Road Signs

Steve Smith, reports for Behavioral Insider: “According to Peerset, an ad targeting venture that leverages social data in a unique way, our interests are reflected most accurately by our expressions online rather than our browsing history.” For example:” If you mention the word “chocolate” here and there in your online blog and comment posts, the odds are pretty good you are also interested in Audis, lacrosse, Easthampton and weeds.”

J.D. Power and Associates, famous for its quantitative measures of consumer behavior when it comes to car buying, is now adding that sort of qualitative research for its clients. Writing for Marketing Daily, Karl Greenberg, says the company’s new Auto Intelligence Monitor, combines data and insight from social media conversations about automaker brands and models with marketplace retail sales and segment data. In a semi-scholarly post for the U.K.’s Car Rental, Mark Rainford writes, “magazines are developing the core competencies required for a multi-platform future. Auto journalists will always need to be good to write, but soon every journalist is expected to be proficient in video production, presentation, editing, and some may need to know how we can develop electronic media such as Web pages and online magazines. The Internet should not be seen as a problem for auto magazines but more of a price change.”

And quotes Autocar editor-in-chief Steve Cropley: “It could be suggested that Autocar has become a hybrid magazine, printed and distributed each week, but also with a daily updated online presence at www.autocar.com.

Once again, young Americans’ romance with cars is being questioned. This time by Jack Neff in an Advertising Age piece titled: “Is digital revolution driving decline in U.S. car culture?” He points to the considerable decrease in licensed 16 and 17-year-old drivers. Once nearly 50% and 75%, respectively, of their age group were licensed. The percentages are down to 31% and 49%. And the amount of driving by the under-30 age group has diminished as well. While a number of reasons are advanced for this decline in car interest, a good number are related to the Internet. Neff cites William Draves’ belief that, “the digital age is reshaping the U.S. and world early in this century, much like the automobile reshaped American life early in the last century. Draves is president of Lern, a consulting firm that focuses mainly on higher education, and co-author of “Nine Shift.” Draves’ theory is that almost everything about digital media and technology makes cars less desirable or useful and public transportation a lot more relevant. . . . . That may not be all bad, as teenagers multitasking with computers, IPads and other digital devices could tend to function without focus and not really be there even when present, like behind the wheel of a car. It is not a phenomenon limited to youth according to a recent New York Times article by Matt Richel, titled, “Hooked On Gadgets and Paying A Mental Price.” He says, “…scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.”

On a happier note, AOL is planning to hire as many as 500 writers and editors in the next year. Quoted by Michael Learmonth on Ad Age.com, David Eun, president of AOL’s Media and Studio Division, “We are going to be the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year.” In addition, Learmonth reports, “Mr. Eun wants to quickly ramp up the number of freelancers contributing to AOL. Currently there are about 40,000 freelancers contributing to AOL, its SEED content production arm and Studio One. Mr. Eun said the company is still working on a system that measures the value of a piece of content based on the number of people that click, how long they stay, and the amount of ad revenue associated with it.” The company’s chances of building profitable subscription bases for its various content divisions are rated better than average among paywall startups. The reasoning being that building subscriptions requires direct marketing know how and AOL has spent 15 years doing that for their services.

In case there was any question, the Center For Automotive Research (CAR) reports that the automotive industry continues to contribute significantly to the U.S, economy and employment. Specifically, 1.7 million jobs. CAR reports the industry’s impact in each of the 50 states and is available at www.cargroup.org.

The Washington Post Company is hoping its trash may be another company’s treasure. Chairman Donald Graham acknowledged in putting Newsweek Magazine up for sale that they couldn’t stem the red ink and it might be a better fit elsewhere . . . Brandwire reports GQ Magazine unveiled a bespoke plug-in hybrid Citron in England last March to go with its branded tailored suits, after shave and hand-made shoes. . . . Wooden Horse News revealed that Canada’s Auto Journal Group has filed for bankruptcy and its six motor magazines are undergoing changes. Which may be why some U.S, freelancers have complained about slow or no pay from work they did for unnamed outlets north of the border.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence In Journalism revealed editors at newspaper-related companies “praise the cultural shifts in their organizations, the younger tech-savvy staff and a growing sense of experimentation,” According to Mediapost.com, half of those surveyed believe their operation will survive another 10 years without significant new sources of revenue. . . . A good thing, too, because a recent Nielsen survey of 27,000 consumers across 52 countries revealed that 78% of them believe that if they already subscribe to a newspaper, magazine, radio or TV service they should be able to use its online content for free- as reported by Gavin O’Malley in Online Media Daily.

And, as a Pew State of the Media Report puts it in a felicitous conclusion, writes Jacqui Cheng in Ars Technica, “when it comes to online news, getting people to pay for content they otherwise value is “like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons.” . . . While it is presently too expensive for most individual users at $295.00 a year and likely too ponderous for daily news use, a new online resource Wired Magazine describes as “the Anti-Google”, Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO) has been launched by Oxford University Press. According to Wired it is, “essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced bibliographies in different subject areas. The idea is to alleviate the twin problems of Google-induced data overload, on the one hand, and Wikipedia-driven GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), on the other.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt may have sounded self-serving in his prediction that it will be “mobile first” as quoted in last month’s Autowriters.Com Newsletter. However, when Morgan Stanley managing director and “Queen of the Net”, Mary Meeker says so in her latest very detailed: “State of The Internet” report, it is hard to ignore. As quoted by Mathew Ingram at GigaOM, Meeker predicts “within five years more users will connect with the Internet over mobile devices than through desktop PCs.” She, of course, relates this to prospects for communications hardware companies and the commercial search and social potentials for the web.

Driving this trend in the U.S. (and no doubt Japan and elsewhere) and of particular important to providers of content for the web are media users between the ages of 8 to 18. A study of kids’ use of media (referred to us by reader Doug Stokes) shows their average time spent in reading a newspaper has dropped in five years from 6 minutes to 3 minutes per day! During the same time span, the study sponsored by The Kaiser Family Foundation found that mobile devices are expanding the number of hours youths can consume media, even while on the go. As it prepares to enter and influence the world’s use of media, this age group has increased its daily media use by one hour and seventeen minutes to 7:28 hours per day. By multitasking they boost that daily average to 10:45 hours– seven days a week.

In the process, Mike Doherty notes in Media Post, the new generation of web users “process data five times faster than most of us and use a language of abbreviations, fragments and images to click on rather than text. And, they are always on.” In The Danger of Always Being On, New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, cites the risks of “a print culture built on careful reporting, layers of editing and time for reflection as it moves onto platforms where speed is everything and attitude sometimes trumps values like accuracy and restraint.”  Ironically, on the same page as Hoyt’s piece, columnist Frank Rich decries the near universal acceptance of the “mistakes were made mantra” in lieu of assigning or accepting responsibility. When we accept errors without consequences in national affairs how accountable can writers be for spelling, grammar and often, facts, when trying to stay up to speed in feeding and using the Internet? Like a driver entering a crowded, really crowded freeway, where observing the speed limits may get him rear ended.

“There may be less going on here than meets the eye.”

Media Digest’s quote of the week from The Economist may apply to social media as well as to the net generation’s “digital natives” the paper was referencing.

For example: While thousands of “friends” may be accumulated on Facebook, an on-going study at Oxford University puts the brain’s capacity for maintaining relationships at 150 persons. Reported by Chris Gourlay in www.timesonline.co.uk. Or, Twitter has unleashed 10 billion “tweets” in three years and at its current rate of more than 50 million per day will double that total by the end of the year, according to gigatweet, reported in Media Digest. Yet, the great bulk of those “tweets” come from about five percent of Twitter members. Or, AOL is creating an incestuous content factory that uses search engines to scour the web searching out hot topics and then farming out assignments to citizen journalists and professional editors to create more of the same. 

And AOL is not alone.

Daniel Blackman, writing for Media Post’s, Online Publishing Insider, says, “At this very moment, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of articles are being created on a scale never before seen in the media world. Algorithms generate specific topics, then keyword-stuffed articles are quickly written. It’s the shotgun marriage of Henry Ford and Johannes Gutenberg, consecrated by the Internet. Much of this content isn’t being generated in order to inform, inspire, or to entertain. Its raison d’être is simply to be found by the search bots and then served up to deliver ad clicks. The content is only a means to an end.” Yet, as Desi Tzoneva reports in Media Post, research this January by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found that traditional media still generates the bulk of information that reaches the public: