by Adam Hartung | Jun 1, 2012 | Current Affairs, In the Rapids, Innovation, Leadership, Television, Web/Tech
On May 18 Facebook went public with an opening price of $38/share. Now, after just 2 weeks, it's more like $28. Ouch – a 25%+ drop in such a short time makes nobody happy. Except buyers. And if you are interested in capturing a high rate of return with little risk, this is your lucky break!
The values of publicly traded companies change, often dramatically, based upon changes in performance and investor expectations about the future. Trying to profit off fast price changes is the world of traders – and the vast majority of them lose fortunes rather than create them. Knowing how to ignore whipsaw events, and invest in good companies when they are out of favor is important to long-term wealth creation.
Investors make money by understanding product markets and the companies supplying them, then investing in companies that build upon trends to create revenue growth with high rates of return over several years. In the forgettable 1999 movie "Blast from the Past" (Brendan Fraser, Christopher Walken, Sissy Spacek) a family moves into its nuclear blast shelter in 1960 during a panic, and doesn't come out for 35 years. Fortunately, the father had bought shares of AT&T and other companies aligned with 1960 trends, and the family discovers upon re-emergence it is quite wealthy.
Creating investment wealth means acting like them, buying shares in companies building on trends so you can hold shares for years without much worry.
If ever there was a company aligned with trends, it is Facebook. The company did not create 900million users in 8 years by being lucky. Facebook is the ultimate information era company. Facebook is not a fad – any more than television or telephones were fads in 1960. Just like they provided fundamental new ways of acquiring and disseminating information Facebook is the newest, most efficient and effective way for connecting and communicating in 2012.
When television appeared the mass population said "why?" There was radio, which was cheap, and older users said TV reduced the use of imagination. And television was not available many hours per day. But it didn't take long for CBS and its brethren to prove it could attract eyeballs, and soon Proctor & Gamble started paying for programming so it could promote its soaps (remember "soap operas?") Soon other companies developed programs strictly so they could promote their products. The "Ted Mack Amateur Hour" was sponsored by Geritol, and viewers were reminded of that over and over for 30 minutes every week. Eventually the TV ad model changed, but the lesson is clear - when you can attract eyeballs it has value and there will be businesses creative enough to take advantage.
Now television watching is declining. Instead, people are spending more time on the internet – including via mobile devices. And the location attracting the most people, and by far for the most minutes per day, is Facebook. Facebook's access to so many people, so often, creates an audience many businesses and non-profits want to tap.
Further, in the networked world Facebook not only has eyeballs, it delivers up to those eyeballs some 9 million apps, and knows what everyone wants, where they come from and where they go next. Beyond the industrial-era business of selling ads (like Google,) Facebook's information business has significant value for anyone trying to promote or sell a solution. Facebook is a repository of information about people, and their behavior, never before seen, understood or developed for use.
Around the IPO, General Motors decided to drop its Facebook advertising. That freaked some investors. Cries arose that social media is somehow broken, and unable to develop a business model.
Let's keep in mind who we're talking about here – GM. Not the most innovative, forward thinking company, to put it mildly. GM, like a lot of other plodding, but big spending, large companies has approached social media like it is just television on the web – and would prefer to simply put up a television ad on a Facebook like link. Whoa! That would be akin to a 1960s TV ad that was simply the text from a newspaper ad. Nobody would read it, and it simply wouldn't work.
Television required a new kind of communication to reach customers – and social media does as well. TV required the ad be entertaining, with movement, product use demonstrations, and video plus audio to go with the words. Connecting with users was harder, but the message (and connection) could be far more robust. And that is what advertisers are being forced to learn about Facebook/Social. It has new requirements, but once understood companies can be remarkably successful at connecting with potential customers – far more than the traditional one-way approach of historical advertising.
Paid promotion on Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg – a one-way approach to advertising sure to create short-term revenue but not terribly robust. Beyond that, social media changes everything. Retail, for example, is fast shifting from pushing inventory to being all about understanding the customer and offering them what they need in an anticipatory way (think Amazon rather than Best Buy.) And nowhere can you better understand customer needs than by social media participation. By being an information company, rather than an industrial company, FB is remarkably well positioned to create growth – for everybody that figures out how to use this remarkable platform.
As Facebook's shares kept falling this week, more attention was paid to whether traditional advertisers would buy FB. And much was made about whether the "metrics" were there to justify social media investments. This micro-management approach clearly misses the main point. People are already on Facebook, their numbers are growing, their uses are growing, their time on the site is growing, and the benefits of using Facebook are growing. Trying to measure Facebook use the way you would measure a print ad – or even a Google Adword buy – is simply using the wrong tool.
When P&G first started producing television "soaps" their competition sat back and said "look at what television advertising costs, compared to print and compared to pushing products into the local stores. What is the return for each of those television shows? Can it be justified? I think it is smarter to keep doing what we've done while P&G throws money at ads you can't measure." By moving beyond the historically myopic view of trying to find returns at the micro level P&G quickly became (at the time) the world's largest consumer goods company. Early TV advertisers followed the trend, knowing their participation would create returns far in excess of doing more of the old thing. And that is the direction of social media.
There was a lot of anticipatory excitement for the Facebook IPO. Lots of people wanted shares, and couldn't buy them in advance. The public, and the Morgan Stanley investment bankers, clearly thought the shares would go up. Oops. But that's a lucky thing for investors. Especially small investors, usually unable to participate in a "hot" IPO. Now anybody can buy FB shares at a 25% discount to the offering price – a better deal than the institutional buyers that usually get the "sweet" deal little guys never see.
If you are an employee, short term you might be unhappy. But if you are an investor, be happy that worries about Greece, the Euro's future, domestic politics, a lousy jobs report and simple myths like "sell in May and go away" have been a drag on equities this month – and diminished interest in Facebook.
Buy FB shares, then forget about them for a while. What you care about isn't the value of FB shares in 4 days, 4 weeks or 4 months – you care about 4 years. If you missed the chance to buy Microsoft in 1986, or Amazon in 1997, or Apple in 2000, or Google in 2004 then don't miss this one. There will be volatility, but the trends are all in your favor.
by Adam Hartung | May 3, 2012 | Current Affairs, Defend & Extend, In the Swamp, Innovation, Leadership, Web/Tech
With revenues up 39% last quarter, it's far too soon to declare the death of Google. Even in techville, where things happen quickly, the multi-year string of double-digit higher revenues insures survival – at least for a while.
However, there are a lot of problems at Google which indicate it is not a good long-term hold for investors. For traders there is probably money to be made, as this long-term chart indicates:
Source: Yahoo Finance May 3, 2012
While there has been enormous volatility, Google has yet to return to its 2007 highs and struggles to climb out of the low $600/share price range. And there's good reason, because Google management has done more to circle the wagons in self-defense than it has done to create new product markets.
What was the last exciting product you can think of from Google? Something that was truly new, innovative and being developed into a market changer? Most likely, whatever you named is something that has recently been killed, or receiving precious little management attention. For a company that prided itself on innovation – even reportedly giving all employees 20% of their time to do whatever they wanted – we see management actions that are decidedly not about promoting innovation into the market, or making sustainable efforts to create new markets:
- killed Google Powermeter, a project that could have redefined how we buy and use electricity
- killed Google Wave, a product that offered considerable group productivity improvement
- killed Google Flu Vaccine Finder offering new insights for health care from data analysis
- killed Google Related which could have helped all of us search beyond keywords
- killed Google synch for Blackberry as it focuses on selling Android
- killed Google Talk mobile app
- killed the OnePass Google payment platform for publishers
- killed Google Labs – once its innovation engine
- and there are rumors it is going to kill Google Finance
All of these had opportunities to redefine markets. So what did Google do with these redeployed resources:
- Bought Motorola for $12.5billion, which it hopes to take toe-to-toe with Apple's market leading iPhone, and possibly the iPad. And in the process has aggravated all the companies who licensed Android and developed products which will now compete with Google's own products. Like the #1 global handset manufacturer Samsung. And which offers no clear advantage to the Apple products, but is being offered at a lower price.
- Google+, which has become an internal obsession – and according to employees consumes far more resources than anyone outside Google knows. Google+ is a product going toe-to-toe with Facebook, only with no clear advantages. Despite all the investment, Google continues refusing to publish any statistics indicating that Google+ is growing substantially, or producing any profits, in its catch-up competition with Facebook.
In both markets, mobile phones and social media, Google has acted very unlike the Google of 2000 that innovated its way to the top of web revenues, and profits. Instead of developing new markets, Google has chosen to undertaking 2 Goliath battles with enormously successful market leaders, but without any real advantage.
Google has actually proven, since peaking in 2007, that its leadership is remarkably old-fashioned, in the worst kind of way. Instead of focusing on developing new markets and opportunities, management keeps focusing on defending and extending its traditional search business – and has proven completely inept at developing any new revenue streams. Google bought both YouTube and Blogger, which have enormous user bases and attract incredible volumes of page views – but has yet to figure out how to monetize either, after several years.
For its new market innovations, rather than setting up teams dedicated to turning its innovations into profitable revenue growth engines Google leadership keeps making binary decisions. Messrs. Page and Brin either decide the product and market aren't self-developing, and kill the products, or simply ignore the business opportunity and lets it drift. Much like Microsoft – which has remained focused on Windows and Office while letting its Zune, mobile and other products drift into oblivion – or lose huge amounts of money like Bing and for years XBox.
I personalized that last comment onto the Google founders intentionally. The biggest news out of Google lately has been a pure financial machination done for purely political reasons. Announcing a stock dividend that effectively creates a 2-for-1 split, only creating a new class of non-voting "C" stock to make sure the founders never lose voting control. This was adding belt to suspenders, because the founders already own the Class B stock giving them 66% voting control. The purpose was purely to make sure nobody every tries to buy, or otherwise take over Google, because the founders will always have enough votes to make such an action impossible.
The founders explained this as necessary so they could retain control and make "big bets." If "big bets" means dumping billions into also-ran products as late entrants, then they have good reason to fear losing company control. Making big bets isn't how you win in the information technology industry. You win by creating new markets, with new solutions, before the competition does it.
Apple's huge wins in iPod, iTouch, iTunes, iPhone and iPad weren't "big bets." The Apple R&D budget is 1/8 Microsoft's. It's not big bets that win, its developing innovation, putting it into the market, shepharding it through a series of learning cycles to make it better and better and meeting previously unmet – often unidentified – needs. And that's not what the enormous investments in mobile handsets and Google+ are about.
Although this stock split has no real impact on Google today, it is a signal. A signal of a leadership team more obsessed with their own control than doing good for investors. It is clearly a diversion from creating new products, and opening new markets. But it was the centerpiece of communication at the last earnings call. And that is a avery bad signal for investors. A signal that the leaders see things likely to become much worse, with cash going out and revenue struggling, before too long. So they are acting now to protect themselves.
Meanwhile, even as revenues grew 39% last quarter, there are signs of problems in Google's "core" market leadership is so fixated on defending. As this chart shows, while volume of paid ads is going up, the price is now going down. 
Source: Silicon Alley Insider
Prices go down when your product loses value. You have to chase revenue. Remember Proctor & Gamble's "Basics" product line launch? Chasing revenue by cutting price. In the short-term it can be helpful, but long-term it is not in your best interest. Google isn't just cutting price on its incremental sales, but on all sales. Increasingly advertisers are becoming savvy about what they can expect from search ads, and what they can expect from other venues – like Facebook – and the prices are reflecting expectations. In a recent Strata survey the top 2 focus for ad executives were "social" (69%) and "display" (71%) – categories where Facebook leads – and both are ahead of "search."
At Facebook, we know the user base is around 800million. We also know it's now the #1 site on the internet – more hits than Google. And Facebook has much longer average user times on site. All things attractive to advertisers. Facebook is acquiring Instagram, which positions it much stronger on mobile devices, thus growing its market. And while Google was talking about share splits, Facebook recently announced it was making Facebook email integrated into the Facebook platform much easier to use (which is a threat to Gmail) and it was adding a new analytics suite to help advertisers understand ad performance – like they are accustomed to at Google. All of which increases Facebook's competitiveness with Google, as customers shift increasingly to social platforms.
As said at the top of this article, Google won't be gone soon. But all signs point to a rough road for investors. The company is ditching its game changing products and dumping enormous sums into me-too efforts trying to catch well healed and well managed market leaders. The company has not created an ability to take new innovations to market, and remains stuck defending and extending its existing business lines. And the top leaders just signaled that they weren't comfortable they could lead the company successfully, so they implemented new programs to make sure nobody could challenge their leadership.
There are big fires burning at Google. Unfortunately, burning those resources is producing a lot of heat – but not much light on a successful future. It's time to sell Google.
by Adam Hartung | Feb 11, 2012 | Current Affairs, In the Rapids, Innovation, Leadership, Television, Web/Tech
Buy Facebook. I don't care what the IPO price is.
Since Facebook informed us it was going public, and it's estimated IPO valuation was reported, debate has raged over whether the company could possibly be worth $75-$100B. Almost nobody writes that Facebook is undervalued, but many question whether it is overvalued.
If you are a trader, moving in and out of positions monthly and using options to leverage short-term price swings then this article is not for you. But, if you are an investor, someone who holds most stock purchases for a year or longer, then Facebook's IPO may be undervalued. The longer you can hold it, the more you'll likely make. Buy it in your IRA if possible, then let it build you a nice nest egg.
About 85% of Facebook's nearly $4B revenues, which almost doubled in 2011, are from advertising. So understanding advertising is critical to knowing why you want to buy, and hold, Facebook.
Facebook has 28% of the on-line display ad market, but only 5% of all on-line advertising. On-line advertising itself is generally predicted to grow at 16%/year. But there is a tremendous case to be made that the market will grow a whole lot faster, and Facebook's share will become a whole lot larger.
At the end of January Proctor & Gamble's stock took a hit as earnings missed expectations, and the CEO projected a tough year going forward. He announced 1,600 layoffs, many in marketing, as he admitted the ad budget was going to be "moderated" – code for cut. While advertising had grown at 24%/year sales were only growing at 6%. He then admitted that the "efficiency" of on-line advertising was demonstrating the ability to be much higher than traditional advertising. In other words, he is planning to cut traditional marketing and advertising, such as coupon printing and ads in newspapers and television, and spend more on-line.
P&G spends about $10B/year on advertising. 2.5x the Facebook revenue. Now, imagine if P&G moves 10% – or 25% – of its advertising from television (which is now a $250B market) on-line. That is $1-$2.5B per year, from just one company! Such a "marginal" move, by just one company, adds 1-3% to the total on-line market. Now, magnify that across Unilever, Danon, Kimberly-Clark, Colgate, Avon, Coke, Pepsi …… the 200 or 300 largest advertisers and it becomes a REALLY BIG number.
The trend is clear. People spend less time watching TV and reading newspapers. We all interact with information and entertainment more and more on computers and mobile devices. Ad declines have already killed newspapers, and television is on the precipice of following its print brethren. The market shift toward advertising on-line will continue, and the trend is bound to accelerate.
Last year P&G launched an on-line marketing program for Old Spice. The CEO singled out the 1.8 billion free impressions that received on-line. When the CEO of one of the world's largest advertisers takes note, and says he's going to move that way, you can bet everyone is going to head that direction. Especially as they recognize the poor "efficiency" of traditional media spending.
And don't forget the thousands of small businesses that have much smaller budgets. Most of them rarely, or never, could afford traditional media. On-line is not only more effective, but far cheaper. Especially as mobile devices makes local marketing even more targeted and effective. So as big companies shift to on-line we can expect small to medium sized businesses to shift as well, and new advertisers are being created which will expand the market even further. This trend could lead to a much faster organic market growth rate beyond 16% – perhaps 25% or even more!
Which brings us back to Facebook, which will be the primary beneficiary of this market shift.
Facebook is rapidly catching up with Google in the referral business. 850 million users is important, because it shows the ability Facebook has to bring people on-line, keep them on-line and then refer them somewhere. The kind of thing that made Google famous, big and valuable with search a decade ago. In fact, people spend much more time on Facebook than they do Google. When advertisers want to reach their audience they go where the people are (and are being referred) and that is Facebook. Nobody else is even close.
The good thing about having a big user base, and one that shares information, is the ability to gather data. Just like Google kept all those billions of searches to analyze and share data, increasingly Facebook is able to do the same. Facebook will be able to tell advertisers how people interact, how they move between pages, what keeps them on a page and what leads to buying behavior. Facebook uses this data to help users be more effective, just like Google does to help us do great searches. But in the future Facebook can package and sell this data to advertisers, helping them be more effective, and they can use it for selling, and placing, ads.
Facebook usage is dominant in social media, but becoming more dominant in all internet use. Like how Windows became the dominant platform for PC users, Facebook is well on its way to being the platform for how we use the web. Email will be less necessary as we communicate across Facebook with those we really want to know. Information on topics of interest will stream to us through Facebook because we select them, or our friends refer them. Solving problems will use referrals more, and searching less. The platform will help us be much more efficient at using the internet, and that reinforces more usage and more users. All the while attracting more advertisers.
The big losers will be traditional media. We may watch sports live, but increasingly we'll be unwilling to watch streaming TV as the networks trained boomers. Companies like NBC will suffer just as newspaper giants such as Tribune Corp., New York Times and Dow Jones. Ad agencies will have a very tough time, as ad budgets drop their placement fees will decline concomittantly. Lavish spending on big budget ads will also decline.
Anyone in on-line advertising is likely to be a winner initially. Linked-in, Twitter, Pinterest and Google will all benefit from the market shift. But the biggest winner of all will be Facebook.
What if the on-line ad market grows 25%/year (think not possible? look at how fast the smartphone and tablet markets have grown while PC sales have stagnated last 2 years as that market shifted. And don't forget that incremental amount could easily happen just by the top 50 CPG companies moving 10% of their budget!)? That adds $20-$25B incrementally. If Facebook's share shifts from 5% to 10% that would add $2-2.5B to Facebook first year; more than 50%!
Blow those numbers up just a bit more. Say double on-line advertising and give Facebook 20% share as people drop email and traditional search for Facebook – plus mobile device use continues escalating. Facebook revenues could double up, or more, for several years as trends obsolete newspapers, magazines, televisions, radios, PCs and traditional thoughts about advertising.
If you missed out on AT&T in the 1950s, IBM in the 1960s, Microsoft in 1980, or Apple in 2000, don't miss this one. Forget about all those spreadsheets and short-term analyst forecasts and buy the trend. Buy Facebook.
by Adam Hartung | Dec 8, 2010 | Food and Drink, General, In the Rapids, Innovation, Leadership, Television, Web/Tech
Summary:
- We too often think of competition as “head to head”
- Smart competitors avoid direct competition, instead using alternative methods in order to lower cost while appealing directly to market needs
- Proctor & Gamble has long dominated advertising for many consumer goods, but the impact, value and payoff of traditional advertising has declined markedly as people have switched to the web
- New competitors can utilize internet and social media tools to achieve better brand positioning and targeted marketing at far lower cost than old mass media products
- Colgate is in a great position to blow past P&G by investing quickly and taking the lead in internet marketing for its products
- Eschew calls for investing in old methods of competition, and instead find new ways to compete that allow you to end-run traditional leaders
According to a recent Advertising Age article (“To Catch Up Colgate May Ratchet Up Its Ad Spending“) Colgate has done a surprisingly good job of holding onto market share, despite underspending almost all its competitors in advertising. This is no mean feat in consumer products, where advertising dominates the cost structure. But the AdAge folks are predicting that to avoid further declines, and grow, Colgate will have to dramatically up its ad spending. That would be old-fashioned, backward-thinking, short-sighted and a lousy use of resources!
Colgate competes with lots of companies, but across categories its primary competitor is Proctor & Gamble. In toothpaste, P&G’s Crest outspends Colgate by over $25M – or about 35%. In dishsoap Colgate spent nothing on Palmolive in 2010, compared to P&G’s spend of $30M on Dawn. In deodorant/body soap Colgate spent about $9M on Softsoap, Irish Spring and Speedstick while P&G spent 9 times more (over $82M) on Old Spice and Secret. (Side note, Unilever spent $148M on Dove and a whopping $267M when adding in Axe and Degree!) In pet food, Unilever spends $35M dollars more (almost 4x) on Iams than Colgate spent on Hills Science Diet. Altogether, in these categories, P&G spent almost $158M more than Colgate (2.5x more)! As a big believer in traditional advertising, AdAge therefore predicts that Colgate should dramatically increase its annual ad budget – and maintain these higher levels for 5 years in order to overcome its historical “underspending.”
But that would be like deciding to trade punches with Goliath!
Why would Colgate want to do more of what P&G does the most? While advisors try to pit competitors directly against each other, head-to-head “gladiator style” combat leaves the combatants bloody – some dead. That’s a dumb way to compete. Colgate has long spent in other areas, such as supporting dog rescue operations and with product specialists gaining endorsements while eschewing more general advertising. Now, if Colgate wants to take action to grow share, it should pick up a sling (to continue the (Biblical metaphor) in its ongoing battle. And the good news is that Colgate has an entire selection of new, alternative weapons to use today.
Across all its product categories, Colgate can utilize a plethora of new social media marketing tools. At costs far lower than traditional mass advertising, Colgate can build promotional web programs that appeal directly to targeted consumers. Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, YouTube, Google and many other tool providers allow Colgate to spend far, far less than traditional advertising to provide specific brand promotions, product information, purchase incentives (such as coupons) and product variations targeted at various niches.
With these tools Colgate can not only reach directly into buyer laptops and mobile devices, but offer specific information and incentives. Traditional advertising, whether print (newspaper and magazine), radio, television or coupons is a low percentage tool. Seeking response rates (or even recall rates) of just 1 to 5 percent is normal – meaning 90% percent of your spending is, quite literally, just “overhead” cost. But with modern on-line tools it is very common to have response rates of 50% – or even higher! (Depending upon how targeted and accurate, of course!)
Colgate is in a great position!
It has spent much less than competitors, and maintained good brand position. It’s biggest competitors are locked-in to spending vast sums on traditional tools that have low impact and are in declining media. Colgate could now decide to commit itself to using the new, modern tools which are lower cost, and have decidedly more targeted results. In this way, Colgate can get out of the “colliseum” where the gladiators are warring, and throw rocks at them from the stands. Play its own game – to win – while letting those in the pit whack away at each other becoming weaker and weaker trying to use the old, heavy and unsophisticated tools.
Now is a wonderful time to be the “underdog” competitor. “Media” and advertising are in transition. How people obtain information on products and services is moving from traditional advertsing and PR (public relations) focused through mass media to networks with common interests in social media. Instead of delays in obtaining information, based upon publisher programming dates, customers are seeking immediate, and current information, exactly when they need it – on their mobile devices. Those competitors who rapidly adopt these new tools are well positioned to be the new Davids in the battle with old Goliaths. And that includes YOU.
by Adam Hartung | Sep 9, 2010 | Defend & Extend, Leadership, Lock-in
Leadership
Fire The Status Quo Police
Adam Hartung, 09.08.10, 06:00 PM EDT
Their power to prevent innovation can devastate your business.
“That’s not how we do things around here.” How often have you heard that? And what does it really mean? It is said to stop someone from doing something new. It is no way to promote innovation, is it?”
That’s the lead paragraph to my latest column on Forbes.com, published yesterday evening. Forbes launched a new editorial page covering Change Management, and gave my column’s link the premier placement!
All companies want to grow. But early in the lifecycle they Lock-in on what works, and then implement Status Quo Police that intentionally do not allow anything to change. Their belief is that if nothing changes, the business will always grow. So conformance to historical norms is more important than results to them. To Status Quo Police results will return when conformance to old norms is returned!
Of course, this completely ignores the marketplace. Market shifts, created by competitors launching new technologies, new pricing models, new delivery models or other new solutions cause the value of old solutions to decline. No matter how well you do what you always did, you can’t achieve historical results. The market has shifted!
To keep any company growing you must know who the Status Quo Police are in your organization. They can be in HR, controlling hiring, promotions and pay. In Finance controlling what projects receive resources. In Marketing, tightly controlling branding, product development or distribution. The Status Quo Police are committed to keeping things tightly controlled, and saving the organization from change that could send the company in the wrong direction! No matter what the marketplace may require.
But it’s not enough to know who the Status Quo Police are, its up to leaders to eliminate them! If you want to have a vibrant, profitably growing organization you have to constantly adjust to market shifts. You have to sense what the market wants, and move to deliver it. You have to be very wary of the Status Quo, and instead be open to making changes in order to grow. To do that, you have to hold those who would be the Status Quo Police in check. Otherwise, you’ll find the obstacles to innovation and growth overwhelming!
Please read the article at Forbes, review it and comment! Let me know what you think!
