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

The Great (Print-Online) Debate (Cage Match Edition)

In one corner, John Donovan, the crafty veteran (he of low-powerdesign.com), sat eyeing his opponent, rubbing his Everlast gloves together in anticipation; in the other, another crafty veteran, John Reardon, Donovan’s ex-boss at RTC Group, glared, as he shuffled his laced-up, ankle-high shoes on the canvas. In between them sat a third veteran, Rick Jamison, [...]

A modest proposal for a new resource in electronics B:B

In my communications and community job at Numetrics, I’m learning lots of new things about how to market and communicate in the electronics B:B space. The main thing I’m learning is that we have few resources in this industry to do our job well.
Ours is a unique audience (engineers) and niches within that audience (think [...]

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 [...]

EDN closes the audience gap with EE Times

Update: Note that the Compete.com data cited in this post and the chart come from 2 million Compete.com users in North America. The numbers are not represented as absolutes of EE Times or EDN actual traffic, which a subscription company like Omniture can provide, but as projections. These numbers are only used to show a [...]

A peek at the new EE Times

Come spring, EE Times will be reborn, and Electronic Buyer’s News will be resurrected. That was the message EE Times Group CEO Paul Miller delivered last week during meetings in Irvine, Calif., and Santa Clara, Calif., as he gave audiences a sneak peek at the new network’s look, feel and value propositions.
It’s a [...]

Marketing old-school

Summary: In building marketing and communications campaigns, great companies don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The great thing about immersing yourself in social media is that it’s a fantastic, real-time, global source for information especially pertaining to using social media for marketing purposes.
The bad thing is it functions as an echo chamber. Voices [...]

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. [...]

What’s killing newspapers? Newsrooms

The last two mornings, I’ve arisen before sunrise, I shuffled out into the chill, damp air and seen the most amazing sight in front of our garage: a pig….
…with lipstick.
I have heard about pigs with lipstick; read about pigs with lipstick but until this morning had never seen a pig with lipstick. In our neck [...]

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 [...]

keep looking »
Theme Tweaker by Unreal
Switch to our mobile site