Regarding USA Today Publisher Craig Moon's Monday retirement announcement, Anonymous@11:24 a.m. said: "If Moon had said 'brand' one more time in his memo, I was going to puke." (Memo contained 412 words total; occurrences of brand: seven.)
Soon after I started in May 2000, it dawned on me that USA Today was both a consumer brand conceived as a paper, and a paper devoted to those brands. Indeed, few ingredients got one of my stories on a section front faster than a hot brand shoehorned into the lede. We wrote a lot of stories about Procter & Gamble's Swiffer mop. Plus, the ultimate brands we chased were human: celebrities. All that collided in a story I wrote four years ago about the billion-dollar Olsen twins-turned-teenage fashion and home furnishings marketers.
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Here this America, read your brand every morning. It will make you regular.
ReplyDeleteMoon's "brand" memo explains it all.
Jim, USA TODAY, was started, NOT as a means, to write about news, or promote brands. IT IS AN EGO TRIP, for little Al.
ReplyDeleteIf over 50% of the USA TODAY circulation is in front of occupied hotel rooms via corporate deals it brings the real viability of the product into question. I hope corporate isn't banking on that kind of circ to leverage their 85 local papers.
ReplyDeleteWhen I asked Allen why he thought this paper would sell? He replied , "Because people don't like turning the page".
ReplyDeleteNewspapers have always been about branding. What is the NYTimes if not a brand? New York Times Best Sellers List is just one example.
ReplyDeleteBranding is NOT a bad thing. It is a concept that MORE newspapers should have embraced decades ago.
I applaud USA Today's marketing savvy and wish Gannett had applied the same thinking in each of its local markets.