Wake up to Google’s threat to journalism (Acorde para a ameaça do Google ao Jornalismo)

 Não costumo ter uma visão demoníaca, tampouco conspiratória do mundo, mas pelo que venho lendo recentemente à respeito fo Google (e seu crescente poder monopolista), dá para começar a suspeitar de algumas coisas!

O post abaixo, de http://seattletimes.nwsource.com, entra na linha de argumentação de que a Mídia, antes denominada de o “Quarto Poder”, está perdendo lugar para o Google, com seus “tentáculos” em todas as esferas da mídia moderna!

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Wake up to Google’s threat to journalism

Journalists create much of the content that drives Google, notes Internet industry consultant Scott Cleland. He argues that journalists and publishers must finally wake up to the fullness of Google’s threat to the Fourth Estate.

By Scott Cleland

Special to The Times

GOOGLE’S CEO Eric Schmidt is a man known for candor. So perhaps it should have come as no surprise when he recently told magazine executives how they should run their businesses. The real answer, Schmidt said, was to “increase your relevance.”

Relevance in this case means passing muster with the Google online advertising complex that increasingly decides which companies will prosper and which fail online. And the Internet, to be clear, is the only place where many newspapers and magazines are gaining advertising revenue. It is the future of nearly all media today.

What Schmidt does not understand is being “relevant” is what every editor and publisher does for a living. Media cannot stay in business without articles, photos and all the other things that matter to their readers. The real problem here is not journalism but Google itself, which is rapidly funneling the flood of advertising dollars flowing from print publications to the Internet directly into its own pockets, choking off investment that by all rights ought to go a few other places, too.

Google’s emerging control over publishing is shocking and worse than most people think. It is the main driver behind the seemingly endless waves of layoffs that are destroying journalism today. In short, it makes previous concerns about media ownership and consolidation seem quaint.

Take for instance Google’s 70-percent share of the text ads that appear automatically alongside search results and articles on the Internet. If you believe in competition, that 70 percent looks bad, but not as bad as the 90 percent of U.S. Internet advertising profits it already hauls in. Indeed, had the now-failed advertising deal with Yahoo not been blocked by the Justice Department and at least several states, Google and Yahoo together would have pulled in a staggering 99 percent of all Internet advertising profits in the United States.

So Schmidt talks a lot about “relevance.” But what is relevance, anyway?

Relevance is not necessarily what you want to see, read or hear. It hasn’t a thing to do with “editorial judgment.” It is, however, whatever makes Google rank one Web site ahead of another on its search engine — in other words, whatever makes Google the most money.

Advertisers are slowly waking up to the problems. They know now there is little room for any but a few winners in the Google universe. And even when Google claims that it assigns ad space according to a competitive auction for keywords, the truth is those bids are adjusted — oftentimes radically — by a “quality score” whose precise inputs are secret and cannot be improved through anything but wild guesses. Put another way, the game is rigged.

Many businesses understand the threat, even if they don’t want to talk openly about it. So far, objectors have relied principally on industry associations to do the fighting and shield them from direct attack.

But others stick their neck out still. Consider SourceTool.com founder Michael Savage, recently profiled by The New York Times. Savage had started a niche, industrial search engine that did well both as advertiser and seller of ads, only to see his hugely profitable business turn into a money loser in a matter of weeks. Google never could explain why things went badly, other than cite a vague quality score they could not help him improve.

Savage has an explanation of his own, however: monopolization. Google saw his niche business as an emerging competitor and cut it off before it could ever grow into something big.

Industry and consumer opposition — finally — has begun to build. Consumer groups such as The Center for Digital Democracy and US Public Interest Research Group opposed the Google-Yahoo ad partnership. Industry groups including the Association of National Advertisers, The World Association of Newspapers, the World Federation of Advertisers and the International Advertising Association also told law enforcers to block the deal. But there is still work to do.

Journalism — reporters and editors — create much of the content that drives Google. After feeding, pampering and protecting the beast that is devouring them, journalists only now are waking up to the fullness of Google’s threat to the Fourth Estate. Publishers will deserve to lose their business if they continue to roll over and let Google play its totally rigged game of “relevance.”

Scott Cleland is president of Precursor LLC and Chairman of NetCompetition.org, a pro-competition forum funded by broadband companies.

The new permanent crisis of marketing (A nova permanente crise do marketing)

A emergência da mídia social, das redes sociais e coisas equivalentes está transformando a indústria do marketing. Uns falam de uma tensão entre Personalization e Mass Customization.  O que eu acredito mesmo é que o marketing está migrando de paradigma: de um brand push para um customer pull, e isso está mudando o papel dos tradicionais marketeiros (sejam empresas ou personas)!

Vejam post abaixo do http://news.cnet.com !

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February 6, 2009 8:01 PM PST

The new permanent crisis of marketing
Posted by Tim Leberecht

(Credit: Cut Chemist)

When I had dinner with my former boss and mentor in Paris a few months ago (formerly vice president of marketing at a US-based enterprise software company, now CEO of a French enterprise software company), he shared a dirty little secret with me: “Forget about marketing,” he told me, “it doesn’t really matter. I spend 80 percent of my time on HR, finance, operations, and sales. Branding, marketing communications, PR – not my priorities.” A few weeks later I came across a working paper called “Getting Marketing Back in the Boardroom,” and seeing the title gave me chills. Provided that both the practitioner’s view and the academic analysis signify a larger trend prevalent in the industry, then the days of marketing as a corporate function might indeed be numbered.

Is marketing dead or does it just smell bad? The new swan song for marketers is ironic as it comes at a point when the power of marketing seems not only so obvious but also so ubiquitous: Marketing is around us 24/7, marketing paradigms have invaded our private lives (“personal branding,” “self-branding”), the blurring boundaries between marketers and consumers have led to the rise of the notion that “everyone is a marketer,” and the Americans elected a president whose marketing prowess is widely admired (Advertising Age even voted Barack Obama “Marketer of the Year 2008″). And marketers are complaining about losing influence?

It is not the first time someone is ringing the death knell for this profession. Marketing, almost by definition, finds itself in a permanent crisis. Marketers are accustomed to constantly justifying their efforts. Marketing is an easy target because its targets are constantly moving. Audiences are fickle and their beliefs elusive, and marketers’ tools are easily outdated. As in the media business, marketers’ wins from the past are old news. What worked yesterday can be wrong tomorrow. Moreover, the lack of a formalized set of rules (as it exists for, say, accounting) makes the discipline prone to advice from all kinds of want-to-be experts from near and far. When so much of a profession is based on knowledge (episteme) and not craft (techne), there will always be those who believe they know more (or know-it-all, for that matter).

Marketing has traditionally been closely scrutinized from other corporate functions, particularly sales, not the least because of the inverse proportional ratio between the visibility of its efforts and the intricacy of quantifying their impact. Even in the heyday of marketing, when it was considered the flagship function in most companies and the fastest track for executives to be groomed to become the next CEO, chief marketing officers (CMOs) found themselves on hot seat. From the late 1990s to 2004, Starbucks appointed a new marketing head five times in seven years, and Coca-Cola changed its CMO four times in six years. This trend is mirrored globally: In a recent CMO survey by the Economist, 63 percent of survey respondents said that the global marketing head at their companies had served for less than three years. The average tenure of CMOs at US companies has shrunk to just 16 months.

But something is different this time around. While marketers have always been under scrutiny for what they do – they are now also being scrutinized for what they are.

A number of voices question the marketer’s role today. McKinsey Quarterly believes that marketing executives are grappling with the new social media environment, arguing that “many chief marketers still have narrowly defined roles that emphasize advertising, brand management, and market research.” And even marketing guru Seth Godin asks whether “your marketing is out of sync.”

It looks as if marketing needs some serious marketing. Conferences that seek to redefine (and thus strengthen) marketing’s role are burgeoning: The American Marketing Association offers seminars such as “Beyond Marketing 2.0: Harnessing the Power of Social Media for Marketing Campaign Results,” Forrester’s Marketing Forum 2008 heralds “engagement” as the profession’s “new imperative for success,” and the (humbly titled) THE Conference on Marketing aspires to be the penultimate forum for marketing leaders who “seek certainty in experimental times.”

Pundits warn that this new crisis of confidence may be existential and usher in the inevitable demise of marketing as a corporate function. Today’s CEOs are more and more frequently selected from candidates who have proven their value by rising through the ranks of finance, operations, or sales. Marketing is perceived as “soft,” as the consolation prize for sales people who didn’t quite advance far enough in their own field to rise to the top.

There is growing concern among marketers about losing influence, as many strategically important aspects of marketing are increasingly distributed across other functions in organizations. A recent CMO survey co-sponsored by the American Marketing Association and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University indicates that many tasks traditionally ascribed to marketing are no longer primary responsibilities of marketers. While marketers in the surveyed organizations oversee positioning (86%), advertising (92%), promotion (86%), marketing research (86%), competitive intelligence (71%), and market entry (67%), more strategic responsibilities such as new products (48%), market selection (48%), customer relationship management (49%), innovation (39%), innovation (36%), innovation (36%), pricing (22%), distribution (13%), and customer service (9.5%) have moved to other departments. Even more tellingly, only in six percent of firms marketing is considered to be responsible for stock market performance.

Diana Derval, professor of marketing at the French business school ESSEC and author of the book “Wait Marketing,” mocks marketers as a nostalgic class: “The only reason marketing still exists is because of the big lobby power of its professional organizations, especially in the advertising industry,” she told me. Derval argues that marketing is a science and not an art, and makes a passionately cold-hearted case against the “myth of marketing genius.” She contends that most marketing dollars are squandered by “experimental” marketing efforts that fail to scientifically segment and target their audiences. Her skepticism poses some rather disturbing questions for marketers: If marketing is a science, who still needs marketers? Will marketing soon be taken over by non-marketers?

Marketing is indeed in an existential crisis as it faces unprecedented challenges to its conventions. But I would argue that it is accompanied by new, unprecedented opportunities. Companies have to radically rethink how they do marketing – marketing can no longer be viewed as a collection of programs, but instead as way of behaving in a networked economy of “market communities.” The industry has reached a turning point that presents a unique launch pad for marketing to reinvent itself – or to paraphrase German filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch: “You don’t have a chance so use it!”

 

Tim Leberecht is frog design’s vice president of marketing and communications and has worked in the media, entertainment, and high-tech industries. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET.