FIPP 2009: What Everyone Could Agree On…
There were some things that everyone could agree on at FIPP 09. Chief among them was how the halcyon days of constant high ad revenues are over. “Do not expect a recovery… you have not seen yet anything”, said Maurice Levy on the first morning, and various others were to follow. John Smith of BBC Worldwide said it wouldn’t be as long as the 20 years he predicts for TV ads getting back to pre-recession levels, but it would nonetheless be a while; “Advertising will not recover as it was before. It’s done”, said Didier Quillot of Lagardere.
The importance of keeping on talent, and hiring new blood, was another common theme, stressed by new FIPP President Aroon Puri, Bob Carrigan of IDG, and Lord of the Rings troll stunt double (maybe) Dieter Riechert of censhare. Dylan Jones of GQ took the opposite tack, suggesting we get rid of the extraneous staff that were hired in the boom times, while Roberto Civita of Abril said with regard to online content: “We have to let the kids do it. They speak the language”. That said, he and the others on his panel admitted that none of them were hiring new staff, and were if anything cutting back on editorial budgets.
The industry has also realised that diverse revenue streams are essential, with many speakers espousing the importance of live events, selling on database information, and merchandising, most effectively by Marcello Miradoli of RCS MediaGroup, with his “360-degree” brands who seemed to be doing everything. Perhaps the best catchphrase for this impetus was from Tim Weller of Incisive Media, who told everyone to ”own the day”, dropping content throughout the day onto people via SMS, RSS, events, tweets and so on (Weller also showed the importance of shameless theft of other ideas, with their piggybacking of LinkedIn to create an online community).
And finally, many were at pains to stress the importance and power of the brand. “I am surprised how little you take advantage of your brands”, scolded Maurice Levy in undulating Gallic tones. “You can leverage your incredible power with readers”. And the session called “Sustaining Editorial Excellence” was doomed to blandness by a sycophantic line of questioning, but what was clear from the success of Grazia, Good Food and GQ was the steadiness of their respective brands, if not their daring with them.
Christie Hefner (pictured) is someone who knows the importance of maintaining a brand more than most, having been head of Playboy for 20 years, only retiring earlier this year. She told of the air fresheners and furry dice getting chucked out: “think of a brand as a bank, and everything you do is a deposit or a withdrawal”.
I caught up with her after her panel, to ask her about how the brand was protected. ”I think we’ve been pretty good brand stewards in the 20 years I ran the company, and I think it was partly because we saw some of the mistakes that had been made with the idea that as long as you were collecting a royalty cheque, it had to be good for the company. That really isn’t true, so I think we’ve actually been careful, and said no to a lot of things, and have a very active team of people in the consumer products part of the business”.
I asked her how it was faring in the downturn. “We’ve actually relaunched the site with a great deal more lifestyle content, because I think the declines in the States and globally in online advertising, I do think that’s cyclical, not structural. We’ve wanted to be positioned to enjoy the double-digit growth in online advertising that we had then, and we thought the way to do that was to provide more content that would build our audience and the time spent on the site and then be able to monetise it.”
Stay tuned for what subjects were rather less harmonious, namely how on earth can anyone make money from online…
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | May 7, 2009 7:07PM |