反轉豬肚

做生意的一般不敢得罪客人，千錯萬錯，客人永遠是對的。食肆全面禁煙，酒樓員工都違規者「盡量容忍」，得罪客人等於與自己荷包對著幹。客人拖數賴帳就更麻煩，一方面公司希望客人繼續光顧，另一方面，又怕欠款愈欠愈多。免費報紙AM730則反其道而行，今日在要聞版刊登了一則「欠廣告費啟事」，促請一廣告客戶清還欠款，還公開其股東身份。實行為客人做個「反宣傳」，這一招真絕，欠款的客戶相信只好乖乖就範，否則報紙天天來這一套，恐怕其旅行社生意做不下去。「欠廣告費啟事」會不會嚇怕其他的客人呢? 茶怪想，AM730的廣告版位天天爆滿，惡得起。該客戶不單只馬上付清欠款，還要再落另一則廣告解釋事件，以保護自己的聲譽，報紙又有生意。

Do you trust newspapers?

When a real estate sales agent pursues you to buy a flat, you won't take his words as fact. So do you regard comments from car sales, cosmetic sales and stockbrokers? You treat their words as advices or opinions, if not mere selling efforts, because you know how they earn their living -- from pursuing you to open your wallets. Do you trust the contents of newspapers?

Unfortunately, most people treat what the newspaper said as factual reporting. But if you follow my previous two articles and believe in what i said, you know the newspaper publishers made their business by selling advertising, rather than selling newspapers. In other words, you, as a reader, are not their customers. Their customers are advertisers. Your purchases of the newspapers merely help them serve advertisers better. Then you won't be surprised to learn that newspaper publishers behave more like salespeople than judges. Will you still take their words as fact anymore?

Most newspapers do not tell lies. Neither do most salespeople for apartments, cars and stocks. Newspaper publishers sell your attention. To source as much quality attention as possible, newspapers must arouse your curiosity. The aim is to arouse curiosity, whether by telling the truth or lies. If the truth can arouse attention, that's perfect for readers. Unfortunately, it is always easier to find a curious lie than the curious truth although, in that case, accurate and objective reporting would be compromised.

Drawing attention is the old trick, which include photos of celebrities taken by paparazzi, bloody and violent photos of scenes of traffic accidents and suicides, and the outing of privacy of celebrities or even ordinary people.

It serves advertisers up to the moment that you decide to buy the newspaper. The more dangerous trend is that newspapers try to blur the line between editorial contents and advertising contents.

Once you buy a newspaper, you have the very own right to read the editorial contents only and disregard the ads. i think most readers have unconsciously developed the habit of skipping the ads. Obviously, even though news reports and ads share the same page, there must be straight black lines separating reports from ads. Advertisers hate those black lines.

There have been headline stories about how fat Hongkong people are. Another report said how much fatter we have become since we started waking up for the World Cup games a few weeks ago. Pages of ads from fitness and weight-losing centers followed.

Besides, there are dozens of feature stories about fashion, retirement planning, test drives, dining, travel, etc. All of these speak well for their advertisers.

The business section should be the second-most lucrative section for generating advertising revenue, after the front page.

i always suspect, without any proof, that newspapers turns bullish about the stock market when there are big initial public offerings. i also wonder how seldom newspaper cites negative comments from analysts and fund managers about the stock market. i also get the similar feeling whenever property developers launch apartment flats. The market opinions cited by newspapers are often predictably tilted toward the positive side.

Just look at the full pages of ads placed by property developers and IPO companies and you might have the same suspect as my own.

Worst, there are routine advertisers who place pages of ads everyday and could turn angry about negative reports about their corporate images. Theoretically, the editorial department and the sales department of a newspaper publisher are separate. However, the editorial department often feels the pressure from the other side of the company.

Journalism ethics mandate accurate and objective reporting. However, reporters and editors have the freedom to choose whom to interview. Experienced reporters can easily tell in advance what the stance a particular person has and what he or she will comment.

If i want to write a bullish report about certain IPO, i could call up any brokers who are offering margin financing for the subscription. If i want to trumpet the property market, i could interview any sales of property developers and agencies.

Even more dangerous are the citing of anonymous sources of information. Journalists have the duty to protect identities of their confidential sources, as it is in the public interest of sharing information. However, this rule can be easily abused, for people to distribute some information, true or fake, in favor of their own interest.

Furthermore, reporters and editors also have the freedom to choose what comments to cite from the interviewee, and what angle to present the story, after the interview. Editors choose the headlines, after the report is written.

Unnoticeably, the newspaper of your own choice would be full of advertising contents. If you are an Adam Smith, free market, advocate, and you understand that the newspaper publishers are profit-maximizing bodies, you won't have any complaint about any biased reports.

When you make decision on investment, homebuying, car buying, shopping, you are inevitably influenced by the media. The business tie between advertisers and the media would probably make you spend more money than otherwise.

An ideal newspaper business is one that has high creditability, which attracts many serious readers. The high circulation lures much advertising revenue and hence generates high profits. But the reality is that the newspapers with highest creditability are not necessarily the most profitable ones.

Nevertheless, under such a business restructure of newspaper business, the journalism ethic standards and editorial independency become very important safeguards for the dissemination of unbiased, accurate information, which makes journalists who uphold these ethical values highly respectable.

Jul 12, 2006
Copyright Quamnet

Before you read a newspaper

i heard a relative bought 10 copies of the same newspaper one day, bringing down a dozen of trees, and never read a single news headline of those papers. You might have recently noticed, in any usual morning without any exciting breaking news happening in town, people tightly queue up in front of newsstands. They grasp the bulking papers and cut up pieces with scissors they have brought, and in the next minute, they throw the papers into trashes.

What they really go for are shopping coupons. The face value of those coupons far exceeds the price of the newspaper. For instance, one day, Sun Daily which is sold for HK$4 gave out coupons worth HK$20. You earn HK$16 for each copy purchased. If you bought 10 copies, you would sweep a profit of HK$160. That's why people are so desperate to buy newspapers that they go down the street at six o'clock in the morning.

On the surface, the phenomenon contrasts with the economic wisdom that "there isn't such a thing as free lunch".

Some newspapers, such as Metro and am730, are free of charge. Moreover, those attached with valuable coupons, such as Sun Daily, are actually cheaper than free. What went wrong?

Meanwhile, the free newspapers have generated a new kind of jobs-- the front-end newspaper collectors. i am not talking about those workers responsible for distributing free newspapers in the street. It is the reverse. There are some people asking you to pass the newspapers to them, if you have already finished reading them. One day, i was wondering why a middle-aged woman stood in the middle of the pedestrian and said good morning to everyone passing by. Later, i figured out that she is collecting finished newspapers. There used to be newspaper collectors only who collect large bulks of newspapers left in the recycle bins. But this new type of jobs is different in the way that the workers actively remind, or pursue to a certain degree, people to give away their papers.

These workers are not wearing uniforms. They are not hired by the newspaper publishers. They are not offering value-added services to help you conveniently unload your unwanted stuffs. They want your papers because the papers can be sold for money.

Papers are costly. Readers of free newspapers get papers free of charge. Even for paid newspapers, the wholesale price of newspaper cannot fully cover the cost of paper materials used, let alone the heavy overhead of the editorial departments. What a favorable deal for readers, as a consumer?

You get it all wrong if you believe what you are doing every morning is what it appears to be. You buy a breakfast and have it. Fine, you are a consumer of a meal. By handing the coins to the newsstands, you are not buying newspapers. You and all the other newspaper readers are not consumers at all.

The supply chain appears to be: raw information -> reporting -> editing -> printing -> wholesale -> retailing. No, the supply chain is actually the reverse of what it appears to be. You are the supplier -- the supplier of attention, eye-balls; the supplier of brain-space, memories, perceptions. Newspaper publishers actually work as the collectors, the aggregators of attentions and all the stuff. Their business is to sell these "goods" to advertisers including property developers, supermarkets, warrant issuers, watch companies, apparel retailers, etc.

In fact, attention is valuable goods for advertisers, and it sells. This is the real part of the whole business. Forget about the few coins you hand out. Property developers budget millions of dollars in marketing campaigns, including placing ads in the front pages of newspapers. They are buying your attention.

People are most alert in the morning, best time for advertisers to get their notices. For instance, you hear a song from the radio early in the morning, and the melody will echoe in mind for the whole day. Every morning you grasp your favorite newspaper, you sell your valuable attention to it.

Advertising is the vital income source for newspaper publishing businesses. For profitable publishers, the adversiting revenue more than covers the paper costs and the salary expenses for reporters and editors. That's why some publishers do not care giving out newspapers for free, and some others publish them "cheaper than free".

Well, the next question is: "If my attention is so valuable, why do i still have to pay for some newspapers? The cash flow ought to be the other way around. The newspaper publishers should pay me for reading the newspapers, instead."

The easy answer it: "You pay for the contents, the breaking news, the investigative feature stories, the tips for jockey racing, soccer games and stock punting, as well as your favorite columns and the editorial."

i pay my respect to journalists who produce great contents. Good articles are invaluable. Sometimes, i come across wonderful articles which help me understand what is happening around me and guide my thoughts. How do you value this kind of articles? A pint of beer is sold for HK$40 in pubs. A good article should be worth as much as a happy hour with a buddy. Therefore, i am willing to buy a newspaper which carries a good article for HK$40.

But the reality is there is not any newspaper publisher making sustainable profits without advertising income. Even those newspapers with the best quality cannot depend solely on selling contents.

Therefore, you do not pay for the content. Back to the question why i have to pay for newspapers if i am indeed the supplier, i imagine a newspaper publisher would say: "Thank you for your $6, dear reader. Well, the advertising fees have taken care of our production expenses for the contents. The $6 you paid is for us to identify you as one of the serious suppliers of attention."

To boost advertising income, a publisher must boost the circulation of its newspaper. The easy way to boost circulation is to reduce the newsstand price. But that won't serve the advertising the best because it won't help them access to the best quality of attention. In an extreme scenario, if a publisher attached a HK$100 banknote to each copy of its newspaper, it must be able to sell as many newspapers as it wishes. Everyone, including me, will run to the nearest newsstand by dawn and sweep away as many copies as they can.

Yes, the circulation must be spectacular. But will the advertisers be happy to see that? No, they will not because they won't get more attention to their ads than before. Most probably, they would get less because, by the time the serious readers walk down to the newsstands, the $100-giving newspaper would have already been sold out.

Therefore, by handing out $6, you are acquiring a certification -- ISL 9000 required as an approved supplier of attention. While ISO 9000 is an industry standard for quality control, ISL 9000, which, out of my imagination, stands for "I Shall Look", would be a qualitystandard for the "attention" industry.

Still, there are unanswered questions: "Why don't free newspapers require ISL 9000?" "How does contents play their roles in this attention industry?" i will continue next time.

May 16, 2006
Copyright Quamnet

Advertisement Victims

We have discussed, earlier, about how watching television make us unhappy. We saw too many rich people and beautiful actors and actress that undermine our confidence toward our wealth and appearance. Ladies consistently compare their body shapes with those of supermodels and inevitably feel discontent about their own. Gentlemen dream about the romantic lifestyles of lawyers and doctors created by scriptwriters.

Last weekend, i invited a few close friends of mine to have a little party in my place. It was nice to chat with them about anything from work to hobbies, from relationships to sex. After a bottle of Scotch whisky and some wine, a girl started to sing songs. The men started to check out one another's belly. Not surprisingly, we all looked like being three months pregnant.

One lectured us how to train up the abdomen muscles. He just joined a fitness club and enrolled in a training program. He claimed to have every reason to look good because he was single. Honestly, he is a neat and kind gentleman in a highly respected profession. He won't lose out to any gymnastic marshal men in front of ladies. Still, he recently started to worry about his muscles.

Honestly, we all want to look good, married or not. We all did pay serious attention to the lecture he gave. And we agreed to meet in a few weeks and see the progress of each of us. Great! Peer pressure is a great driving force for anything.

Men at our ages of late twenties and early thirties are so worried about our bellies as well as hair. We have, since long, passed (or failed) the school exams, settled in a profession and, yet, have no kids to worry about. We are still young and want to look so. Hair in the bathtub and tightening pants raise red alerts. This is a stage everyone has to go through. But the anxiety grows exponentially when all people around you are watching. Ladies face similar situations for their skin and body shape.

Advertisers see this crack and punch right at the spot. For example, Listerine was invented in the nineteenth century as a surgical antiseptic. It was later sold as a floor cleaner and a cure of a sex disease. But it wasn't a big hit until 1920's, when it was applied as a solution for bad breath. Listerine aired an ad featuring young women and men eager for marriage but put off by the bad smell from their mates' mouths. "Can I be happy with him in spite of that?" one woman, in an ad, asked herself. Freakonomics cited advertising expert James Twitchell's writing: "Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitoisis (bad breath)." Believe it or not, the company's revenues multiplied by 13 times in the seven years following the launch of the ad.

Advertisers usually promote services or products by triumphing how good they are. Timeless advertisement to me is the one selling Vitasoy (345), featuring a warm bottle of soybean beverage in the cold winter. In another unforgettable one, Leslie Cheung's musical performance, selling the fast food chain Cafe de Coral's (341) "100 score points" service. More recently, power company CLP's (2) "Hopes-lightened-up" ads are delightful. However, some advertisements do the opposite by telling you how bad you look without those products and services. They try to highlight the opportunity costs of keeping your wallet closed. Avoiding their services and products, you would look ugly, be socially isolated and unhappy.

Advertising is powerful enough to wage a social campaign. A typical beauty service advertisement stage a fat lady upset by her body shape, and how the beauty salon "transforms" her into a slim and confident woman. Now, many girls become unsatisfied with their body shapes and always want to become slimmer than they are now.

Then, middle-aged men become the next target. The close-up shot of a middle-aged man's half-deserted head is the deadliest weapon. More recently, that a man has a belly become a sin.

If the trend continues, more and more people would be victimized in the future. i predict they would include people with sweaty palms, if there are the cures to sell. Let's call such a hypothetical cure the "Hoi's sweat-stopper", in the form of hand cream or spray. Believe me, even if you think you don't have the sweaty-palm problem. After seeing the ads, you will worry about the condition of your own palm every time you need to shake somebody's hand. Inevitably, you will become mindful about shaking somebody's sweaty hand. You would also wonder what other people might think about your hand and you. Hoi's will eventually become a runaway success.

You may ask: "Isn't it nice to keep palms dry before shaking hand? What's wrong with that?" The problem is not the product itself, but the anxiety it brings to all people. Even though the sales of Hoi's would add to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country, the anxiety it brings cannot be subtracted from the GDP. The economy would grow. But, would we be happier than now?

i once joked with a friend how to promote Quamnet. The story line goes like this: After losing all the money due to a series of bad investment decisions, a wife loses the control of her diet. That leads to spots on her face and rising body weight. Her husband leaves her, and she started to lose hair. The story comes to a twist when she, one day, joins Quam. Three months later, she wins back all the money, seamless skin, perfect body shape, charming hair and starts a new romance.

This is legitimately blackmailing. i dared not propose this idea to the marketing colleagues.

We are getting more aware of our health, which is good. Bad breadth, excess fat and hair loss might be caused by hidden health problems. We should be careful about that, and should mind our diets and habits. Excess fat could cause other health problems as well. But living in the shadow of unnecessary threats about our own appearance could possibly raise blood pressure as well.

Jul 27, 2005
Copyright Quamnet