2nd of 5 Reasons why printed media will evolve

Markus — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 14:30:35 +0000

Note: This is the second part of my week-long series of posting 5 reasons why I think the printed media will have to evolve and what I think it should evolve to. The steps will be posted daily starting with this on a Monday, and ending on this week’s Friday.

If you missed the first part “Time is of the essence”, you can find it here.

2. Advertising dollars are being spent elsewhere

The Daily WTF (brilliant blog, by the way) did an April fools skit on their site, stating that they’d received venture capital money and made millions upon millions of dollars. This was a load of bull, but their post had an interesting bit:

With Web 2.0, we saw the collapse of every major newspaper and magazine. These days, your local newsstand is just as likely to carry Nickel Naks and Whiz Bars as they are a paper periodical.

But content isn’t just going online, it’s growing online. Experts say that a million new blogs are created each day and, within a year, that number will grow to two million a day. With such a massive influx of content, no one will have time to read anything. That is, unless it’s 140 characters or less.

The last part hit me. “With such a massive influx of content, no one will have time to read anything. That is, unless it’s 140 characters or less.” Although that’s a joke about Twitter‘s 140 symbol post limit, it has a point. People have gone lazy. Not just because there’s so much content everywhere, but because it’s been made easy for us.

There are previously mentioned infographics and videos everywhere, most news items also tell the same thing in video so we don’t have to read anymore. The reason this series is split in five posts during five days is simply because of the reason, that after the first post I was past 600 words and I realized that no one would read it since it’s so long. So, because the web offers us such an easy way to consume data in pretty much any way we want, we spend a lot of time online.

This means, that the advertisers follow the users.

Bring on the economies of scale

Before, the printed media had all the information about the users, they had address and profiles. They were a machine, that was selling ads like mad, because they were pretty much the only media that was democratic in the sense that anyone with 5 dollars could buy an posting in the classifieds while the big daddies could spend millions in their massive campaigns. They reached hundreds of thousands of people or you could target in specific magazines that catered to a more limited audience.

You see where this is going? I thought you would.

Then came the web. It was crude at first, offering mainly information in the form of business cards online, but web 2.0 changed everything. People were participating and giving up their information in different medias. Suddenly we knew pretty much everything about our users. Google indexed our e-mails and Facebook even knew who our friends were. Now advertisers had the option of targeting millions of people globally that shared the same interests. Facebook has 175 million users, from which they know pretty much anything. So if I want to advertise my product to 28 year old men in Helsinki that have over 500 Facebook friends, I can do it.

You still can get results with pennies, because the web also brought measurable results. Now we have statistics and showing advertisements in the forms on banners that get paid by the number of views are becoming dinosaurs from the Web 1.0 era. now we pay when someone clicks our advertisement and finds themselves sucking in our wonderful products. The big daddies can cover millions of people with the same money they spent earlier to reach only hundreds of thousands. And the best thing about the web? There are no specific days you can advertise, no renewals, no hassle. You make a good “campaign” and it might live on for months or even years.

Thanks to the new wave in augmented reality (AR), print ads are seeing a renaissance – mainly thanks to the fact that they show content from the internet which could be viewed even without the magazines.

Still, the numbers show it and have shown it for a long time to my eyes. Online advertisement spending is growing day by day and all other numbers and medias will keep on falling, and I can’t see anything in the near future that could trump the power of the web. Which is why I find it ridiculous, that so many companies still plan their television and print campaigns first and then, and only then start thinking of what they should do online to support their print ads (and use the little that’s left of their money.)

Do you know any new, cool things done in other mediums than the web – that have provided measurable results?

Infographics as art

Markus — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:30:18 +0000

As computers and technologies have become more available, info-graphics went from being subway maps, charts and other two-dimensional objects more towards art. We now have cheaper and more powerful computers and open sourced, free software that removes the limits of technology to a level. As was seen earlier in my post titled “The Crisis of Credit” where an info-graphic video by Jonathan Jarvis showed the origins and behavior behind the credit crisis, information has become more available as well.

Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Above is a video by Swedish student Tomas Nilsson called Slagsmålsklubben that he did for his school work. According to him:

School assignment to reinterpret the fairytale Little red riding hood.
Inspired by Röyksopps Remind me.

It not only shows Mr. Nilsson’s skills on doing informative animations, but it tells a story within a more classic story. Although info-graphics are quite time and resource consuming to produce, they have an amazing impact and I hope to see more of them.

If you have links and information about similar videos or use cases, I’d be interested in hearing them!

Varha.com | Markus Varha » infographics

2nd of 5 Reasons why printed media will evolve

Infographics as art