The football season was looking great for the Green Bay Packers. The 2011 Super Bowl champions finished the regular season with 15 wins and one loss, only to lose in the playoffs last month to this year’s Super Bowl champions the New York Giants.

Many tears were shed in Titletown, but likely not too many among Green Bay’s biggest digital media players. True they would have profited from a Super Bowl bout — Gannett-owned local newspaper Green Bay Press Gazette’s website, GreenBayPressGazette.com, and its micro site PackersNews.com, had 6 million more page views in January 2011 than in the year prior period. But the sheer presence of a major NFL franchise in Green Bay, Wis., has been a big win for digital advertising providers playing in a market of its size.

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In terms of population, the Green Bay-Appleton market is the 69^th largest DMA in the country, according to Nielsen. But in terms of digital spending, it actually ranks at No. 58, fueled by a strong league of Packer-backers, digital ad-embracing recreational businesses, as well as a solid auto dealer market. For the Gannett-owned Press Gazette, digital advertising actually makes up nearly 20% of its overall ad revenue, said Advertising Manager James Maurer.

“Being in a small market with a national football franchise gives us a different flavor,” suggested Dana VanDen Heuvel, president of Green Bay-based digital marketing consultancy Marketing Savant. “We’re obviously smaller, but at the end of the day there’s a little innovation going on and opportunity to experiment.”

The digital advertising market as a whole is above the curve in Green Bay, but some areas are still behind. Most noticeably, spending share in Green Bay towards streaming video ads is 4.6% less compared to the national average (the fact that only two local TV news players dominate the online media market could be a factor, Larry Shaw, VP of research for Borrell Associates, suggested).

Yet Green Bay is excelling in terms of behavioral targeting, with a local share of spending 4.3% higher than the national average. At $9.2 million in 2011, spending is expected to reach $89.4 million in 2016, a significant 868.2% increase.

“The Green Bay market is more focused on local advertisers,” Shaw said. “The smaller business market can afford to do that targeted ad instead of the old method of advertising. A local restaurant doesn’t want to reach as many people as possible, it wants to reach as many people in the area that are likely to go to the restaurant.”

According to comScore, the Press Gazette is the area’s digital media champion, scoring a monthly average of 429,500 unique visitors for the year period ending December 2011.

Only two other media players in the market reach comScore’s minimum reporting threshold of 50,000 unique visitors a month, said comScore marketing manager Carmela Aquino.

Fox affiliate WLUK-TV, owned by LIN Television, is at No. 2 with 355,117 average unique visitors a month to its site Fox11Online.com for the year ending last December. Jay Zollar, WLUK’s VP and GM, gives some credit to the station’s “balanced news” brand, directly inspired by cable news leader Fox News.

Coming in third is WBAY-TV, a local ABC affiliate owned by Young Broadcasting.

WBAY.com received a monthly average of 223,500 unique visitors for the 10-month period ending last December. (Aquino explained that WBAY used a different reporting methodology for December 2010 and January 2011, so numbers for those months are not comparable. In that same 10-month period, the Press Gazette averaged 428,100 unique monthly visitors and WLUK averaged 353,800 unique monthly visitors.)

The Press Gazette’s site-defining Packers coverage welcomed some digital enhancements for the team’s Super Bowl-winning season. During the playoffs, the Packers’ site featured daily live chats with team reporters, and the entire newsroom contributed to blog about Packer-related happenings in town, such as a local elementary school where students and teachers wore green and gold for the day, said Online Editor Julie Riebe.

For the most recent season, the site posted several videos a week of news conferences and locker room interviews, generating several thousand views each. It also ramped up efforts on an ongoing historic photo gallery project; approximately 2,000 to 2,500 Press Gazette archived photos were preserved and showcased on the site last season, with one gallery alone generating 221,000 page views, Riebe said.

The Press Gazette’s mobile sites underwent a Gannett-designed overhaul in February 2011. “Before they weren’t really that attractive,” Riebe said of the old mobile sites. “Now they’re cleaner, and they’ve made it easier to find features like weather and sports scores, and we’re able to add photo galleries to the mobile sites.”

The sites are also customizable; as an example, the Press Gazette put together a University of Wisconsin sports tab exclusive to its mobile sites. Five months later, Gannett modified the Green Bay sites to resemble the Odyssey template it has rolled out for other properties. “It was an effort to make the sites look cleaner to the reader, to present stories in a better format and to give more presence to photo galleries,” Riebe said.

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Street Legal http://streetfightmag.com/?p=15259">0 Comments 20 February 2012 by Brian Dengler “Advertising is content — the only new content that really matters,” wrote AR&D‘s Terry Heaton in a recent blog post responding to a Pew report that questions the financial future of news. His point is salient, for sure, and it renews the question of whether hyperlocals should be incorporating content created by local merchants — perhaps in the form of advertorials or “guest columns.” Publishers like StarNewsOnline are giving it a try. Pulling it off successfully, however, requires hyperlocals to make sure they don’t turn a revenue opportunity into a regulatory nightmare.Heaton suggests that one remedy for local media is to acknowledge that “advertisers are the new content makers, and we need to be exploiting our strengths as experts in the world of content creation in order to serve this burgeoning market.” In a Street Fight column published last year, Patrick Kitano suggested this was just the formula: “Simply put,” Kitano wrote, “business is integral to engaging the community, because they have the commercial incentive to create content that builds their brand equity, directly or indirectly. In the world of social media, the local foodie reporters own restaurants, and the real estate bloggers are realtors; their voices are part of the local media landscape but generally segregated from local news media.”A new research report released by the Content Marketing Institute disclosed that marketers use articles as a leading tactic for B2B marketing. In fact, articles make up 79% of B2B marketing strategies according to the study. Clearly, taking content from merchants is a ripe opportunity for publishers. Patrick Williams, publisher of Worth Magazine, estimated in January 2010 that the magazine’s advertorial program would account for 50 to 60 percent of the magazine’s revenue “in the near future.”However, advertorials and “guest editorials” cannot be passed off as standard editorial content. Two years ago, the FTC issued new guides governing testimonial advertisements, bloggers and celebrity endorsement. The FTC Guides require that a publisher disclose whether content posted on an editorial site or blog was sponsored, paid for, subsidized, or prepared by an advertiser or merchant. For example, the guidelines require:If you run an advertorial for a local business, such as yoga class, you must disclose that the content is a paid advertisement.If you obtain free services or a free sample to write a review for a local shop, you must disclose to the reader that you were provided the sample to write the review.If you are offered a free meal at a local restaurant to write a review, you must disclose the fact in your review.You must disclose if any of your writers or bloggers are sponsored by a particular advertiser or merchant.Your independent writers and bloggers must disclose if they were paid to provide an article or review.The consequences for lack of transparency can be severe. Read the rest of this article here:  http://streetfightmag.com/2012/02/20/the-legal-implications-of-advertiser-supplied-content/

Brian Dengler is an attorney with Vorys Legal Counsel and journalist who covers legal issues in eMedia. He is a former vice-president of AOL, Inc., a former newspaperman, and an EMMY-winning TV journalist. He teaches new media issues as an adjunct at Kent State University and formerly at Otterbein University.via streetfightmag.com

Demand claims trio of departures to be “just coincidence”.

Via Reuse This Bag. (H/T @ritubpant)

Eat green.

For decades, salespeople have practiced something called an "elevator pitch." The idea was that they had to sell themselves and their product or service in the time it took to ride an elevator from the ground to the top floor. Every good salesperson had an "elevator pitch" and could perform it flawlessly at a moment's notice.

Today, elevators are much faster and attention spans are much shorter, so you've got to amp up your pitch. You've got to have a 118.

The 118 Pitch is my modern term for the old elevator pitch. It's based on the fact that 118 seconds is the length of the average elevator ride in New York City. The first 8 seconds are "the hook"—the time you have to get the "lean in" factor, to snag your prospect, to catch their interest.

Those first 8 seconds are the key. In researching the idea I discovered that the length of time the average human can concentrate on something and not lose some focus is as little as 8 seconds. Eight! (It's true--I found it on the Internet!) Thirty seconds, then, was way too long for getting that lean-in factor for your pitch. You know how you hear something in a conversation and you lean in because you want to hear the rest of it? That's what you want from your prospect in those first 8 seconds of the 118.

If you accomplish that in those 8 seconds, they'll give you the next 110 seconds to drive your message home with no bull. It's not about name dropping. It's about what's in it for the recipient of your pitch.

Your 118 must:

•Grab the attention of your prospect
•Convey who you are
•Describe what your business offers
•Explain the promises you will deliver on

You need speed and immediate relevance. A compelling, attention-grabbing 118 tells who you are, the value of what you do and sells that to anyone, internally and externally. Used correctly, it helps your business grow bigger. Your 118 should also describe the thing that separates you from everyone else that sells the same thing. I don't care what businesses you are in or what other services you offer; tell me how you are different, your story and how that story connects to your prospect.

Leaders need to get away from bland pronouncements that say, "We do this" and focus on "what we do for you." You're supposed to understand not just what you're selling, but what it offers to your prospect.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of 118 Pitches:

The Good: Mentions your product or service and tells how it will help your prospect. "In less than two minutes, I will tell you how the use of me, my company, or my service will grow your development department 115%."

The Bad: Mentions what you're offering, but lacks any reference to what it offers your prospect. "My name is Sam Maybe-Somebody, and my company The Hopeful-Who Knows wants to work with your company using our We Think Super Service."

The Ugly: Makes no mention of your company or service and how the prospect will benefit. "My name is Sam Nobody, and my company wants to work with your company because we think we can help you."

Eight seconds goes by in a heartbeat and you don't have time for anything that's flabby or ambivalent. Cut to the chase, make them lean in, and then don't let go.

Start your 118 with a rough draft. Then, do another draft. Then, put it down for a while and come back to it. Does it still ring true? Repeat the process. When you finally arrive at a 118 that best suits your business, you'll know it. The vibe will be there. It'll feel good rolling off your tongue. You'll wake up in the morning reciting it and go to bed at night doing the same thing.

You'll believe it.

After all, if you don't, nobody else will.

118 seconds seems like the perfect length for a video!

Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success.

The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Though Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with the readers of HBR. To learn more about Christensen’s work, visit his HBR Author Page.

Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”

I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.

When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is...,” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.

My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

The Class of 2010

As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.

If you like this I'd also reccomend reading: Mastering the Art of Living Well - http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/12/mastering_the_art_of_living_me.html