Latest news suggests that advertising budgets are going to fall in Europe like they’ve already done in USA.
The rate of decline “was gathering to a pace not seen since the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks”. Source: FT.com.
It would be easy to say that it is because of the US led economy downturn. However, simultaneous shift from traditional media to online multiplies the negative effect on the both shores of Atlantic Ocean.
For some individual media owners, feeling the combined effects of the shift to the Internet and the economic downturn, an ad recession has already arrived. Trinity Mirror, a British newspaper publisher, said last month that advertising had fallen 12.6 percent in May and June, following the recent gloomy reports of some American newspaper companies. Source: IHT.
It seems that we will see cost savings and financial crisis management initiatives in Europe too. Next question is, what happens after current economic turmoil, will traditional media regain the revenues they lost or will the advertising budgets be invested to more targeted media? Maybe it is even better to just directly ask: “How big market share traditional media has lost to online before economical recovery starts”?
After all, current decrease in advertising budgets is just a short-term cyclical problems that will pass. Temporary recession, downturn, or slowdown shouldn’t make us to lose focus from the real long-term challenge. The media owners have to find good answers to five change drivers described by Robert G. Picard. They are:
Media abundance, audience fragmentation and polarization, product portfolio development, the eroding strength of media companies, and a overall power shift in the communications process.
Executives who are fighting with declining monthly advertising revenues and can simultaneously find good solutions to live with these drive changers are highly valued nowadays.
Photo above used under CC licence, credits to tuis.
Categories: Media
Tagged: Advertising, audience fragmentation, downturn, Europe, Media, media abundance, media advertising, newspapers, online advertising, publishing, recession, Robert G. Picard
Couple days ago we had an interesting and humorous discussion about serious subject: global food crisis. The discussion was ignited by a recent article in Wired magazine. There is a lot of discussion, should all we accept genetically modified food in order to increase production efficiency of the agricultural industry.
We came to conclusion that is really a narrow point of view if we are just focusing on improving productability. In our daily business lives we try to optimize costs, not only maximize the revenues. So, we should also consider to decrease human energy consumption. Therefore, instead of making for example bigger GM corn, we should start modifying future generations much smaller. We are now in average 170cm and making our kids just to let’s say a size of a 25cm midgets would make a huge difference to food consumption.
There would be a long transition period. Our giant generation and smaller low energy generation would co-exist for almost a century and this definitely would have some side effects. As a Scandinavian I can clearly see a Midsummer party, where drunken grandfather at his 70’s throws his badly behaving grand children to the lake after argument caused by this 145cm generation gap. After 100 years these things wouldn’t of course happen.
What is more interesting, there would be a massive impact to carbon hydroxide emissions, as we would either need smaller airplanes or less airline traffic. Same goes for cars and other transportation. In addition, we wouldn’t need so much cotton or oil based textiles and so forth. Huge impact to world’s energy balance in general. And just by genetically reducing size of humans, we would solve also oil crisis.
On the other hand, instead of reducing the body size, we just could reduce the size of our most energy consuming organs by using genetic engineering. And let’s just start with the organ that consumes the most energy… Well, it seems to be the brain that represent 25% of daily body glucose consumption. After all, the genetically engineered human future doesn’t look too bright. Maybe we should just concentrate to genetically engineer corns, carrots and potatoes.
Photo above published under CC licence, credits to logosberlin.
Categories: Out there
Tagged: agriculture, brain, farming, food crisis, food production, gene technology, generation gap, genetic engineering, genetic modification, Genetically modified food, GM, GMO, humor, midsummer party, oil crisis, saving energy
Latest news suggests that advertising budgets are going to fall in Europe like they’ve already done in USA.
