The world's biggest focus group

As American Idol winds down its season tonight and bids adieu to its most formidable long-running participant, this is a great opportunity to put the spotlight on the show and what it can teach us about social media. AI actually predates what we’ve come to think of as social media by several years, but its overwhelming success is founded on many of the same principles that govern brand marketers every day.

Every week the viewers of American Idol comprise the world’s largest product development focus group. While it’s easy to focus on it as a Survivor-style game show, it can easily be forgotten that AI’s real purpose each season is to discover and groom a new pop artist for the show’s owner, which just happens to be an entertainment conglomerate. Sure, the judges will try to guide audience response, but AI fans can name numerous occasions when the vote didn’t go the way the judges wanted

The audience’s buy-in is another peculiar element of the show.  By encouraging participation, the audience has an emotional stake in the winning product before it even launches. What marketer wouldn’t love that?  The product (in the form of a pop singer’s debut album) arrives mere months after the show’s finale with little risk to the record company, certainly compared to sending out A&R people meant to guess what The Next Big Thing might be.

There are also inherent danger in letting the audience take control.  For me, the ost frustrating aspect of reality competition shows is the lack of clear rules to the game.  Without standards or ideals to apply, the audience – and sometimes the judges – can become confused over what exactly they are judging, especially for something as qualitative as ‘pop stardom quotient.’

The result can be a mess: sometimes ingenius in its preferences (Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood), other times selecting dud winners that offered only short-term satisfaction (Ruben Studdard, Taylor Hicks).  It’s the noisy American polity celebrated by DeToqueville writ large.

That’s appropriate for something called American Idol.  Is it right for your product?

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Despite this I’m yet to see a dry cleaner go on the offensive to increase their revenue or take market share.  I’m sure many think that location is enough to take customers and get loyalty.  It’s not.  I travel all over my town every day.  If Purple Tie shows up in the workplace, that would automatically become a good candidate to steal my business.

The lifetime value of a customer is potentially huge.  Even in these slower times, my household easily spends $500 annually on its dry cleaning.  Knowing little about the business, I have to imagine that the margins are pretty good, possibly as much as 50%.   This implies that a customer in your neighborhood who visits your business for five years is worth well over $1000 to you.  So it’s amazing that dry cleaners do so little to attract customers and retain them.

So after the jump here are a few modest low-cost proposals for marketing a dry cleaning business to bring in new customers and keep them:

1. Loyalty programs: It’s incredible that in a market where it’s as easy for customers to switch vendors as crossing the street – literally so on Oakland’s Grand Avenue – that cleaners do so little to lock you in.  If the average annual value of a customer is $250 profit, I’d gladly give you a few dollars back to make sure you keep coming to me.  How about $10 back on every $100?  Or a baker’s dozen for shirt laundry?
2. Tiered pricing: Most of the time when I come in I ask for rush service – and then don’t pick up the order for days afterward.  Yes, I suck, but I’m betting this is pretty common practice.  Why should rush service priced the same as “regular”?  When I come in and demand 24 or 48-hour service when the business’s standard is something more, essentially what I’m doing is asking to jump the queue in front of every other customer.  Clarify your pricing policy, charge a premium for premium service and give customers a perceived break for getting your regular service.
3. Be a community hub: There are few places in the neighborhood that everyone uses as they do a dry cleaner.  Put up a bulletin board and encourage flyering.  If you tell your customers that you are a center of life in the neighborhood, then they will treat you that way.
4. Take advantage of word of mouth and low-cost advertising: The big easy money in dry cleaners clearly comes from doing specialty items like carpets and wedding dresses.  I’ve never seen a dry cleaner that asks for reviews on Yelp, but that’s the first place folks of a certain age go to look for that kind of service.  Further, opportunity abounds through tight geographic targeting on AdWords, Facebook and the like.  A quick googling of “dry cleaning” around me yielded ads for national services and one in San Rafael – a mere 30 miles away!
5. Introductory specials: First time there?  Give discounts for a big-ticket items.  If they like your service, they’ll be back.
6. Have a sale: Sometimes that big-ticket item just lingers.  I’ve had it on my ‘long list’ to get our living room carpet cleaned for literally years.  If you offered a 10% discount for a limited time, I bet that would motivate me.

Finally a cynical word about “green.”  Some of my locals have higher prices – sometimes outrageously so – because they don’t use perc.  Many of your customers will appreciate the opportunity to support a safer, more environmentally friendly technique, but remember: by not using perc, you reap all the benefits, both your own health and the extra profit implicit in the premium pricing.   The customer gets no tangible benefit, so to reach & retain the average customer, especially in more frugal times, you’d better be offering ‘something else’ to land them.  Either that or you need to offer premium service – open Sunday? Delivery?  Something.

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One of the key reasons to register with Lala is the right to stream music that you own to any computer: a great service and potentially world-beating if you can make it happen on portable devices as well.  (‘Ownership’ is defined as having a copy, regardless of how you might have acquired it.)  The catch – and it’s a big one – is that you have to download a program from Lala that reads your MP3 library and uploads ID information from each of your files.  If you have a large library, it’s an absurdly long process – I gave up in an hour with less than 5% of my collection read.  Even for a modestly-sized library, the upload routine is still odious, time-consuming and puts the onus on the user to do too much work.

(Aside: Why is this legal now for Lala but when the original MP3.com had a similar service back in the early years of the decade it was immediately sued out of existence?  That was even worse for the user; you had to download software and then insert all of your CDs for identification. At least in that model you had to prove you actually owned a physical – and presumably ‘real’ – CD. Puzzling.)

Apple, however, via its Genius feature in iTunes already knows what MP3s are in its users’ collections, which means it could be just a flip of a switch to allow users access to their music anywhere on any connected device.  If the purchase price really is as little as $17mm (as Techcrunch reported today), this is a total bargain to bring down one of the chief barriers to quick leadership in the “Stream Music Everywhere” market – not to mention avoiding all the negotiations Apple would have needed to go through with the copyright holders.

Pandora, Mog, Spotify, Last,fm and everyone else in the market may have just been trumped.  Lala’s current feature set added to iTunes takes Apple from nowhere to everywhere in single update for software that’s already ubiquitous. Small wonder that today’s gossip sees Pandora running like hell to expand its business into the car stereo market.

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Sell Out was The Who’s fourth LP and the band’s first attempt at a full-length concept album.  The schtick was that the album was really a radio show complete with interruptions for station IDs and commercials.  (This also made for a clever way to gloss over the production problem of the album’s schizophrenic body of songs – everything from Beach Boys pop to proto-metal.)  Underlining the “sell out” concept, many of the ads were for brands they loved with the hopes that Premier Drums and [ahem] Jaguar would shower the boys in the band with free product.

The album’s conceptual centerpiece is the track where it all comes together.  “Odorono” sounds like a sweet if overdone Byrds-y pop track with a curious narrative about a female singer’s big debut.  It’s not until the last line of the song that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that the whole 2+ minute song is an advert for deodorant.

Listen: The Who – The Who Sell Out

Of course that’s all performed as a sly joke.  But recent events have brought product placement in pop songs into the spotlight as a legitimate brand-builder.  Most notably Chris Brown’s “Forever” was revealed to be a jingle for Wrigley Doublemint Gum only after the track had already launched into the Top 10.  (Perhaps we should have noticed earlier because of the chorus: “Double your pleasure/double your fun”). “Forever” also shows in the most dramatic way possible the pitfalls and opportunities inherent in latching your brand to a pop song.  As anyone who has passed through a supermarket checkout lane in the last five months would have seen, Brown’s reputation is now tattered following a domestic violence incident with his then-girlfriend, Rihanna, and Wrigley subsequently pulled his spots out of rotation.

Out of the blue, “Forever” was hijacked by a viral video that has become one of 2009’s biggest hits, “JK Wedding Entrance Dance,” now standing at over 25 million views and providing Brown’s song an unexpected return to the iTunes Top 10 singles chart.  Reflecting on how the private lives of artists impact their professional output is often a fool’s game, so we should probably look past using a love song by a convicted girlfriend-beater for a wedding.  But one wonders if Jill & Kevin were aware how much of a role Wrigley played at their (now very public) nuptials and how much free publicity they would be giving the gum.  (Or do they work for Wrigley?  Nowthat would be brand dedication: product placement at your wedding.)  One thing’s for sure: Google noticed – and turned “JK Wedding Entrance Dance” into a case study for monetizing YouTube content.

Def Jam, meanwhile, is taking a different tack by reminding publishers that its products often have many more eyeballs than famous magazine and web brands.  To that end, Mariah Carey’s new album will include a 34-page mini-Elle magazine – while Elle will feature a 14-page spread about the album.  “We sell millions of records, so you should advertise with us,’ ” said Antonio “L.A.” Reid, IDJ’s chairman. “My artists have substantial circulation–when you sell 2 million, 5 million, 8 million, that’s a lot of eyeballs. Most magazines aren’t as successful as those records.” And, he might add, hit records have a lot more shelf life.  Just ask Chris Brown.  Or The Who.

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Baseball-dedicated magazines have been around since time immemorial and – like every other magazine segment – they aren’t exactly killing it these days.  Baseball Digest, founded in 1942, recently downshifted to an 8x schedule from monthly, while the baseball-heavy Sporting News showed a 39% decline in ad pages for the first half of 2009.  The biggest players in sports magazines, Sports Illustrated and ESPN: The Magazine, saw ad pages down 28% and 31% respectively in Q1 2009.  (Curiously SI for Kids is one of only 11 magazinesthat showed an ad page increase so far this year.)

MLB Insiders Club would need to bring something different to the table in order to succeed and what it promises is attractive: “Behind The Scenes looks into the clubhouse and front office of MLB teams” and “MLB Insiders Club Fantasy League Tips!”  First off, it’s surprising to hear that a major league would directly support fantasy leagues.  It would be a lucrative opportunity for a major sport league to get involved in fantasy leagues, but it’s also tantamount to supporting gambling – which has a history, especially in baseball, of being the worst crime a player or manager can commit.  One wonders if the MLB Powers That Be is aware that an official licensed product of this tacit endorsement.

As for “Behind The Scenes,” a review on Baseball Reflection reveals that the magazine practically begs for user-generated content.  The official license may get some access, but it certainly doesn’t guarantee more or better; the premiere issue features an interview with Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, but he’s probably MLB’s most open GM, frequently giving long interviews to blogs like Athletics Nation.  And if UGC is the majority of content, you can be pretty sure the fans mailing it in don’t have any special access.

MLB Insiders Club is published by North American Media Group, a company that specializes in niche media with a few key licenses, including the Professional Golf Association and History Channel.  In addition to magazines, it also pumps out expensive coffee table books.  So for $24/year, you get some indeterminate number of baseball magazines (they don’t say whether its monthly or what) and the opportunity to buy more books (or as the come-on says “Preview Great Books and DVD’s”).  Ouch.

Baseball’s marketing and media sophistication continue to be disappointing and well behind its rivals for attention in the NBA and NFL.  Few of MLB’s teams or players are involved in social networking, while Shaquille O’Neal is the world’s ninth most-followed twitterer (as of this writing) and the NFL has so many tweeters that it had to conjure a “No tweeting during games” policy.  When these other leagues and their team are putting together their communications strategies, they are way past trying to sell magazines to their best customers. With overall attendance down nearly 6% so far this year, MLB needs to do something to make itself more compelling – more necessary – to its fans.  A clever coordinated social networking policy would be an inexpensive, low-risk way to go, especially in light of the vitality of fantasy baseball – one of the original pre-Internet social networks.

More on point: yesterday the Giants E-mailed me an offer for $5 tickets for next week’s Pirates series for my “vote for Pablo.”  Now that’s something I can use.

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The catch is that despite this impressive performance, the monetization is not happening. Each time I’ve reviewed the site over the last couple of weeks, I’ve found a bare few national campaigns and a whole lot of ad network inventory. Sure, the latter can be ‘optimized’ (maybe) and sold for slightly-better-than-rock-bottom rates, but it’s still a long way away from charging premium rates to reach a highly targeted local audience.

Name-brand sites still want maximum reach, but this may be a situation that calls for a wildly different tack. With uniques handily exceeding population, there’s no way an ad team could claim its delivering a ‘uniquely Seattle’ audience to a local advertiser, much less one with certain desired attributes. On a local site with a local target audience, visitors from the rest of the web are not valuable. A restaurant in Seattle should not have to pay for an ad shown to a visitor from Schenectady. And this in turn drives content strategy: no longer should a newspaper site aspire to be the central hub of everything, but merely the central hub of its metro area. Leave the national news to the national sites.

Earlier today I picked up this year’s “Best Of” edition of Oakland’s East Bay Express. It’s chock-fat with useful content and ads from all over the East Bay, from sandwich shops to bakeries to beauty parlors. Long reliant on ads from big retailers, banks and real estate (among others)heyhe holy grail for SeattlePI and other MSM newspaper sites is to get these advertisers into their ecosystem and away from Google AdWords. And the way to` do that may be antithetical to everything they’ve ever wanted to achieve: get smaller.

In fact, under the radar (and probably not on purpose), the ‘getting small’ strategy is already well in use. According to the Inland Press Association (via Newsosaur), the newspapers with the smallest circulations have actually had the least impact on their bottom lines. That’s because they were never reliant on the big retail, bank and real estate ads that drove old newspaper profits. The weekly independent papers actually stand to recover well and retain these ads because of their long-standing relationships with local businesses.

So, yes, I see a future where the San Francisco Chronicle is no longer the dominant player in its metro area, but independents like the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly stand tall. These smaller papers with distinctive editorial voices and tighter relationships with local advertisers may be the future of the newspaper.

The question for the reputable MSM big-city dailies is how they can get true local businesses – the restaurants, nightlife, storefront businesses and so forth – to advertise. In these narrow margin times, that means putting out a marketing solution they can afford. So long as CPM remains the measuring stick, newspapers will need to reduce readership to make it truly affordable and guarantee they can reach the audience they need. Starting point: the number of uniques is something less than the metropolitan population.

In an era of worries about media and business homogenization – the ‘Walmart effect’ and c. – going small may be the best defense for keeping local media, attitudes and businesses flourishing.

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My bet � or, as last as things move these days, this month�s bet � is that we�ll start to see a merging of the forms.

As Malcolm Gladwell writes in this week�s New Yorker, the biggest handicap that underdogs give themselves is engaging in competition on the terms of the stronger party.� An underdog�s chance of victory nearly triples if it finds a way to not play the game.� Right now newspapers � whether they admit it or not � find themselves the underdog for information distribution but still (so far) the best at obtaining information.� So why do they insist on sharing the same distribution models as their potential destroyers?

The New York Times' new reader uses AIR capabilities to flow text and show video. (Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

The New York Times is one of the best at this.� To my knowledge, it was the first with a dedicated iPhone application, it looks great on a Kindle, and its new Adobe AIR format is simply spectacular.� Still, as everyone knows, the Times is hurting and in talks with everyone from Google to Geffen to find a suitor.

So instead of wringing our hands about public trusts and eroding institutions, perhaps we should be asking of our Third Estate �What can you do to adapt?� Something basic to your business model that doesn�t play to the other guys� strength?�� Here are a few I�ve thought about:

• Does it really need to be daily? If people are already receiving a stream of real-time news everywhere they go and at their desks, do newspapers need to be real-time, too?� Local �alternatives� with a more magazine-like format and deeper stories like the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly are well positioned to take over many of the essential local functions of a newspaper � and with lower circulation, their ad rates are less prohibitive, meaning they get the bar, restaurant and nightlife ads that are essentially blocked from big dailies.� Reliance on major retailers to be your biggest advertisers is a recipe for death in an era where retail doors will close continuously, like, forever.� (But what about the recent SF/LA closure of The Onion?� I�ll address that in a minute.)
• Does the news need to lead? Every news site has a �Most Frequently Viewed� or �Most Frequently E-Mailed� feature.� Let�s face it.� It�s very rare that the top stories, even on the most serious sites, are today�s news.� (Or as SFist notes about the Huffington Post today: �Boobies.� Boobies.� Boobies.� Boobies.� Boob.�)� I would hate to see our locals ignore the news, but why couldn�t it be treated like a magazine cover � with offers of advice, news coverage, quizzes�� Things that reel the reader in.

  Here are today�s SF Chronicle leads:
  *� A stricter, drier Bay to Breakers
  *� Craigslist cuts ‘erotic services’ section
  *� If state cuts too deep, it loses stimulus funds
  *� Senate testimony sheds light on alleged torture
  *� Young boost diversity as population ages

  Seriously, not a single one of these lines would sell a magazine at the checkstand.� No editorial viewpoint expressed, no help offered� simply no answer to�Why buy?�� Why not feature elements from throughout the paper?��� “Take your medicine, it�s good for you” doesn�t work for marketers in any other industry, including medicine.� Why is it the norm here?

• Does it need to be shaped like a newspaper? Why not a glossy cover?� Billions of magazines have done just fine that way.� In particular, I�m a fan of The Atlantic and The New Yorker�s newsstand strategy: a single compelling image with a flap violator that entices the reader to pick up the magazine and look inside.
• Can it be targeted better than �It�s local, it�s yours�? In printing �All The News That Fits�, newspapers lose the single biggest weapon a marketer has: the freedom to select an audience.� It�s wonderful that the Chronicle expresses the region�s diversity and interests, but I think it�s fair to say that the news interests of, for example, a 70-year old woman in the Sunset and a 25-year old man in The Mission are very different.� So how come the same information in the same format is being sold to both?� Using copy splits, could different front pages go to different neighborhoods � and not just regional sections to outlying areas?
  It�s also worth noting that this could open up new revenue streams.� In my opinion, one of the seeds of the demise of The Onion in SF/LA is that it didn�t take the thinly-veiled prostitution ads that are easy money for the Bay Guardian and SF Weekly.� With CraigsList now discontinuing those same ads, that�s a lot of advertising cash set free.� Where will it go?� Well, if you had a well-targeted newspaper that didn�t need to worry about offending its audience with certain content/ads, you just might be able to scoop it up.� So, yes, I�m imagining a world where �Candy TS Outcalls� replaces Macy�s.)
• Further, why is it serving so much of the area? In an era when advertisers pay more for the specificity of an audience, why is the San Francisco Chronicle the leading paper of Contra Costa County?� And Oakland?� And most of remote Northern California?� Surely some of these readers are more profitable than others.� And those that aren�t can get their news somewhere else.
• Does every copy need to have the same content? When I received the Sunday paper, the first thing I did every week was throw away 50% or more of it.� Why not allow a la carte sections?
• Is it automatic for its customers – and especially its best ones? Mark Cuban – who got me thinking about this originally and reels off another thousand or so ideas in his blog post on the subject – points out that his local paper was blowing one of the very basic elements of keeping him engaged: pricing policies.� Aside from receiving no volume discount, Cuban says that the billing policies discourage people from staying involved.� Why aren�t subscriptions annual � or far more?� In the core areas, closest to the printer and the most attractive identified customers, especially those that own their home and are less likely to move, why not offer 5 years, 10 years, even a lifetime subscription?
• Finally, what unique advantages can newspapers bring to ‘real-time’ media? Yes, there’s still an opportunity for symmetric warfare for newspapers.� My old colleague Sebastian Provencher at Praized Media recently blogged on just this with regard to the Yellow Pages, but it applies equally well to local paopers.� His 2300-word post on real-time information flow between local merchants and customers should be required reading for local media outlets that seeks to make its revenue from being an intermediary in these relationships.� You should have a look, but I can boil it down to one tantalizing word: souq.

I�m curious for your thoughts on this since I know my few readers are newspaper lovers, too.� Don�t forget to comment!

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As anyone who follows media knows by now, magazines have been hit with a triple-witching the last few years: collapsing CPMs for even the most difficult-to-target audiences (in light of the targeting capabilities of the Internet) and plus collapsing advertising page sales; slackening demand; and rising distribution costs.

The big bellwether is now upon us.� Conde Nast, really the last of the big-spending believers in magazine, first quietly packed off Domino and a few other titles and, more dramatically, this week closed Portfolio, for which the company had reportedly spent over $100mm to launch.� (Portfolio was a poorly-timed entry – a well-written glamor magazine about business caught up in, well, now.� But it was also schizophrenic.� Despite being targeted at business elite, it was also weirdly basic; a column in the first issue, for example, explained how interest rates work[?!?!].)

While most attention has been paid to falling ad pages, it�s really the CPM problem that most fundamentally egs the question of whether the magazine industry will get anywhere close to its old business model ever again.� Publishers formerly charged $30-100 to reach a hard-to-reach passionate target � say, ukulele players � while now that CPM on AdWords is not just catastrophically lower but also available by auction.� In other words, not just the price is better; it�s the buying process, too, with better information creating a more efficient market.

So what for magazines to do?� The most obvious choice is simply to start charging readers, which is what many of the newsweeklies are now trying to do.� Any subscriber to Wired can see that they are getting their magazines at a steep unprofitable discount.� ($12 for 12 issues written, designed, printed and mailed?� Probably more like $30.� Printing and postage alone is probably well more than $1.25 per copy.� I�ve long said that Conde Nast magazines are one of the great bargains of American life, like home plumbing and the US mail.)

But the reality is that it�s going to be a very hard road to convince readers to pay after being trained into receiving content for free (the Internet) or near-free (magazines) for their entire lives, no matter how great the reporting or photography.� In the face of low demand, we�ll see massive changes in how these magazines work in the next few years � maybe months.

Another possible answer could come from the manufacturing side.� The biggest challenge with magazine business models as they stand stems from their battleship-turning nature.� It takes a long time to build circulation to get to a saleable advertising proposition; it takes an equally long time to deflate that unprofitable circulation when the ads dry up.� (This is why you’ll see big circ magazines like George suddenly disappear.)

HP recently debuted a service called MagCloud that could potentially democratize the industry by allowing easy creation of micro-targeted magazines � for example, not just for the ukulele player but for left-handed ukulele players living in the Midwest. A more nimble manufacturing process could allow more short-term plays; imagine for example �100 Days� magazine to follow the excitement around the new President, killing it just as readers start to tire of it.� Magazines may survive in fact by forgetting about brand-building and going after hot content.� In short, a return to the tabloid times of our Founding Fathers.�� More on this in a coming post.

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Joba Chamberlain opens the second game ever at the new Yankee Stadium and empty seats outnumber full ones in the exclusive areas behind home plate and the dugouts. The Stadium was packed otherwise. (Flickr / Fansherpa)

With all the fuss over the empty luxury seats at the new Yankee Stadium, I was mildly surprised to find something similar – dramatically so – happening in my own backyard.� We went to Sunday’s A’s-Rays game at the Oakland Coliseum.� All the ingredients for a great day at the ballyard were in place: sunny April weather, last year’s AL champions in town and a Sunday afternoon.� What we found instead was a micro-market in disarray. As the credit markets teetered last October, the market for sports tickets anecdotally seems to be following.

The first indication there was a problem was the total lack of online ticketing activity.� There were practically no offers on CraigsList, even from brokers, and none at all on eBay.� At the walk-up ticket booth, we found that we could buy any section in the house, including the Diamond Level.� This should simply never be the case.� The Diamond Level is a very limited “VIP” area, maybe 60 seats tops, right behind the plate on the playing field level.� Seats go for $225 but also include free food and drink service for the whole game.

Weirdest of all was the scene inside the stadium.� The A’s bifurcate each of the two seating levels – a minimum of two pricing levels in each deck.� In both decks, there was a cluster of people behind the plate, practically nobody for several sections as the seating moved towards the outfield, another cluster in the sections starting the new pricing tier, again fading to nothing.

The mystery to me is why shouldn’t the people forced out to the outfield be able to sit in these empty “mezzo-sections.”� The answer could come from a nimble dynamic pricing system at game time.� As airlines like Virgin and JetBlue have discovered with exit rows sold at check-in, why not enable ask fans as they arriveto purchase a better seat for an extra few dollars?� It would be an easy thing to equip ushers with Palm-style barcode and credit card machines like those carried by the clerks at The Apple Store.� Everybody gets the opportunity to move closer (or elect not to), getting rid of the weird empty spaces and (I’m assuming) presenting a better, more invigorating environment for the home team.� (I know they’re supposed to ignore the crowd, but ask any actor or musician if they’d rather play to a full orchestra than have the front rows empty and the crowd loosely dispersed.)

Meanwhile across the bay, the Giants are trying out a number of dynamic pricing policies.� First, the team partnered up with a firm to build elastic pricing around its unsold inventory for the least attractive games.� Last week, though, came the real reckoning – and a big indication that the team is running scared about its attendance.� Ticket prices were dropped 40% for the Giants series this week against the Dodgers, traditionally the most attractive opponent.� Granted the team is trying to stir up interest for later in the year – it appears they’ll be competitive in a moderately challenging division – but to have to do this so early and against the team’s best natural rivarly is surprising.� One wonders how scared the Giants are about advance sales for the rest of the year.

Susie is quick to point out that the lack of an Oakland A’s ticket market framed by the fact that the Oakland Coliseum is a horrible dump, getting dumpier every day.� The tarps in the third deck look weathered and horrible, while the bathrooms, parking lot and facilities remain some of the worst for a major league sport.� Nevertheless the empty seat patterns – along with all the unsold display ad inventory throughout the stadium – are clear indications that baseball is not recession-proof.� There are easy ways to make profit from making markets more efficient; marketing and pricing are the classics.� Let’s see if the A’s and their brethren take up the challenge.

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Quaker Oats, one of America�s great venerable supermarket products, staged a complete relaunch of its brand over the last two months.� The campaign has won kudos both for its general positivity in these otherwise dark times � sick of bailout-themed ads yet? � but also for the way that it reframes oats as a �power food.�� That is indeed a new, compelling USP for the brand and subtly introduces the idea of value as a �bang for the buck� food.�

A closer look shows something else: a new emphasis on �bang for the buck� marketing.� By bringing all of its product lines under a single campaign, however big or expensive, Quaker must be saving here, there and everywhere on its promotional and internal costs.� The most obvious way is the now-gone requirement to discretely support each of its panoply of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats, Quaker Quick Oats, Quaker Instant Oatmeal, Quaker Oatmeal Squares and on & on.� It also means potential reductions in tmarketing personnel, in-store marketing, graphic staff (fewer executions), agency support,�and so forth.� One wonders once the initial advertising launch blast is over with where the savings will go: into the product (reaching consumers) or simply as a hedge against falling revenue.��

Either way Quaker looks smart.� The company gets a new convincing USP out there, it cuts costs and � as James Surowiecki points out in this week�s New Yorker � finds a way to keep innovating and marketing in the throes of the recession.�

�a major study, by the Strategic Planning Institute, of corporate behavior during the past thirty years found that reducing ad spending during recessions did improve companies� return on capital. It also meant, though, that they grew less quickly in the years following recessions than more free-spending competitors did.

The Quaker Oats campaign may be a bellwether for the overall marketing economy. As long as we see only one campaign for all its many products � I count 30 currently on its web site � we�ll know that US brands are still in cost-cutting mode.� But when the company starts to support its individual brand lines again � especially though general advertising, not just couponing and in-store marketing � then we can surmise that it�s sufficiently confident that spending is rising again.�

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