Tag Archives: Advertising

Why don’t books carry ads?

Posted on by
4

My hol­i­day enter­tain­ment was watch­ing an end­less cara­van of rain clouds cross the skies of a Bre­ton pen­in­sula. As an occa­sional diver­sion, I read a French guide book from 1909. Its pages were full of ads for grand hotels with casi­nos and spas where auto­mo­biles could be hired and fun could be had. All just five years before the Great War.

It wasn’t the hind­sight that got me think­ing though. It was the ads. Book sales are on the up. More people than ever are pub­lish­ing books. Why no ads? If advert­isers want to go where the audi­ence is, why aren’t they nest­ling in the pages of Lem­ony Snicket or Ian McE­wan?

I asked someone in the pub­lish­ing biz. The integ­rity of the book, they said. The book as object. An advert­ising free space. Well, I can see that argu­ment for the Lindis­farne Gos­pels, but for vaca­tion reading?

Surely it has to come. Wouldn’t a couple of pages in a Harry Pot­ter be worth some­thing to someone? Don’t pub­lish­ers talk to advert­isers? Maybe you could offer cheap books with ads and expens­ive books without, and see which ones people preferred…maybe it’s already happening.

How television made money

Posted on by
Reply

A brief account of how net­work bosses make money from Dan Lyons at For­bes, aka Fake Steve Jobs:

What the fuck is a tele­vi­sion net­work? It’s a sys­tem of affil­i­ates designed to help carry a broad­cast sig­nal across the wide con­tin­ent of Amer­ica on air­waves and into tele­vi­sion sets owned by mil­lions of people. In essence, you are in the dis­tri­bu­tion busi­ness. In the second half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury you had the great good for­tune to be gran­ted a kind of lim­ited mono­poly over the dis­tri­bu­tion of a very valu­able com­mod­ity. There were only so many air­waves, hence only so many net­works. There were way more advert­isers than there were chan­nels to carry their advert­ising. So you sat there with your choke-hold on the garden hose, con­trolling the flow of pro­gram­ming and get­ting fat­ter and fat­ter and fatter.

It was a won­der­ful sys­tem. For you any­way. Except that it had one huge flaw. Which is that for you guys, the middle­men, to get rich, you needed to fuck over the people at both ends of the value chain — the con­sumers who had no choice in what they watched and spent years being fed moun­tains of dog shit, and the pro­du­cers of con­tent who were at your mercy and had to nego­ti­ate with this tiny num­ber of net­works who oper­ated, let’s be hon­est here, as a kind of cartel.

It’s over now. Your busi­ness model was a his­tor­ical anom­aly built on scarcity of a valu­able resource and the will­ing­ness of a small group of net­work oper­at­ors to not slit each other’s throats and to col­lab­or­ate in exploit­ing the con­tent producers.

Advertising, content and discontinuity

Posted on by
2

I was just read­ing Vin Cros­bie’s latest post in which he repeats the line that news­pa­per cir­cu­la­tion has been fall­ing for 30 years. (Leo Bog­art noted that it was 1971 when total US news­pa­per cir­cu­la­tion dropped below total num­ber of house­holds.) Since the 1980s TV has been facing sim­ilar decline.

Cros­bie says it’s all about con­tent. But look at the last fun­da­mental advert­ising plat­form revolu­tion in media, when national TV arrived in the 1960s. It swept away mater­ial for which it offered no dir­ect replace­ment at all, except — under legis­lat­ive man­date — news. The shift online is not a dis­place­ment process.

In The Power and the Profits, David Hal­ber­stam wrote this on the advert­ising implic­a­tions of nation­ally net­worked pro­gram­ming:

The pos­sib­il­it­ies of nation­wide advert­ising on tele­vi­sion trans­formed the nature of Amer­ican com­mu­nic­a­tions. After­noon news­pa­pers began to atrophy and die. Large-circulation magazines, which up until then had been the main con­duit of mass advert­ising — for razor blades, beer, tires, cars, main house­hold goods — could not com­pete with tele­vi­sion for advert­ising or audi­ences. Within a few years many of them were dead.

A new mass audi­ence was eager for mass enter­tain­ment: along with it came new dimen­sions in hard-sell mass advert­ising. It was all big­ger, and reached more and more people, and the qual­ity was pitched just a few notches lower. Dra­matic changes in the rela­tion­ship of pro­grams to spon­sors marked the trend.

Hal­ber­stam, incid­ent­ally, called the inform­a­tion part of that revolu­tion — TV news — “the national séance.”

Blog-vertorial

Posted on by
Reply

In case you’ve been doz­ing, the blo­go­sphere is filling up with the reac­tions to Val­ley­wag’s rev­el­a­tion that not­able tech blog­gers have been drop­ping Microsoft slo­gans into their copy.


My reac­tion to the scan­dal? Well, I’m lovin’ it.

Next time, how­ever, the blog­gers con­cerned should think dif­fer­ent.

Just for the record, you won’t be see­ing under­cover advert­ising on this blog. And if that changes — you’ll be the first to know.