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Reuters blog archive
from Global Investing:
It’s all adding up – emerging markets to drive global spending
The world's leading ad agencies are positioning themselves in Brazil, Russia and China -- countries that are expected to provide almost a third of the growth in global advertising over the next three years. That's according to a report by S&P Capital IQ Equity Research, a unit of publishing giant McGraw Hill.
Most major advertisers already have a foothold in these BRIC economies, where the advertising market is projected to grow by an average 10.7 percent a year over the next three years -- more than three times the growth rate in the developed world. Over the next 15 years, big emerging markets will add $200 billion to the global ad spend, S&P Capital IQ reckons.
Hopes, unsurprisingly, are pinned on the soccer World Cup in 2014 and the 2016 Olympics, both hosted by Brazil. Russia hosts the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi and Football World cup in 2018 and both these events are expected to boost ad spending. The behemoths of the ad world have prepared for this, says Alex Wisch, an analyst at S&P Capital IQ:
The global agencies have already developed a solid foundation in the BRICs, so the heavy lifting on the investment ramp is largely behind them.
from Jack Shafer:
And now, a word against our sponsor
The Washington Post's website joined the sponsored-content stampede early this week with the introduction of its BrandConnect Web product, making it the first major U.S. newspaper to embrace sponsored content, according to Digiday. Other high-profile Web publishers selling sponsored content include Gawker, Huffington Post, Business Insider, Forbes, BuzzFeed, Slate, Cheezburger, Techmeme and The Atlantic. Meanwhile, Fortune magazine is creating Fortune-branded content "for marketers to distribute on their own platforms," AdWeek reports.
Also known as native advertising, the current wave of sponsored content on the Web can resemble the advertorial sections you're familiar with — the ponderous Russia Beyond the Headlines Today and China Daily pages in the print editions of the Post and the New York Times, which nobody reads, and those sections in glossy magazines you automatically skip. Or, it can look remarkably like the content the site already produces. BuzzFeed has created pages for Virgin Mobile, Pillsbury, Coca-Cola, Dell, the Nevada Commission on Tourism and General Electric that could pass for its standard pages as they use jokes to "subtly weave in the values of the brand," as the Wall Street Journal reported last October. BuzzFeed sponsored content costs about $20,000 for five or six "articles," reports Digiday.
from Breakingviews:
Profit first casualty in China’s mobile ad war
By John Foley
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
China’s online giants are tooling for the mobile ad wars, and profit will be the first casualty. Of 560 million web users, three-quarters are already using smartphones, threatening massive disruption for companies who depend on online advertising revenue. Baidu, the dominant search provider that reports earnings on Feb. 4, has most to prove, and most to lose.
from Stories I’d like to see:
Ad technolology that may threaten newspapers; winners and losers of the fiscal cliff
1. Another threat to newspapers’ business models?
This article in the New York Times last Friday and this one in the National Journal pinpoint two important developments in the media business that could collide to pose yet another threat to the financial viability of journalism.
The Times article describes the rise of “programmatic advertising,” in which new online tracking technologies allow an advertiser to follow a consumer whose profile fits the advertiser’s targeted demographics wherever the consumer goes online rather than just make an educated guess about the websites that consumer is most likely to visit.
from Breakingviews:
Google’s hardware ambitions proving costly
By Robert Cyran
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews journalist. The opinions expressed are his own.
Google’s hardware ambitions are proving surprisingly costly. The search giant paid $12.5 billion for Motorola’s handset business. The division lost another $527 million in the third quarter and the mistaken early release of unexpectedly weak earnings knocked over $20 billion off Google’s market capitalization in afternoon trade. A bigger concern is the risk of long-term management distraction.
from Stories I’d like to see:
Tracking the battleground wars
I always tell my students that the best stories come from what you’re most curious about. And for all the coverage of the presidential campaign we’ve been getting in print, online and on cable, my curiosity about what’s really going on in the battleground states and in their most evenly divided precincts hasn’t come close to being satisfied. With all the time and money CNN, Politico and the major newspapers are spending letting the usual suspects opine on the horse race, they should zero in on the people who count by doing some of the following:
a. The voters: Why haven’t the news organizations most heavily invested in campaign coverage selected representative samples of voters (undecided, as well as voters leaning to one side or the other) in three or four battleground precincts across the country – from Colorado to Ohio and New Hampshire to Florida – to ask them in focus groups what, if anything, is persuading them or turning them off? This should be video programming, but that doesn’t mean Politico or the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal (or even Reuters or Bloomberg) – in addition to the cable news networks – couldn’t do it, given that they all now have robust online video programming. There’s almost an infinite number of questions I’d want to hear these voters asked, among them:
from Breakingviews:
Focus Media insider buyout gives investors relief
By Wei Gu
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.
U.S. investors should take heart from a $3.5 billion Chinese-led buyout. Some of the same people who brought Focus Media public in 2005 now want to take it private. They might want to re-list the shares later in China, out of the focus of U.S. shorts-sellers, where the provider of advertising screens in public places might command a higher valuation.
from Emanuel Derman:
The Complexities of Advertising
I'm attending a meeting on complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, and today there was a panel during which someone bemoaned the absence of science reporting in US newspapers, and mentioned that even the NY Times Science section is mostly not serious. Someone from the UK then remarked that science programming on British TV is much better.
I postulate that you can understand what happened to the NY Times Science section by comparing nbcolympics.com to bbc.com vis a vis Olympic reporting.
from MediaFile:
Bluefin Labs names former Razorfish, Publicis exec as CEO
Bluefin Labs-- a company that tracks a brand's perception on social media sites while a commercial airs on TV-- has named a new CEO. JP Maheu has signed on with the fledgling company as CEO while its co-founder Deb Roy will take up the role of chairman.
Maheu was most recently the global CEO of Publicis Modem, the digital marketing arm of Publicis Worldwide, and has also served stints as CEO of Razorfish and chief digital officer at Ogilvy & Mather.
from MediaFile:
Ad startup SessionM nabs big clients, expands
Advertisers have long sought to grab the attention of the notoriously inattentive mobile user. And Lars Albright 
is seeking to provide just that by "gamifying" mobile ads.
The co-founder of Quattro Wireless, which was bought by mobile device giant Apple for $275 million in 2009, left Apple last year to start SessionM, which aims to engage mobile users by tempting them to play a game, watch a video, take a poll or share information with friends - all for "M" points.
