Competing Mediums
The other evening I watched presentations made at Idea City ‘04 on television. Every year Idea City hosts some interesting people to present interesting ideas, "meeting of minds".
One presenter focused on how valuable an individuals time has become. He brought up the topic of newspapers and specifically USA Today which in the 1980’s had redesigned their newspaper. The design had a lot of pictures, graphs, colour and small tidbits of news which could easily be read. The point he made was that newspapers were fighting television so in order to compete with them they surrendered and made their publication look like printed television. What happened to USA Today was that readership went downhill. On the other hand newspapers like the Globe and Mail made their publication as simple as possibly, just mainly text. The Globes readership went up after this redesign.
A few weeks ago someone leaves me a message asking why I had not renewed my subscription to their magazine and if I could call Mr. X at the following number to explain why. Yeah right I was going to do that, waste my time for people who don’t value mine and all for what? I’ve cancelled subscriptions to magazines before and was curious why they even called, did they have a lot of people who cancelled also. When I subscribed to this magazine, actually is was a newspaper who called itself a magazine. This publication focused on marketing and was very simple in design, all text very few images and almost no advertisements. Then they announced they were redesigning the magazine. They new design was now printed like any other glossy magazine, no more newsprint. But the new design made things difficult to read, lots of graphics and advertisements. Can you guess who they were competing against? Their competition was the internet and all the pages in the magazine now began to resemble a bunch of web sites. They too had surrendered to the internet. But what really turned me off was the content. After reading a few articles I began to feel insulted, bull shit was their new strategy. This was a publication I looked to for insightful and intelligent opinions about marketing, this too had changed. Don’t compete with mediums compete with content.
Also I don’t think it’s a very good idea to insult yours readers then call them to find out why you cancelled your subscription when your mag is a big waste of time.
One presenter focused on how valuable an individuals time has become. He brought up the topic of newspapers and specifically USA Today which in the 1980’s had redesigned their newspaper. The design had a lot of pictures, graphs, colour and small tidbits of news which could easily be read. The point he made was that newspapers were fighting television so in order to compete with them they surrendered and made their publication look like printed television. What happened to USA Today was that readership went downhill. On the other hand newspapers like the Globe and Mail made their publication as simple as possibly, just mainly text. The Globes readership went up after this redesign.
A few weeks ago someone leaves me a message asking why I had not renewed my subscription to their magazine and if I could call Mr. X at the following number to explain why. Yeah right I was going to do that, waste my time for people who don’t value mine and all for what? I’ve cancelled subscriptions to magazines before and was curious why they even called, did they have a lot of people who cancelled also. When I subscribed to this magazine, actually is was a newspaper who called itself a magazine. This publication focused on marketing and was very simple in design, all text very few images and almost no advertisements. Then they announced they were redesigning the magazine. They new design was now printed like any other glossy magazine, no more newsprint. But the new design made things difficult to read, lots of graphics and advertisements. Can you guess who they were competing against? Their competition was the internet and all the pages in the magazine now began to resemble a bunch of web sites. They too had surrendered to the internet. But what really turned me off was the content. After reading a few articles I began to feel insulted, bull shit was their new strategy. This was a publication I looked to for insightful and intelligent opinions about marketing, this too had changed. Don’t compete with mediums compete with content.
Also I don’t think it’s a very good idea to insult yours readers then call them to find out why you cancelled your subscription when your mag is a big waste of time.
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