Industry News
SELECTED ITEMS OF INTEREST TO THE MEDIA COMMUNITY
“Influencers” Have a Growing Appetite for Food-focused Content
Increasing numbers of content creators are using food to diversify and attract more interest from brands. TikTok and Instagram segments, often produced at home, offer a much more cost-effective way than traditional advertising for brands to have their products, including snacks and appliances, featured in front of a large audience. And interest in cooking and other food content, which first jumped during COVID lockdown, has continued to grow, with one marketing analyst finding a 30% increase in client interest in those topics just in the past year.
Read more of the Digiday story here.
#media #strategy #consulting
Unconventional Wisdom: Digital Newsrooms Should Fail More Often
In his "Second Rough Draft" journalism newsletter, Dick Tofel suggests that the very low failure rate of digital news nonprofits isn't a sign of industry resilience. To the contrary, Tofel believes it represents "funder timidity, founder stubbornness and industry stagnation." While he acknowledges the hardship of employee job loss and that newsroom survival shouldn't be based completely on traditional business profitability models, Tofel says a higher failure rate may be necessary if the industry is to survive. Lessons about audience and budgeting learned from a larger percentage of failures -- a rate that comes closer to that of for-profit venture capital funded enterprises -- could be applied to creating more sustainable nonprofit news operations in the future.
Read more of Dick Tofel's "Second Rough Draft" piece here.
#media #strategy #consulting
Uncovering the Evolution of Romance Novel Covers
An analysis of romance novel cover design shows that the industry has moved from bodice-ripper illustration to a fun and light-hearted style that's currently popular. One result is that readers who might be embarrassed about being fans of romance novels can carry the books without their content being obvious. The trend of using more abstract designs and bright colors is also popular in the covers of other types of fiction. The romance cover review in "The Pudding" substack analyzed more than 1,400 covers featured in Publishers Weekly between 2011 and 2023. It also found that during that time period there was a significant decline in "raunchy" romance novel covers, and a large increase in racially diverse characters depicted in cover designs.
Read more of The Pudding story here.
#media #strategy #consulting
