Brian Fuller’s blog on the state of media and communications

Respect the Sabbath

Summary: Longtime cries for a digital Sabbath are getting louder, but we think more broadly as humans become cogs in an increasingly pervasive, pernicious 24-hour multimedia marketing wheel.
Tom Mahon is one of the most thoughtful guys I’ve ever encountered. In his own quiet way, he’s long championed the notion that people need to take a [...]

Has the advertising free-fall slowed?

Don’t break out the Champagne just yet, but signs are emerging that perhaps the advertising collapse for newspapers and magazines is slowing and leveling off. Still, publications have a long way to go to get with the program.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week:
A year-end flurry of ad spending helped moderate steep declines at some [...]

Tiger Woods’ Branding Problem

Does Tiger Woods have a branding problem or do brands have a Tiger Woods problem? 
The Woods story will be one of the most important lessons in brand management in recent years simply because everything is so outsized: Woods as a personality and pitchman is big; the brands are big; the infidelity story is salacious. [...]

TechInsights’ latest reorganization

TechInsights, the former CMP Electronics Group, reorganized again last week. The news went largely uncommented on, which, in one sense was not surprising: The company has reorganized in recent years with a frequency by which one could set a watch. However, this one is important because it should, within a very short time frame, show [...]

Gourmet magazine’s death and the wisdom of crowds

Summary: The tenets of matching audience to publication or “content” don’t change. The lesson of Gourmet magazine’s demise is that you shift your content away from your core audience at your own peril.
My initial reaction to the shuttering of 68-year-old Gourmet magazine was simply to shake my head. How do advertisers turn their backs [...]

DAC, EDA and the Unbearable Lightness of Blogging

Summary: The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry may be dead (or dormant) but its communications strategies aren’t. Engineer- and corporate-bloggers are finding their way very quickly through the evolving social media world.

I pulled up to the Moscone Center for the 46th DAC this week and thought for a moment I was at the wrong convention [...]

The Changing Media Landscape at DAC

Arguably the highlight of this year’s Design Automation Conference (#46, if you’re counting and arguably the first “social media” DAC) was a program put together by Synopsys (kudos to Karen Bartleson, Rick Jamison and Yvette Huygen) called Conversation Central. It had a series of kitchen-table talks from engineer-bloggers and media folks on the changing nature [...]

B:B Publishing’s Jazz Funeral

Summary: B:B publications in the electronics space continue to fold or shrink, but out of the ashes are rising new publications run by seasoned editors in an era when small, focused and agile define the face of media.
Compound Semiconductor magazine is being put to bed for the last time. Mike Hatcher, the publication’s publisher and [...]

Out of Joost

Joost, the online video-sharing service founded by Skype founders Nik Zennstrom and Janus Friis, pulled the plug on its original business model. The company, according to The Wall Street Journal, said it would reinvent itself as a whitebox technology provider for companies wanting to publish Internet video under their own brands (Hmm…. no first-mover advantage [...]

The Future of Newspapers–Spreadsheet Edition

Really interesting piece from Peter Kafka in All Things Digital today in which he talks with Outside.in CEO Mark Josephson. Josephson shares some spreadsheet numbers on a model of a future city newspaper.
It can work. It will have a smaller staff and no printing press, but Josephson argues it can work.
I buy his philosophy almost [...]

Theme Tweaker by Unreal
Switch to our mobile site