Good Picture Trumps Good Content-Exception Proves the Rule

Fast Company recently repurposed some good content about ad money.  The original content was relatively boring, and as displayed in an informational teaser on the original site of Outsell, where they are essentially trying to sell a research report, one has to wonder how or if Outsell will stay in business.

Fortunately, Fast Company came along to save their Outsell’s bacon and possibly help Outsell sell more with a better graphic about ad sales.  Crazy!

The great graphic above shows the total money, and breaks out how it flows out to the various different channels that get to take that money home.  That should be important information for any marketing company, any corporation curious about benchmarking their own marketing budget percentages at a generic level, and if you are a blogger or a newspaper, you either see a yellow brick road paved in gold or a cobblestone mud path off a cliff.

Here’s Outsell’s lackluster sales pitch for their own product  It only costs $1295 so if you have some extra coffee money lying around, knock yourself out.  The authors, Chuck Richard, Vice President & Lead Analyst; Sheila King, Director of Primary Research, may be great researchers, but either they or others at Outsell have just been schooled by Maccabee Montandon of Fast Company.

Its your standard teaser article about industry stats.  That’s going to get people buying like nobody’s business.  Not.

Makes you wonder why Outsell doesn’t hire a groovy graphic designer or two to compete with the graphic from Fast Company.  Maybe Outsell just isn’t that fast, or maybe this will be their wake up call.

In general, there comes a point these days where a research company is just a blog.  If you are not selling your reports anymore, then you are just a blog, that happens to do research.  If you are a site that only sells a research report or two per year, then you are still just a blog, a blog that sells linkbait.  If you sell lots and lots of research reports, well then maybe you are a research company, but if so, you better have a blog and you better hit it out of the park when you are prompting your own goods.

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