New Tech Press
Posted on | May 12, 2008 | No Comments
Lou Covey has been generating a lot of buzz for his New Tech Press concept which is soft launching right about now. It’s a simple concept with disruptive underpinnings.
A great swath (i.e. the majority) of companies in the electronics space not only have shrinking marketing budgets, they have small marketing budgets. They’re companies run by engineers who can’t understand why marketing doesn’t function like a CMOS wafer fab. Brett Cline, who runs marketing for the design-automation software company Forte, helped me see the picture clearly last year, before I left EE Times. Said he: Forte-sized companies want to market and they’re interested in marketing in print, but what can you give us for $4000 a month? (In context, that sum is half what a single full-page ad in Times cost in the good old days).
There’s mass suspicion about the effect of advertising in the electronics space because there’s no analytics and ROI, even in online campaigns. Companies are increasingly looking to non-advertising forms of communications to deliver messages.
In comes New Tech Press, which sits at the nexus of that need and the media, which is watching its ranks shrink by the month. Their question: How to deliver good content to our readers with increasing budgetary pressures.
Lou’s concept is simple: A company pays a modest sum of money to have a feature story written about them. It’s written by an established journalist, and the company gets a look-see but not veto power. Yes, there’s some give and take in the process. But ultimately the journalist has a reputation to protect, and the company wants to get covered.
Lou then distributes the story to his New Tech Press list and publications and sites can choose to run it or not. They get it for free when they would have had to pay a freelancer for the same piece. Presumably they’re putting appropriate disclaimers on it when it publishes.
Different, eh?
I wrote the first piece for Lou because I was interested in the technology (micro-emissive /OLED displays) and I wanted to see how the process felt. I wrote the story just the way I’d write a feature story for EE Times, a techno-business slant with a dollop of skepticism in it. Did I roll in competitive commentary? No. But we did prevail on the company, MED, to get some additional outside commentary from analysts in there.
Time will tell whether it catches on, but it’s clearly worth the try. Everything finds its place in open markets, and writing is one of the most open markets there is. (And if you thinking the writing business is changing, try being a professional musician).
Lou’s approach sits right between traditional media models and my mantra in communications land: The company is the medium is the message (here’s a list of posts on this topic). The philosophy is being adopted by a number of companies, but most SMB companies don’t have the mass to staff it properly. So they’ll be looking to alternatives if they’re having a hard time getting covered.
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Related posts:
- Maureen Dowd comes to the tech press
- State of the press release
- Media re-aggregation picks up steam
- Dear Trade Press Editors: Get with the Program
- Assume the position
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