Unanimous, Nearly All and Framing Survey Results
February 4, 2008 – 6:21 amMonique linked to a couple of interesting studies about marketing and trends in the book industry. They may float your boat, but I wanted to discuss the first paragraph of the report on the Publishing Trends survey on online marketing:
It’s unanimous. Publicists think online is the way to go for promoting their authors’ books, but before you cancel your next pub party, read on: Publishing Trends polled publicists at publishers, independent publicity firms, and agencies, and sent a companion survey to members of the book-related media to find out what publicists claim they’re doing, and what the media report they’re actually doing. Nearly all (70.9%) publicists said they devote up to 50% of their resources to online marketing. The remaining said they do even more.
There’s so much wrong with his paragraph. Remember that these are people who work with words. You know, for a living. :
- “Unanimous” means “fully” in agreement, not “slightly more than two-thirds”. Because, speaking accurately, that’s what 70.9% is.
- By the same token, 70.9% does not mean “nearly all”. It means 7 out of 10. If I eat “nearly all” of a chocolate cake, it means my sisters only get a sliver, not more than a quarter of the thing.
- Also, if 7 out of 10 publicists devote “up to 50% of their resources”, it’s not a foregone conclusion that “publicists think online is the way to go”. Let’s illustrate these numbers. Say that “up to 50%” averages out to, generously, a 30% online spend by those 7 out of 10 publicists. Now imagine that 100 of the surveyed publicists each had $10,000 to spend. According to these results, they would spend just $210,000 or 21% of the total budget online. Clearly publicists are still pretty centered in the offline world.
I have no stake in these results either way. In fact, given my day job, I’d probably support this kind of online boosterism. But this is a bit silly, don’t you think?
I’m not saying this survey is without merit or interest–just that their approach to describing the results is faulty. I don’t know what Publishing Trends’ motivation is here. Maybe they have a stake in promoting online publicity in the book industry? Or maybe they were just looking for a way to frame the survey results. That’s important if you want to make it palatable to the media.
If so, they picked the wrong frame.
Tags: bogosity, framing, online, publishing, survey
2 Responses to “Unanimous, Nearly All and Framing Survey Results”
Good points Darren. In fact, I was weary of the study and even contacted them about the questions and what they were trying to accomplish. Some of the questions seemed aimed at online media who receive pitches and some of the questions seemed aimed at publicists who do the pitching. It was very weird and I must say I doubt the scientific nature of the study. However, I think there are some interesting comments in the overall article about how online marketing is perceived.
By Monique on Feb 4, 2008
I confess I haven’t yet read the study although I will, I promise.
I agree with your quibbles (particularly the chocolate cake one), but I think there’s something else to look at in terms of resource allocation. Historically book publishers have been notoriously and woefully - well, the only word that really fits is mingy - with marketing and PR. A few very select titles will actually have some resources devoted to their promotion, but the overwhelming majority of books published get nothing more than a few review copies sent out and that’s about it. The marketing communications strategy for most books involves getting a more famous author to read a review copy and write a flattering blurb for the back jacket or inside front (think Zadie Smith’s first novel, White TeethM/i>, and Salman Rushdie’s ringing endorsement of her as an emerging writer.
So what I’m saying is that 50 per cent of virtually nothing is also virtually nothing.
By Ruth Seeley on May 15, 2008