One of the most visited sites after you get past all of the social media rubbish is Fox News, currently ranking at number 22 with BBC News coming in behind it at number 26, both sites employ some of the latest web technology to ensure that your user experience is something that you wish to have again. On the face of these sites they don’t look anything special, but what’s clever is the way the news is delivered to you, how the content is linked and how searcgable it is (i.e how accessible it is to you) they don’t have any gimicks, just plain old news!

But the world is changing and these sites are gradually dropping down the list in favour of the social media sites and webmail sites, this to me would say the the news sites need to rethink about how and where they deliver their content, much like google exploited the power of advertising to get the google brand out there, so do news channels need to further their reach by rapidly attaching themseleves to social media aggregation.

Whilst it’s easy to say that YouTube is the most visited site on the planet, and that you can find on their site the most watched videos, you can see what is the most visited add, or linked site, that referral information is keep to themselves in order to leverage the best prices for the space, so how would a news channel (lets say the BBC) get space on Facebook and know that it is getting a good ROI?

How do you know that when you visit their site that the news that is presented is actually what the mass consumer wants to see…. I just visited the BBC and one of the articles was about how TimeWarner accidently slipped clips from Playboy TV onto 2 childrens channels, now although this is good news, it’s not actually what I want to read, I’m more interested in knowing or selecting news I want to know about, lets say murders, killings, assualts etc starting in my local area and fanning out from there, so if a murder happened in SE9 it would be headlin news and the 10 in SE18 as smaller headlines where as the ones in N5 might just be on the ticker feed….

News needs to become personal, definable and deliverable, I’ve written numereous blogs on how the future of news kiosks could provide this personalised news on demand and in printed from at your convienience and there are several sites out there that will provide that aggregated content, but news is not just about headlines (well the media might lead you to beleive it is)

At the weekend we purchased 3 papers, all presented the headline news of Kate Winslet’s divorce…. Who cares… surely that is something for all the trash magazines, months ago you couldn’t get away from Jordan, the media thinks this is what sells, maybe it is to the majority, but I beleive that the overall content of the paper along with it’s editorial is what makes it sell. It’s no surprise that advertising in papers is big business when you look at the distribution numbers, you definately get to an audience, but as a consumer do you really want 60% for that pound you spent to be on seeing adverts, another 20% on trashy headlines and a further 20% on what would be classed as decent editorial? Wouldn’t you rather pay £0.40 for just the news part? And really do the adverts actually drive you to the stores advertising?

Recently Pepsi pulled it’s advertising from the Superbowl commercial breaks for 2010 stating that the marketing spend could be used better and more effectively else where, and better targetted to the demographic areas they which to aim for, surely that is the same for everyone? Do any of these companies actually know what the demographic profile of the newspapers readers, no-one has ever asked me what paper I read, or never asked me why I read it.

So is advertising on printed material a blind mans game?

Technology has come a long way, in the next 5 years we will see that the message, that advert they want to get out there is better targetted to the audience they want it to goto, progresive companies will ensure they spend their money on focussed advertising to hit the target!

What I hadn’t really thought about and something that I spoke with Mark Kleiter about the other day via Skype, was how the graphical arts industry (that would be print, prepress, repro but not design) has actually been on a winding road of self destruction for some time.

Companies sales teams and business development guys have been falling over themselves to get clients to sign with their companies with deals that provide the bare minimum in profits and most that run at losses after they have had to provided concessions. We have also seen high salaries and ungodly bonuses for management for maintaining house accounts, sales guys that have no incentive to get new business as they live happily off their current accounts and clients who expect everything for next to nothing.

Unless you are an agency…

The good old Agencies, full of mindless arty types (not putting you guys down as you are extremely creative) yet you seem to get away with ignoring process, proficiency and efficiency, yet the clients love you, not only do they love you, they seem to want to shower you with money, with you being able to charge whatever you like, it’s almost like a campaign budget goes a little like this:

• Agency – 80% of budget expense
• Premedia – 10% of budget, but we want all the bells and whistles, oh and you must think for us otherwise we will blame you and not pay
• Print – 10% of budget, we want toilet paper prices for our premium product on premium materials… What do you mean it will cost more, not acceptable!

What we see is that first 80% getting swallowed, design after design, no shopping around, no negotiation, what the agency says is what it costs, when it comes to premedia and print, hell the client may as well put all the companies in a pitbull ring and see who is left standing and who is severely wounded… i.e. they can only just do the work on a zero balanced sheet if they really crack the whip of their staff….

Ok maybe it’s not that bad, and really the companies look to offshore the expensive part of the operation, thats the staff labour, this goes off to India or China where companies can reap the benefits by paying the smallest price possible on the planet for someone to produce a piece of artwork.

Comic Alan Yang pokes fun at fish pedicures. "I don't think these are the right kind of fish for pedicures."

What happens though? If companies in the UK are operating this zero sums game to stay in business and the senior management are all on a good salary but have to work like dogs while they feed the Garra Rufa’s of the third world colonies to pedicure their companies, will the Garra Rufa not some day turn into vicious predators and pick the bones out of the remains of an industry that once thrived in the UK?

Ok lets try that in English…. if, to produce a A4 flyer it takes 30 minutes and you pay someone (with overheads) £25 you could put a 50% markup of that and charge the client £37.50 right, well no, see the current way of thinking is that India will do that £25 job for £7 thus there is an even bigger profit… WRONG! you see the manager, board members and share holders still want their slice of the action, it’s not just the cost of the FTE that does the job, nor the technology (oh something I’ll come onto next) but the overall operational cost of the business that needs to be calculated… Remember it still costs to send something to India or China, someone still has to handle the work, be that the customer services, sales manager, account director etc etc So the idea of being a middle man like in print management doesn’t necessarily add up to big bucks and all your doing is feeding these offshore companies with the knowledge of how to perform the work, that one day they could ultimately deal with your clients directly at the first chance they have!

Now then, now then, whats this about technology being for free…. I agree that there is a cost of entry to work in this industry, but the industry is changing, so your costs to the client either have to reflect your ability to stay up with current developments in software, hardware and development or you charge your client based on their requests, personally you should be doing both… Not only should you being both, but your sales and marketing teams should be equipped to sell this stuff and that means them actually understanding something about what is possible and what it may take to develop it. A pretty tall order really.

A final comment on this, everyone in our industry needs to really take a look at how the compete against the next company to ensure they don’t bite their nose of to spite their face, we’re all in business to make money, but by continually killing ourselves to stop the next man getting it will ultimately leave us all skint and just drive the business to foreign shores.

Sound familiar?

Over the last 20 years in this trade I’ve seen and heard more and more companies trying to conjure up magic numbers that maintain their clients expectations that they are getting a bargain, in fact some companies will take hit on the operational cost of producing the work just to have the client under their belt.

And what about cases where a potential clients promise high spends that never materialise? Sales guys that expect the company to make investments in time, people and resource for a client that isn’t worth it’s value, I know your thinking that any financial controller worth his/her salt wouldn’t allow this to happen, yet it does, and continues to.

These are all examples of how the life is being sucked out of what it actually costs to do the work, that and the high salaries of senior members of the companies that are nothing but a drain on the companies resources, great if their bring in work, but what a dead weight if they don’t!

Anyway thinking now specifically about lets say publishing, someone somewhere must have got some big bonuses for driving the cost per page down to near nothing, but the cost was at the industries detriment, it’s all well and good reducing the costs to the client so much that it keeps everyone else from getting a look in, then offshoring it all to India or China, but at some point something breaks… The clients expectations of how much stuff costs to produce are so high (i.e. they expect it at such a low cost) that companies can’t or don’t have the money to invest in the infrastructure needed to service them in the manner they expect… Ok some companies do get deals on who pays for staff or what the kick backs are of different parts of the supply chain, but on the whole it now a zero numbers game, hard work and dedication just isn’t part of the equation, and reputation means diddly squat now, in fact requtation could actually be their worst enemy.

It’s no surprise so much work is making it’s way out to India and China, many moons ago it would have been eastern block countries until the cost of living went up, thus the cost of outsourcing went up with it forcing companies to find cheaper solutions, will we see the same with India and China?

It confuses me slightly why clients source UK companies who outsource their work? Is that again something for them to save money on? I mean if I were a client and I discovered my pre-media operation outsourced I’d be pretty annoyed if they hadn’t told me…. of coarse one part of me says why should I care because I’m getting a great price, but another part of me says I could just source an offshore company to work for me anyway, most of them have representitives in my country anyway so what do I gain by having a piggy in the middle, surely that big is just getting fat for doing nothing?

Well, maybe not eh? Have we all been watching the media news recently with the number of middle men going under sign of the times me thinks where the bacon is too thin to survive off of….

Something has got to give and it will take the mighty to fall for the industry to realise that greed is not good for business.

Author: Gary George

Taken from my original post on Tunicca-blog.com

Cartoon credit for Corporate Profits to Clay Bennett

My only other mention is an ex colleague of mine who publishes a blog in dutch… it can be a little mixed up sometimes but if you can read between the lines the information and ideas on there are pretty sound! check it out www.kleiter.co.uk

For centuries the cinema was part of the staple diet of anyone who wanted entertaining night or day, I remember the days of having a Saturday afternoon double-bill and going to the packed cinema of a late night (after the pub) screening, but today there is a hidden agenda of the movie theatres that out ways the entertainment factor they are really designed to provide.

We can all understand that every business is there to make a profit, hell you wouldn’t be in business if that wasn’t your goal, but in my mind you have a core product that you sell, with movie theatres they sell a service of delivering a film via projection and sound systems for your entertainment, a secondary service they provide is the confectionary for you to munch on mindlessly during the film you are watching….

Back in the day when films came on multiple reels we used to have an intermission (to change the reels) where a couple of young ladies would position themselves at the base of the walkways and sell ice creams and such like at reasonable prices, as the old style movie theatres became a thing of past with multiplexes being the new way to provide maximum choice to the avid movie goers, we saw a change in the way the confectionary was sold.

Confectionary became the core profit generator for the theatre managers, the cover price on the tickets needed to be so high to cover the operational cost of the place that it would scare the customers away, so the managers added an unbelievable markup on the confectionary… Ok so we can expect to pay a little more as they aren’t negotiating at the same level of a supermarket chain, but the markup the movie theatres are putting on is so ridicules that I am sometimes lost for words.

So what are we talking here? Well not so long ago (well it must of been a while ago as it was before our little one arrived) we popped off to our local Odeon cinema, being that my partner was heavily pregnant and I was driving I strolled upto the counter and asked for two bottles of water…. OMG, the guy stuck two 500ml bottles on the counter and said “that be five pounds please” “sorry” was my reply…..

£5 for a litre of water…. I asked the guy if the water was laced with gold as clearly this was very special water….

I declined my purchase thankfully as I really am not made of money and the water was not even a brand I had heard of, so we wandered to a different counter to buy some sweets and ice cream, £15 later we had 2 bags of sweets and a small tub of ice scream!

Having now paid more for a small amount of indulgence than the actual cost of the entry tickets it made me wonder why cinema goer numbers were steadily declining…..

So a few weeks later off we went shopping and to the cinema again! (a different one this time) having been in the shopping centre we purchased our sweets and drinks from M&S to save ourselves wasting money in the cinema…. As we stopped to have our tickets checked, the young girl asked if we had bought our own confectionary into the cinema and could she check our bags….. Hang on a minute…. We paid a cover price to get in and see a film, not to be searched for buying our own sweets.

Not only do the cinemas now expect you to pay such a high price for confectionary, but they are taking away your right to buy it elsewhere, something I have never seen a sign for in any foyer and it certainly isn’t on the back of the tickets as terms and conditions of purchasing the ticket, so where did this come from and why do cinema bosses think that it’s a good way to get more business in.

My dream has always been to own and run my own cinema, I’ve thought about smaller screen more likened to a nickelodeon where the customer gets a more intermate viewing of the film with a more personal service and honest pricing for confectionary & beverages, but I’ve never taken it any further as I’m really not sure if it would be accepted… People seem to want choice, to want the same old shit when they go, the same mass produced nacho’s that have a 5000% GP (come-on, you get charged £3 for 10 nachos and a thimble sized portion of salsa!) the same mass produced junk food at an over exaggerated price….

But why?

Why is it you stop at a roadside motorway stop and pay £6.99 for a full english that is mass purchased junk food in the smallest portion they can get away with, when you can pay £3.50 in a local town cafe for the same dish just twice the size and better quality product, and why can you feed yourself on that hearty breakfast in one of these local cafes but then pay the guys outside £10 to clean your car????

Where is all the logic in what we are willing to pay?

I think there is a market for an independent small screen cinema run with the customer in mind, and I am sure that somewhere in the world these types of establishments exist, I’d just like to be the one running one in the UK.

While I’m at it, have you noticed one of the big selling point of Windows 7? Let me show you:

See what I mean yet? Well from the professional version the system supports 192gb of ram…. Well as far as I know all desktop motherboards only have a maximum of 6 memory slots, so even with the largest sized ram models available for DDR3 I can find is 24gb (x6 would be 144gb) not that any of our average people could afford one since one of them at their cost, but why have they not considered a server version as the ability to have 192gb of ram in my desktop is not a big bonus point for me as I’d never be able to afford it! But it seems obvious to me for manufacturers to have daughter boards or something available to those die hard enthusiasts who can afford it.

Anyway, just some observations of the way I would do things…..

Maybe Costa could enter this as a spot the difference competition and see if we can notice the missing pieces of bacon in our roll. Below the advert on the table that enticed us to order and the actual delivered roll….. Oh so disappointing !!!!

Painting: 'Sardines' (Damir Ceric; Oil on cupboard, 1998)

So today we spent a lovely day in London doing the rounds visiting work colleagues and family with our little princess, zooming through the human traffic like I’m a professional police driver avoiding any collisions with an unsuspecting member of the human race or running over any toes on our journey. Our little one took her first ride in a black taxi, she almost got her first ride on the tube but we decided against it. What she did get was her first encounter with a complete arse hole who ran for the closing doors at Charing Cross…. There she was sleeping away after her exhausting day of visiting when some idiot ran into the back of the lady with her pram behind ours that then rammed our little one waking her up….

Come on who likes a crying baby on a train…. NO-ONE…. so this guy was not the flavor of the train, luckily everyone only got one crying baby rather than two…. so just as we settled her down we pull into London Bridge and a guy with a pram gets on….

Can you picture this, three prams in the tiny door space of the first carriage and what happens???? TWO f***ing idiots stop the doors from closing falling all over the pram and our little one, well my partner could not contain herself and burst out “Fuck sake, I’m not having that” two guys cramming themselves into an already crammed space with 3 prams, 2 babies (ours 14 weeks and the other looked about 18 weeks) plus a 2 year old…. The guys had the gall to say they didn’t see the pram…. NO SHIT SHERLOCK thats because you didn’t look at all, babies or no babies you could see the doorways were crammed like the picture above so WHY even try….. the next train was only 10 minutes wait!