May 13, 2005

Why didn't Jeff Goldblum get a Tony nomination? Yesterday I was talking about stories; the Broadway play Goldblum is in - "The Pillowman" - is ALL about storytelling. What a trip!

Outsourcing - Get with the Program

Fredo says, "Let's talk more about outsourcing." Well, for me the most vivid outsourcing story in Thomas Friedman's latest best seller "The World is Flat" is about the McDonald's restaurants in Missouri that outsource their drive-through windows to a call center in Colorado.

That's right, you drive up and place your order in Missouri, and the order is taken by someone in Colorado. An electronic photo is taken of you, and the photo and order are sent back to the restaurant. AND your order is ready more quickly and more accurately.

Order time has been cut down by about 30 seconds, which means the restaurants can each handle about 30 more cars per hour. AND the accuracy of orders is twice what it was before.

That's the lesson of outsourcing today: The advantages go beyond price now to include speed AND productivity. So, if there's something we're doing that someone else can do better and cheaper, isn't that great?! It leaves time for us to focus on what WE can do better than anyone else. Don't know what that is? Well, time to figure out...'cause that's how we'll all be defined.

Who's Reading the Newspaper?

This week we got new numbers on newspaper circulation, and it's down. Again. There's been a 1.9% drop in daily circulation and a 2.3% decline on Sundays over the past six months, compared with the same period a year ago. For some papers, the decline is even greater. Circulation of the Los Angeles Times, for example, is down 7.9%

Obviously, there are a lot more outlets for information. And consumers are turning increasingly to the Internet for their up-to-the-minute news.

But, I think that one of the problems is that newspaper people are trying to solve newspapers' problems. As papers go through re-designs, they inevitably turn to people who specialize in - you guessed it - newspaper design. What if they turned to some of the bright new designers who have much broader experience and exposure and will bring a fresh perspective to the challenge of making every newspaper more relevant and indispensible? Newspapers are not designed for today's reader. It's that simple.

Of course, there's another marketing problem which is that newspapers have long relied upon telemarketing to generate subscriptions. And that's tougher to accomplish with the introduction of the "do not call" list in 2003. One antidote for that is to identify the Lifestyle Touchpoints of potential newspaper readers and intercept them there in new and creative ways.

Smartly marketed newspapers can not only survive, they can flourish.

More Stats on Online Advertising

We were talking earlier in the week about dramatic increases in online advertising. Forrester Research has recently released a new five-year forecast saying that online advertising will represent 8% of total advertising in 2010, which makes it competitive with spending on cable/satellite TV and radio.

The report says that online consumers spend about the same amount of time online as they do watching television. Yet marketers only spend 4% of their ad budgets online, vs. 25% on TV.

Online advertising spending is going to explode!

HR Wisdom

My friend Rick Throckmorton, a former wiz partner at Booz Allen Hamilton, has this wisdom about identifying good people:

"People who see patterns, rather than things, are the people who can do something significant."