Will Video Save the Newspaper Star?

OK -- now that I've accomplished getting that song stuck in your head for the rest of the day, here's the scoop:

A study by local media consultant Borrell Associates revealed that newspaper websites that offer online video streaming attract substantial advertising money, much more than their broadcast TV counterparts.

Why? Well, NY Magazine is inclined to blame the broadcast media's 24/7 loops of Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears, which make for a good broadcast strategy, but don't fit well into an on-demand market. In this formulation, producers of print media are more likely to excel in the new world of on-demand video: they understand the nature of the long tail and the attraction of super-local content.

I think the analysis may hold water. Heck, my local newspaper has been running this on-demand news device outside my office for years now...

Tufts on NPR: A triumph of Fax 1.0?

On NPR on the way to work this morning, this story:

So, Tufts has implemented a new idea: What if instead of writing an essay, students were asked to draw a picture? Or write a short story, about, say, "The Disappearing Professor" or "The End of MTV"?

School officials are now hoping that better questions might result in better answers — and better clues about who students really are.

"Our argument is that the problem has not been lack of creativity in students but lack of creativity in the college admissions process," says Robert Sternberg, dean of arts and sciences at Tufts.

Now, I think this is a great idea for applications.

But more than that, this is a great story. NPR essentially just ran a five minute ad for Tufts, saying Tufts cares about how unique you are as an applicant; other schools, not so much.

What's the worth of a story like this, in terms of marketing? How many parents drinking their coffee or stuck in traffic heard this story and thought, you know, my son/daughter should apply there, that sounds more like their sort of place?

Answer: a lot. So that's point one: TradMed still rules the roost.

The second interesting thing to me is this story looks to me like it was offered initially last summer on a standard press release or verbal pitch: both the Boston Globe and Inside HigherEd covered it on the same day, which would be atypical of more PR 2.0 approaches. So that's either a triumph for Fax 1.0 or a triumph for being Tufts.

Probably a bit of both.

So point two: PR 2.0 does not replace the verbal pitch and press release.

Easy lessons. Probably self-obvious. But it's Friday and the week has been long...

If I get a chance I might try to track down the provenance of this story further. I'm particularly interested in whether it's appearance in the summer edition of the Tufts Alumni Magazine resulted in any coverage -- but I'd have to find a mail date for that.

Wii, Stumbleupon, etc

Had a great time last night pointing my Wii to the new Wii-compatible Stumbleupon Video channel. Saw a ukelele version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, and an old recording of that Sesame Street skit where the two monsters improvise jazz ("Bah-da-da-bupp! boo-doop-doo-doo-doo...Oh forget it, either you know it or you don't).

How does this relate to marketing to Millenials? Well, two advantages that traditional TV has had over the internet is that it is

a) A more culturally shared experience, and
b) Semi-ambient and social

And this takes another chunk out of an already dying market.

Is this the same evolution that's been happening all along?

Yep.

What does it mean?

Don't know. But I'm listening to OK Go on Pandora right now, MTV is laying people off, and I spent last night relaxing watching the StumbleUpon Video Music Channel on my Wii while posting at my political blog.

Year of the dynamic playlist, perhaps? Seemed worthy of note...

One Million Common Applications served

The one millionth Common Application has been served.

The big surprise? Use of the Common Application has resulted in no significant increase in the number of colleges students apply to:

While many have feared that the online Common Application would lead to a sharp increase in the number of colleges that students apply to, the average number of colleges of online applicants this year through Common Application is 3.9, a marginal increase from last year’s average of 3.8.

This surprises me, and I'd welcome anyone that can explain what keeps the number of apps stable. It seems to me that especially when considering varying amounts of financial awards that it would be in the student's best interest to increase the number of schools to which they apply...

For the record, we do not use the Common Application at my institution.

Google Reader passes Bloglines

and email still lives...

New motivation to get professors blogging

Because academic conferences are destroying the planet.

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell (Back Bay Books, 2005)

OK, so I got a little reading in over the weekend. And I happened to sit down with the pop-psych hit of last year, Blink.

As a treatise, Blink is fundamentally flawed. Gladwell's assertion that intuition needs to be more valued is undermined by Gladwell's own anecdotes, and while he seems to be aware of that, it is something he does not adequately address.

But what makes it a worthwhile read is not the question of how much we should treasure or doubt our intuition. What makes worthwhile is two things:

a) the discussion of less being more when it comes to analysis, and

b) the discussion of how unaware people are when it comes to understanding what influences their decision

It may fail as a treatise, but it works wonderfully well as a compendium of counterexamples to what we think we know about human decision making. This invariably intersects with questions we deal with on a daily basis. Does it make sense to ask students what they would like to see on a college admissions site (Short answer: No). Should we listen to what kids tell us they like in terms of the look of the site? (Nope).

What the book really drives home is how detached our perception of our decision-making process is from our actual decision making process, and how simple models can become once you filter out the noise. For anyone in marketing, that is a helpful lesson. Expect me to quote it here ad nauseum...