are discovered.
Last Friday we received news of yet another of what seems like weekly Facebook abominations.
Now it has been revealed that Facebook
collects intensely personal information secretly from thousands of popular smartphone apps and just seconds after users enter their personal information. Facebook gets it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook. More surveillance for a profit. George Orwell in the book 1984 wrote "If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself." Good luck with that, there are no secrets any more.
Pretty depressing, right? Well it is, and it should be.
According to The New York Times... Parliament denounced Facebook and its leadership as "digital gangsters."
The British are always so damn polite.
But wait, there is a bright side here, and that is print and the magazine industry. It's not that we can prevent what's going on digitally. We can't. But we can be fertile ground for profitability and safety. Print is and should be a shining beacon standing tall among the fraudsters. There are successes in many places for the magazine print industry and billions still being made.
I go to many magazine conferences all around the world each year. And guess what? There are profitable publishers in every conference. Here is a true example where size doesn't matter. Large or small, many publishers are doing well and creating centers of profitability. I had lunch last week with Alison Dickie, the publisher of a local magazine here in Virginia called Albemarle Magazine. It's a smallish, local publication that has to fight for every dollar. It's not easy, but they do it. And the results are impressive.
In a week or two I'll be having lunch with my friend Bernie Mann, the publisher of Our State magazine.(196 pages last issue) They are doing gangbusters and, as far as I can tell, they are among the most successful regional magazines in the country.
Last month I spoke at the Canada Magazines Business Summit. Here again is a group of successful B2B publishers.
In a few weeks I'm off to DIS (the Digital Innovators Summit) in Berlin. It is a collection of publishers from around the globe sharing success stories in publishing. Not one of those tales will be about digital abuses of power, but rather about gaining revenue and market share, and from my perspective, honorably.
This year I'll also be attending IRMA International Regional Magazine Association. This is a terrific group of regional print publishers growing and making revenue positive strides.
And dare I not mention Samir's Husni's Annual Magazine conference ACT at the University of Mississippi.
As conferences go it is probably the smallest by population, yet the biggest in comradery and geniality. The auditorium is filled with 40 professional speakers and about the same number of journalism/media students. All the publishing professionals represent successful publishing operations.
Let's not forget the printers and paper companies of our industry. They, too, represent on-going strength and successful revenue streams.
I could go on and on, but my point is that print is viable and profitable.
The irony should escape no one that the nature of our product of off-line media is safe and totally non-intrusive to sharing anyone's personal secrets.
Let's use print and thoughtful, thorough journalism to stop, hinder and otherwise mute the digital surveillance network of privacy pirates and not let them distract us from our successes.
"Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past."
George Orwell, 1984
Dateline: Charlottesville, Va
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P&G Turns the Tide With a Flood of Print and TV ads
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How Procter and Gamble turned around the negative publicity surrounding Tide Pods with a well-choreographed Super Bowl advertising campaign using print, television and direct mail.
The internet memes were spilling over into Mom-land, which means my mom, who doesn't even know what a meme is, knew about Tide Pods.
"This is no joking matter," my mom said indignantly. "Kids think these Tide detergent Pods are candy and are eating them!"
Indeed, the publicity was not good for Tide and its parent company Procter and Gamble, a global consumer goods company.
The prevailing opinion was that the company had designed the detergent pods to look fun and colorful...and, inadvertently, yummy.
Under the radar, the company was generating negative PR for closing plants in Kansas and Iowa and moving some operations to West Virginia and Ohio. The Tide Pod tidal wave was not helping their image.
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No matter how you looked at it, it seemed the best thing for Tide to do would be to pull the offending product and apologize.
Instead, imagine my surprise when I read the paper the Sunday morning of Super Bowl LII.
TIDE WAS EVERYWHERE!
The iconic Tide detergent jug and and the rainbow-laden Pods packaging were in Target ads, grocery circulars, drugstore ads, and coupon books. They were even running clippable coupons inside the newspaper on the black-and-white news pages, for goodness sake!
Tide was going ALL IN on the print advertising.
I wondered what was up. When we tuned in to watch the Super Bowl, it wasn't long before we had the answer. Great googley moogley!
Tide had gone CRAZY on the Super Bowl television ads as well!
was.... Bold. Clever. Relentless. Unapologetic.
Even the
@AdWeek Twitter account was congratulating P&G for a clever campaign. A few tweeters piped up with a brave, "But what about the Pods?" For the most part, though, people were reacting favorably.
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Afterward, the sport blog "The Wrap" noted:
"Tide remo
The Tide had turned.
Impressed by the print-TV media blitz, I thought the work by Tide's advertising agency was done. However, the next day we received a Tide-heavy P&G coupon pack in our mailbox.
Lo and behold, they were upping the ante with direct mail!
And yesterday we received our local grocery circular for the week's specials, delivered by postal carrier route saturation. There was the Tide jug and the Pods, taking up a quarter of the page with a bold $2 off coupon in a Mom-and-Pop ad shopper.
Tide was throwing down in print, in direct mail, and on television.
Already the TV campaign has been heralded a success, garnering a
Super Clio
for best campaign of the Super Bowl.
[Business Insider has a list of all the 2018 Super Bowl television ads
here.]
If the goal of the Tide Super Bowl campaign was to clean up their image, they definitely moved the ball downfield.
Best of all, print was a visible and pivotal strategy in this high-profile campaign!
The truth is, PRINT WORKS, and the biggest brands on Earth prove it every day.
Keep the multi channels flowing!
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"The Industry that Vents Together Stays Together"
Responses to all Articles and Bo-Rants are greatly encouraged
and may be included in " BoSacks Readers Speak Out"
All news items and the various opinions expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily the opinion of, nor in agreement with the opinions of BoSacks. They are just interesting thoughts and other opinions that BoSacks thinks you should know about.
After all, as the Japanese proverb goes:
"If you believe everything you read, perhaps you better not read."
"Heard on the Web" Media Intelligence:
Courtesy of The Precision Media Group.
Print, Publishing and Media Consultants
193 Brookwood Drive, Charlottesville VA 22902
www.bosacks.com
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