Have we recovered from the Great Recession?

Of course, any keen observer of the trade media and info business landscape knows the answer is no. The industry has not regained the ground it lost in the Great Recession — in all but a few vertical segments, such as travel and ag media, revenue is down, still way down for some. But it is interesting to look at the actual dollars behind the recovery, and to consider the current oh-so-slow pace at which the industry is crawling back uphill.

Bar graph showing total b-to-b media industry revenue, 2008-2012

Total industry revenue fell a precipitous 16.1 percent from 2008 to 2009, after adjusting for inflation. Revenue was flat-to-down the next year, and finally has started to regain ground in 2011 (a good year) and 2012 (a flat-to-up year).

So what does that suggest for future prospects? In January, ABM asked 43 media CEOs about their expectations for the coming year. Only 7 percent of CEOs assessed current business conditions as negative, and just 2 percent thought that conditions will be worse next year at this time.

Moreover, in March ABM asked 74 marketers about their advertising budget plans for the coming 12 months, and 48 percent reported that they expect ad budgets to increase, while only 5 percent are expecting a decrease. That was part of ABM’s Value of B-to-B research project.

So if we take an optimistic viewpoint and assume that the pace of recovery based on the last three years will continue onwards for the next three, a guesstimated 3.9 percent growth rate will get us back at 2008 revenue levels in 2015. Of course, projecting future growth is a fool’s game, so take that with a grain of salt.

Note: The revenue figures in the graph above are inflation-adjusted to 2012 dollars, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculator. The base numbers are calculated by ABM in its BIN Report, as recently reported.

By Michael Moran Alterio

ABM president: Associations must consolidate as industries collaborate

Clark Pettit, ABM president and CEO.

On the day ABM announced that 97 percent of its members approved of its now-official merger with the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), Clark Pettit, ABM president & CEO, published a blog post on MediaPost.com warning that more association consolidation is to come – and with good reason.

“We’re heading toward a wave of association consolidation,” wrote Pettit. “It’s inevitable and it’s important. It’s inevitable because business models are overlapping, so more companies need access to ideas, information, resources and people outside their silos. It’s a simple matter of supplying what customers demand. It’s important because associations are the mechanism through which top executives can understand the models – and meet the players – they need to create complete solutions. At their best, associations should be the nexus of creative labs and cauldrons.”

Pettit also writes that as technology and solutions evolve rapidly, consolidated associations will rise to the top as they will have more resources and a breadth of knowledge from multiple and complementary industries.

“Industry executives are confronting increasing complexity, which they have to figure out in less time. They need more support from complementary businesses to keep their customers satisfied. Yet they have less time to devote to developing foresight and connections by participating in association meetings. That’s a prescription for fewer, bigger, more diverse associations, following the same integrated model that’s remaking marketing itself.”

Click here to read the full blog post.

Court provides guidance on news aggregation

6a00d8341c639653ef017d3bfefa27970cRecap and key takeaways

by Mark Sableman, ABM’s Information Policy Counsel

An important recent court decision, Associated Press v. Meltwater, provides useful guidance on news aggregation, distinguishing computer-driven commercial services that act as substitutes for original sources from editorially selective services that refer readers to the original sources.

The case has been in the spotlight for about a year because it pitted the Associated Press, an aggressive protector of its copyrights, against Meltwater, an international electronic news clipping service that essentially scrapes the Internet for snippets of news reports and sells it to its clients. AP carefully set up the case, describing its news reporting efforts, including sending journalists around the world, often risking their lives, to collect important and valuable news, which, it alleged, Meltwater then grabbed without authorization and profitably resold to its clients.

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The dos and don’ts for dot-com ads

by Mark Sableman, ABM’s Information Policy Counsel6a00d8341c639653ef017d3bfefa27970c

Internet and mobile advertising is subject to the same rules as anything else, the Federal Trade Commission recently assured us in a detailed 53-page booklet. To be fair, online advertising is subject to ordinary advertising rules, but there are always twists to how ordinary rules are applied on online. The new FTC guidance focuses on those online twists.

Anyone involved in online ad clearance should read the FTC’s “.com Disclosures” booklet carefully. The booklet is generally designed the way the FTC wants online ads to be designed: with plain language text, clear headings, useful hyperlinks and conspicuous disclaimers. Here are a few key points:

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NewsletterDesignInfo

Top design: Best practices that will get your newsletters read [Infographic]

It’s hard enough to get emails to land in inboxes (a quarter of all emails never make it there), so if you’re one of the lucky ones, you don’t want to turn off your newsletter subscribers with a poorly designed product. In an infographic, email design firm Email Monks has detailed a few tips for “exemplary emails.” Here are a few takeaways:

Brand yourself
For optimal branding, the “From Name” field should always include your brand name or a consistent name that will be recognizable. The footer should always include your organization’s contact details and a simple line about why your recipients are receiving the email.

Keep it short and snappy
The subject line should be informative but short enough so a complete idea is read. Additionally, main content should use short sentences and paragraphs for preview panes and snippet text.

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Tweet, re-tweet or retreat?

by Mark Sableman, ABM’s Information Policy Counsel6a00d8341c639653ef017d3bfefa27970c

Everything about Twitter invites you to re-tweet and to broadly republish the content you find there. In journalistic terms, using Twitter material may seem like reporting the news, using tweets and their attachments as basic raw newsworthy information. Anything in a tweet was intended for the wide world, so news media ought to be able to use it, too — right?

Not quite. A recent court decision has imposed a reality check on the myth of freedom to reuse tweets and their attachments.

Daniel Morel, a freelance photographer, took photos of the Haitian earthquake, and made them available on Twitter.  Agence France-Press (AFP) took the photos off Twitter, and distributed them on its wire service. AFP customers published the photos.

When Morel complained, AFP asserted that Twitter’s legal terms allowed it to use the photos, but the court ruled to the contrary. Twitter’s legal terms and conditions were hardly crystal clear, but they pointed out that users retain whatever rights they own to the content they post. That is, Morel, as photographer and copyright owner, retained his rights. Other Twitter terms, referring to Twitter’s rights to use such material, might have confused AFP, but they gave no license to third parties like AFP to reprint copyrighted content.
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Want to succeed in marketing services? Fix your database first.

Business-to-business media and information companies have always prided themselves on their market expertise to the point of being able to do what their readers do. The industry is filled with stories of editors becoming certified in the disciplines they cover (from farming to firefighting to hair dressing –Alison Shipley, editor of Vance’s salon trade publication First Chair, attended beauty school five nights a week from 4:30 to 10pm to obtain her certification).

The same applies to the marketing side — particularly in an industry where many advertiser-media partner relationships are one-one-one without an agency go-between. Advertisers are looking to us to create programs that they either don’t have the resources or sophistication to execute themselves.

That’s a huge opportunity in the days of content marketing and marketing services.  In the prospectus for a whitepaper, “Creating a Marketing Services Business,” from ABM’s Marketing Services Committee (which will be released at ABM’s Annual Conference in April), Eric Beiner, head of marketing services at ALM, says there are four reasons why media companies are poised to capitalize on marketing services:

  1. Domain expertise
  2. Ability to create rich content
  3. Audience databases(s)
  4. Diverse delivery channels

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