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Under Pressure, Stewart Shifts Company’s Focus

June 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Then, with two publicists struggling in her wake, she dashed down hallways filled with the scent of freshly baked chocolate gingerbread cookies to work in a conference room before heading to a talk at the 92nd Street Y.

Ms. Stewart’s schedule may be as busy as ever, but Wall Street wants to know when all of this baking, publishing and public speaking will turn into profits for her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In response, the company is redesigning its Web site and flagship magazine, and Ms. Stewart, 71, says she is “trying to evolve.”

While tabloids and television shows have focused lately on Ms. Stewart’s online dating, analysts have been more concerned with the company’s latest earnings report, which shows that it lost $3 million in the first quarter. Those losses emerged from across the company, including the flagship magazine, Martha Stewart Living — which has had a 35 percent decline in newsstand sales so far this year — and sheets and glassware sold at Macy’s.

The company’s merchandise division remains tied up in a lawsuit after Macy’s sued it, along with J. C. Penney, over whether Penney’s could also sell her housewares. On top of all that, the company has not had a chief executive since February.

Taking on the challenge, Ms. Stewart is returning to what she knows best: design.

On Monday, the company is releasing on iPad its redesigned July/August issue of Martha Stewart Living, which will be on newsstands next week. The redesign features pared-down presentations of recipes, like how to grill a fish, and shorter instructive features, like how to make friendship bracelets.

The magazine’s editor in chief, Pilar Guzman, said “the days of 1,000 word front-of-book stories are over.”

By month’s end, the company will overhaul its Web site to feature shorter videos on crafting and cooking topics. Executives are hoping that these early steps will help drive advertising revenue to Martha Stewart Living magazine and the company’s Web site.

“We understand that people are coming for short, consumable bites of information,” said Joseph Lagani, the company’s chief revenue officer. “People are not spending an hour with you. They’re there to get something.”

The redesign represents a large shift for Ms. Stewart, who built her reputation and her company largely on the strength of her cut-no-corners approach to cooking and crafts.

“I don’t want to retire,” Ms. Stewart said as she sat in a conference room framed by views of the Hudson River. “We’re trying to help figure it out. I don’t think it’s anything to run away from. I’m not banging my head against a stone wall here.”

In part, the redesign is an attempt to hang on to the magazine’s readers and artisans ages 18 to 34 who have become loyal fans. And like many publishers, the company is betting that video can help solve the online advertising riddle.

“That approach of putting cooking techniques near our recipes in video form has done really well,” Mr. Lagani said, “and many of our advertisers want to be part of that.”

Like many publishing executives, Ms. Stewart concedes she thought her magazines would have experienced more digital growth by now. “Publishing is a serious conundrum — advertisers don’t know what they’re doing,” she said, but she remains optimistic about digital publishing. “It’s very profitable to print digitally,” she said, adding that she believes that readers will embrace online editions.

Ms. Stewart returned to her company’s board in 2011 after a five-year ban from serving on a board or as an executive of a publicly traded company. Since then, her company has been scaling back in the hopes of returning to profitability. In early 2012, the company cut $12.5 million in broadcasting costs by not renewing its daily programming deal with the Hallmark Channel. It also broke its lease on its television production studio and ended its live audience for “The Martha Stewart Show.” The company also announced that a new weekly show, “Martha Stewart’s Cooking School,” would be distributed on public television.

In November, the company’s chief executive, Lisa Gersh, announced she planned to cut back two of its four magazines and lay off about 70 employees. In December, Ms. Gersh, after less than one year on the job, said she would step down so the company could find a chief to focus on finding more money in merchandising. The board is still looking for her replacement.

“It’s going to be hard to get your arms around the next phase of the company until senior management is in place,” said David Bank, an equity research analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “They’re doing a good job of treading water until they’re ready to do that. But it’s not that interesting to Wall Street.”

Merchandising revenue was 30 percent of total revenue for the company in the first quarter of 2013 (publishing made up 65 percent), a rise from 27 percent in the first quarter of 2012.

Mr. Bank thinks that because the company’s standards remain so high for all of its products, from its blueberry muffin recipes to Ms. Stewart’s new MarthaPantry line at J. C. Penney, the company has potential to expand its merchandising business abroad.

“The underlying quality of the products tends to be marketable outside of people who know about Martha,” Mr. Bank said. “She will be able to develop scale in the international market just based on quality.”

But the company still doesn’t know if J. C. Penney will be part of its merchandising future.

“It’s awful,” Ms. Stewart said about the lawsuit. “We’re waiting for a decision.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/business/media/under-pressure-stewart-shifts-companys-focus.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

The Education Revolution: China’s Ambitious Goal for Boom in College Graduates

January 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

But Ms. Zhang, 20, is part of a new generation of Chinese taking advantage of a national effort to produce college graduates in numbers the world has never seen before.

A pony-tailed junior at a new university here in southern China, Ms. Zhang has a major in English. But her unofficial minor is American pop culture, which she absorbs by watching episodes of television shows like “The Vampire Diaries” and “America’s Next Top Model” on the Internet.

It is all part of her highly specific ambition: to work some day for a Chinese automaker and provide the cultural insights and English fluency the company needs to supply the next generation of fuel-efficient taxis that New York City plans to choose in 2021. “It is my dream,” she said, “and I will devote myself wholeheartedly to it.”

Even if her dream is only dorm-room reverie, China has tens of millions of Ms. Zhangs — bright young people whose aspirations and sheer numbers could become potent economic competition for the West in decades to come.

China is making a $250 billion-a-year investment in what economists call human capital. Just as the United States helped build a white-collar middle class in the late 1940s and early 1950s by using the G.I. Bill to help educate millions of World War II veterans, the Chinese government is using large subsidies to educate tens of millions of young people as they move from farms to cities.

The aim is to change the current system, in which a tiny, highly educated elite oversees vast armies of semi-trained factory workers and rural laborers. China wants to move up the development curve by fostering a much more broadly educated public, one that more closely resembles the multifaceted labor forces of the United States and Europe.

It is too early to know how well the effort will pay off.

While potentially enhancing China’s future as a global industrial power, an increasingly educated population poses daunting challenges for its leaders. With the Chinese economy downshifting in the past year to a slower growth rate, the country faces a glut of college graduates with high expectations and limited opportunities.

Much depends on whether China’s authoritarian political system can create an educational system that encourages the world-class creativity and innovation that modern economies require, and that can help generate enough quality jobs.

China also faces formidable difficulties in dealing with widespread corruption, a sclerotic political system, severe environmental damage, inefficient state-owned monopolies and other problems. But if these issues can be surmounted, a better educated labor force could help China become an ever more formidable rival to the West.

“It will move China forward in its economy, in scientific innovation and politically, but the new rising middle class will also put a lot of pressure on the government to change,” said Wang Huiyao, the director general of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based research group.

To the extent that China succeeds, its educational leap forward could have profound implications in a globalized economy in which a growing share of goods and services is traded across international borders. Increasingly, college graduates all over the world compete for similar work, and the boom in higher education in China is starting to put pressure on employment opportunities for college graduates elsewhere — including in the United States.

China’s current five-year plan, through 2015, focuses on seven national development priorities, many of them new industries that are in fashion among young college graduates in the West. They are alternative energy, energy efficiency, environmental protection, biotechnology, advanced information technologies, high-end equipment manufacturing and so-called new energy vehicles, like hybrid and all-electric cars.

China’s goal is to invest up to 10 trillion renminbi, or $1.6 trillion, to expand those industries to represent 8 percent of economic output by 2015, up from 3 percent in 2010.

At the same time, many big universities are focusing on existing technologies in industries where China poses a growing challenge to the West.

Beijing Geely University, a private institution founded in 2000 by Li Shufu, the chairman of the automaker Geely, already has 20,000 students studying a range of subjects, but with an emphasis on engineering and science, particularly auto engineering.

Mr. Li also endowed and built Sanya University, a liberal arts institution with 20,000 students where Ms. Zhang is a student, and opened a 5,000-student vocational community college in his hometown, Taizhou, to train skilled blue-collar workers.

China’s growing supply of university graduates is a talent pool that global corporations are eager to tap.

“If they went to China for brawn, now they are going to China for brains,” said Denis F. Simon, one of the best-known management consultants specializing in Chinese business.

Multinationals including I.B.M., General Electric, Intel and General Motors have each hired thousands of graduates from Chinese universities.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/business/chinas-ambitious-goal-for-boom-in-college-graduates.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Media Decoder Blog: Arbitron Deal Would Extend Nielsen’s Reach Into Consumer Habits

December 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

David Calhoun, chief of Nielsen, said the $1.26 billion deal would help it gauge behavior.NYSE Euronext, via Business Wire David Calhoun, chief of Nielsen, said the $1.26 billion deal would help it gauge behavior.

7:54 p.m. | Updated Consumers today are gleaners of information, moving swiftly from cellphones to newspapers, tablets to radio and social media to television. The question for advertisers is how to reach them across a fragmented environment.

The potential for tracking consumers wherever they go was the rationale behind the announcement on Tuesday that Nielsen Holdings, the company that decades ago standardized the television advertising market through its ratings system, had reached an agreement to buy its radio industry counterpart, Arbitron, for $1.26 billion.

The deal, which is subject to approval by federal regulators, would expand Nielsen’s already extensive portfolio of tools to analyze consumers’ overlapping media habits. According to Nielsen, it would also increase the number of hours a day that it can monitor an average American’s media consumption, to seven from the current five.

“That is a very big deal when your job is to measure how consumers ultimately form and change behaviors,” David L. Calhoun, Nielsen’s chief executive, said in a conference call with investors and Wall Street analysts.

Nielsen is best known for its TV ratings, but it also tracks sales of books, music and other consumer products, and measures media habits online. On Monday, the company announced a partnership with Twitter to rank television shows by their levels of social media chatter.

Its goal is to gain as thorough a picture of consumer behavior as possible to allow advertisers and media companies to make more effective investments.

“These integrated, innovative capabilities will enable broader measurement of consumer media behavior in more markets around the world,” Steve Hasker, Nielsen’s president of global media products and advertiser solutions, said in a statement.

So far, though, the idea of a complete picture of consumer media behavior is still elusive, and there is no guarantee that the addition of Arbitron would provide it.

“You want them to be able to stitch everything together as seamlessly as possible,” said Jed Meyer, a former Nielsen executive who is the United States director of research at the Annalect Group, part of the Omnicom Media Group, the media division of Omnicom Group. “That’s the promise, but the question for this and other mergers is whether they can execute.”

The merger has the potential to bring together the two companies’ complementary strengths. Nielsen collects a broad amount of data from television, retail and the Internet, and has wide global reach, but analysts say that it has had little success tracking consumers’ habits while they are on the go.

Arbitron, however, does just a fraction of its business outside the United States but in recent years has been exploring new methods of mobile tracking. Its Portable People Meter, a pager-size device, has given the radio industry a far more detailed picture of its audience than was available before.

A combined Nielsen-Arbitron, several radio executives and analysts said, could help draw advertising to the medium. Last year ad spending was $17.4 billion, flat from the year before and still down about 18 percent from prerecession levels, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau.

Radio consumption has held strong in the Internet age, as people stay plugged in to their favorite stations, particularly while driving. According to Arbitron’s most recent statistics, more than 241 million people in the United States, or about 92 percent of the population age 12 and over, listen to the radio each week. And unlike television, a large majority of the ads on broadcast radio are for local businesses.

The proposed merger has also drawn concerns about consolidation in the global media research field, which has become dominated by a handful of firms like Kantar Media, comScore, Ipsos and now potentially the combined Nielsen-Arbitron.

“Nielsen is no stranger to radio,” said Paul Heine, a senior editor at the trade publication Inside Radio. “It has measured it before as an alternative to Arbitron, and there is some concern in the radio business that it further tightens the monopoly on measurement.”

But several analysts said that given Arbitron’s relatively small size, the deal was not likely to face major hurdles with regulators. Nielsen, active in more than 100 countries, had $5.5 billion in revenue last year. Arbitron had $422 million in revenue last year, but, with $53 million in net income, had wider profit margins.

Among the other hopes for the merger were that it could lead to more measurement of online services and link Arbitron’s value for local advertising with Nielsen’s more extensive, national data.

Despite the growth of Internet radio, services like Pandora, which has more than 60 million regular listeners, is not tracked by Arbitron and therefore lacks “apples to apples” audience data to lure potential advertisers. Such measurements have been sought after by advertisers, particularly as major broadcasters like Clear Channel Communications embrace online radio, but Arbitron has been slow to introduce a system that would put online and offline listening on equal footing.

Laura Martin, an entertainment and media analyst at Needham Company, said that Nielsen’s expertise and its aggressive push into online markets could be an advantage in exploiting Arbitron’s local radio data.

“It’s interesting that they will have the management I.Q. of Nielsen in charge of local advertising possibilities,” Ms. Martin said. “The Internet is moving at the speed of light, and the next big promise of advertising cash is sitting in local. In Nielsen’s hands those relationships may turn into something that Arbitron didn’t think of.”

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/with-arbitron-deal-nielsen-extends-its-overview-of-consumer-habits/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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‘Annoying Orange’ Tries for a TV Career

October 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Sprint and Dole have paid to use his wisecracking cartoon creation in marketing campaigns, and Toys “R” Us, Radio Shack and J. C. Penney are rolling out related merchandise for the Christmas season.

But TV channels and movie studios have yet to bite on Mr. Boedigheimer’s videos, which feature the kitchen adventures of an animated orange with a sinister smile and his buddies from the fruit and vegetable bins. And Mr. Boedigheimer, 31, isn’t waiting for their courtship. After receiving lukewarm responses to his informal overtures for an “Annoying Orange” television show, he opted for an alternative route: he made his own pilot, financed not by a studio or network, but by the management company representing him.

“The reaction is always, ‘I see why it resonates in a bite-sized way on the Web, but how is this a full-blown TV show?’ ” said Dan Weinstein, one of Mr. Boedigheimer’s managers.

Maybe it isn’t. There is certainly no guarantee that a cartoon orange can become the next SpongeBob SquarePants.

But Web video was supposed to be Hollywood’s greatest laboratory ever, a place to incubate ideas cheaply and take some of the stomach-churning guesswork out of selecting concepts for shows and movies — instead of spending millions to develop entertainment that more often than not flops straight out of the gate.

Six years after the proliferation of Web video, the number of entertainment concepts that have moved from Internet shorts to successful television shows are few. Hollywood still largely relies on its time-tested methods of finding hits: scripts funneled through agencies, young comedians, books and magazine articles. “The industry needs to continue to take risks on fresh ideas and people and, to that end, figure out how to better mine the Web,” said Jeff Gaspin, former chairman of NBC Universal Television. There are instances when it has worked. One home run was Nickelodeon’s “Fred: The Movie,” based on a Web series created by a Nebraska teenager, Lucas Cruikshank; its premiere attracted more than eight million viewers, according to Nielsen, making it one of the year’s top children’s telecasts. A sequel arrives Oct. 22.

But the result has more typically been a thud. “$#*! My Dad Says,” a CBS comedy based on a blog, was canceled after one season because of low ratings; “Quarterlife,” an NBC show that sprang from a Web drama, was dropped after one episode. As it turns out, what pops on the Web — short, unpolished bursts — is extremely hard to refine into the kind of longer-form content that flows through Hollywood’s traditional piping.

Part of the problem, at least in the eyes of Mr. Boedigheimer and his managers, involves that systemized development process. When network or studio teams do find something online with potential, they push it through the same creaky mill — focus groups, executive scrutiny — that they have relied on for decades to refine raw ideas into great entertainment (or at least commercially viable entertainment).

It is a process that can take two years, during which the online spark could easily die out. A new YouTube sensation could steal your thunder. “You get pushed around for months on end and so many voices get involved that the original voice — what was special — gets diluted or ruined,” said Gary Binkow, a partner at the Collective, the management company that represents Mr. Boedigheimer.

So Mr. Boedigheimer and the Collective are making the pilot themselves, with the managers picking up the bill. Aside from speed, the costs are lower. Making a 30-minute animated pilot through Hollywood channels (the route that “SpongeBob” took) costs about $1 million. The “Annoying Orange” pilot will cost a few hundred thousand dollars.

Conrad Vernon, one of the directors of “Shrek 2” and other DreamWorks Animation movies, is producing the pilot, which was co-written by Tom Sheppard, an Emmy winner for “Pinky and the Brain.” The Collective plans to shop it to networks starting next week. The target audience is children 6 to 12.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=529f0a42a07ea31b68353287b263b216

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