Long radio silence there. My apologies for those who checked out the site and didn’t find it updated. I am blaming a holiday, a relentlessly crowded work schedule and attention to a couple of exciting personal projects for the lack of posts (No, I wasn’t feeling lazy, really! ;-).
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Frequent readers may recall that I started my blogging journey citing my fascination for the digital transformation underway in the …
In a recent post, I explored the growing move by brand owners away from Paid Media towards Owned Media, highlighting how Brands and Publishers were exchanging roles – even as brand owners undertook greater interest in content marketing, their media counterparts were undertaking a reverse journey of extending their media franchise into consumer brands or even selling the very brands they were covering in their media vehicles. Prominent examples …
On July 30, 2011 the Captain of the visiting English cricket team, Michael Vaughan set off a firestorm when he tweeted
Vaughan was implying that Indian batsman VVS Laxman had applied Vaseline to the edge of his bat, in order to mislead the Hot Spot infra-red imaging system, used to determine faint edges. The tweet set off a predictable mini-controversy as Indians (and the rather thin-skinned Indian Press) leapt to …
Recently, AXE, a Unilever brand announced its “biggest and most ambitious” marketing campaign to date. To create buzz around its Axe Apollo sub-brand, it is planning to send 22 people into space through an elaborate 60-country marketing campaign.
If the experience of Red Bull, with its audacious space jump watched by 8m simultaneously on youtube is anything to go by, Axe too stands to gain tremendously from the excitement that …
Last week, INMA, the global newspaper (or newsmedia as they prefer) trade arm released its 2013 Outlook. The Outlook too, as all INMA’s publications do, has an intensely digital focus. Quite natural, when the print product is in free fall in the West, and more specifically in USA, where INMA is based.
But for those of us in India, where the print industry is still growing (now in …
Sometime in mid 2011, Nick D’Aloisio became the youngest person ever to raise venture capital (!), when his news summarizing startup Trimit attracted the attention of Horizons Ventures, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s investment vehicle.
Rebranded as Summly, and having attracted $1.5m through more celebrity investors such as Stephen Fry, Yoko Ono, Ashton Kucher, not to mention tech stars such as Brian Chesky of Airbnb, Marc Pincus of …
In a previous blog post, wherein I had analyzed NYT’s venture investing approach, I had promised to contrast this with the approach adopted by similar prolific peers – primarily Hearst, Conde Nast / Advance and Gannett. In this post, I plan to do just that. Here you will find details on all the current ventures they have invested in, as well as a brief look at the …
ln a previous blog post, I had written on the importance of the Sunday edition and how it now accounted for a disproportionate 40-50% of the weekly revenues of the average newspaper (For McClatchy, the figure is 36%). This had, I postulated, been built largely on the back of the triple-whammy[1] impact of the FSIs (Free Standing Inserts) or Preprints – essentially inserts / supplements full of …
It is time to announce a winner, ladies and gentlemen! As we head into the last quarter of 2012, we now seem to have a runaway winner in the battle of the paywall models – the metered model.
A recent Newspapers Association of America study of 156 newspapers revealed that 87% of the newspapers profiled had adopted the metered model. And since the study broke, there have been further announcements. …
The Indian Newspaper market, with its near 8% CAGR[1]over the past 6 years, has been well-insulated from the doom and gloom that has pervaded the Western newspaper industry. Thanks to the increasing number of neo-literates and a rapidly growing middle-class, there is considerable demand for the print product (110mn+ copies a day, a 21% global share and the largest in the world) even as the western …