Saturday, February 02, 2008

How depressing

I'm not talking about Hong Kong's unusually foul weather. I'm talking about editorial values in Asia.

I like LightHouse Independent Media's Marketing website (and associated e-newsletter) and was reading a piece about online advertising growing much faster than TV in China. I noticed a little reader poll on the right-hand side of the page and clicked through. The question: Would you be willing to pay for editorial coverage?

The screen shot here shows you the result (click on it to read clearly). How depressing! Paul Conley, sorry to spoil your day, but, if that's how the marketeers of Asia are feeling, we have a LONG way to go in this part of the world before any content, let alone B2B content, can be trusted.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Paul,
That is depressing. But it could be worse. The far more interesting question is what percentage of publishers would be willing to sell coverage. Let's hope that number is considerably lower.

Paul Woodward said...

'm afraid in this part of the world, I would guess that those figures would be reversed in favour of "Yes" if you were to poll publishers on whether they would sell editorial space to advertisers if they could.

Certainly the "we'll write about you if you advertise" promise is alive and well...in fact, the norm...among trade publishers across most of Asia. Stupid, worthless stuff results, but they don't really care.