The Catalyst Code

It used to be when you opened the New York Times to pages 2 and 3 there were a couple of things you could be certain of. There’d be the lead news articles on international events, and there’d be a Tiffany’s ad on the right hand side of page 3. This was a great […]

With Google’s stock down 40 percent since the beginning of the year you have to wonder whether some investors have misunderstood how Google makes money all along. Google’s stock too a big whack a few weeks ago when ComScore released stats showing that number of clicks the search-ad giant was getting were down. What the […]

Media companies are engaging in a bit of co-opetition as they form ad networks for selling advertising across member properties. (See the recent AP article Media Groups Share Content in Ad Deals.)
Sometimes competitors are getting in bed together because they figure, I guess, that they don’t want to lose the money for selling […]

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 160 million years before a huge impact rendered them all but extinct. They never saw it coming – one day they were the dominant species; the next, they were all but gone. Ad agencies might just end up being the dinosaurs of modern business. The impact that has created […]

The latest WeMedia/Zogby poll citing that most people use the internet for their primary source of news and information is hardly a newsflash. We’ve been reading about the newspaper industry’s demise now for a couple of years as a result of fewer people reading the paper and therefore fewer advertisers using it to reach the […]

A recent blog post ponders the future of Amazon’s Unbox video service given its reported inability to “make a dent in Amazon’s business.” This service, which was launched nearly 18 months ago, is a movie download service that allows movies to be downloaded right to set-top boxes (thanks to a partnership with Tivo). Recently, Amazon […]

Industries like people sometimes do not live forever. The whaling industry was the major source of fuel for Americans in the 19th century. Great fortunes were made and Nantucket was once the whaling capital of the world. It died as people switched to gas and electricity. The typewriter industry had an almost century run […]

U.S. media employment in December fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry. But employment in advertising/marketing-services — agencies and other firms that provide marketing and communications services to marketers — broke a record in November (769,000). Marketing consulting powered that growth. (Data from Advertising Age)
Now here’s an interesting trend. As […]

I picked up the New York Times two days ago and I could have told you that there were major cutbacks in its news department before ever reading the story that confirmed my suspicions. The paper isn’t as thick, the stories aren’t as rich and frankly, even the Style section seems a bit anemic of […]

Randall Stross’s comments on the Kindle in today’s New York Times reminded me that I’ve been meaning to review the Kindle which I bought myself as a pre-Christmas present in early December. Unlike Randall, I kept my wife’s paws off of mine and I’ve been happily using it for about six weeks. It is a […]