John Reardon is president of the RTC Group, a publishing company serving the embedded electronics marketplace. He brought an interesting perspective to the Comment thread prompted by my interview with John Donovan earlier this year where we explored some of the tensions between traditional publishing and new media.

RTC print publications achieved positive revenue growth in 2009—a year that was not kind to traditional magazine publishers. So when John weighed into the “New Media v. Print” part of the conversation, I wanted to hear more. He obliged as follows:

Life has an increased value through the art of socialization.  RTC has been addressing the concept of creating and supporting communities from our inception over 20 years ago.  People speak of the virtual nature of the Web, and then they debate the merits of Facebook and Twitter as if they have forgotten or never knew how to network.  RTC does it all—we have Facebook accounts, we Tweet, we have electronic distribution of our publications, and we have an expansive presence on the Web—but none of it has the marketing power of distributing a monthly print publication.  

 

This industry created a suicide pact when they tasked their sales people to go out and sell the concept that print was dead and that they—the advertiser—should redirect their marketing dollars to the Web.  This coupled with the over investment and under performance of the Web, led companies like Penton and Reed to compromise shareholder equity.  The whole time this was occurring, publishers saw the downturn of their print advertisers as further sign that the end was looming—not the fact that marketing budgets were being slashed, not the fact that they had fired a majority of the staff, and not the fact that their selling the Web as an alternative was an easy out for a marketing professional. 

 

That brings us to today.

 

We have an audience that chooses print over electronic 15 to 1; we have advertisers who are willing to pay tenfold more for print than Web; and we have authors looking to have their editorial contributions featured in print first at the exclusion of the Web.  

 

The Web side continues to be a bigger and bigger investment, which continues to grow faster than revenue.  The decreased revenue, reflecting less than 15 percent of a media company’s revenue, shows further dissatisfaction from marketing professionals.  We have recently terminated Editors-turned-marketing-professionals who had hoped they could induce a company to spend a little money based on their academic credentials to make their house payment. 

 

The Web has been a financial disaster for media companies—whether you’ve invested in TechOnline or are a shareholder at Reed, Penton, PennWell or UBS, you know what I am talking about.  It is hard after the billions of dollars spent to admit the error, but like late night talk shows—sooner or later we have to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.

 

Let’s be realistic—the Web is here to stay and offers itself up as a great PR vehicle.  It’s a great place to support the drive of marketing through the offering of further, more complete information.  But it is not a primary marketing tool, it doesn’t have a clear business model, and it hasn’t proven itself in building shareholder equity as a medium for marketing. 

 

So if you are sitting at home believing that you have the next great idea for an industry Web site, ask yourself how many sites you are aware of that make money, and how many of those make money because they’re supported by print?

As a consumer of technology-focused news, or a marketer seeking to communicate with niche audiences, or a journalist adapting to a rapidly changing landscape—what do you think?

Navraj Nandra joined Synopsys in 2005 as product marketing director for analog/mixed-signal IP. His responsibilities include product line and roadmap definition for SerDes-based physical layer interfaces (PCIe Express, SATA, XAUI), high speed memory interfaces (DDR), HDMI, USB, data converters, audio CODECS and video front-ends. Navraj blogs for Synopsys at The Eyes Have It: A Mixed-Signal IP Blog.

Rick: What is the most interesting problem analog/mixed-signal IP experts are currently trying to solve?

Navraj: If I’m wearing my marketing/business development hat for analog/mixed-signal then the challenge is to convince centralized engineering teams that buying IP is a viable alternative to building it. I would go as far as saying that the quality of the deliverables we create are far superior to those created by a centralized team. So the question “How do you know that you have better quality” needs to be addressed. Finding a business model that supports our approach to standards-based IP, leveraging a reuse model, with some customer’s expectations on customized offerings is also a challenge. It is harder to make money on a services engagement. Harder to scale too.

Now putting on my technical marketing hat, the key challenge is to meet analog performance requirements of high speed PHYs, data converters, audio CODECs and video front ends in deep sub-micron CMOS technologies. Technologies are getting harder to design in and the protocols are getting faster, power consumption needs to be reduced and cost has become a design variable (driven by consumer demand). So it’s a quadruple whammy! Imagine, we can put a USB PHY on a 28-nm process designed for the latest MID. I think Aart calls it “techonomics.” He may not have had my concerns in mind, this is just my spin. The techonomics challenge of analog/mixed-signal IP – making it into a business with all the technology advances that actually hurt analog performance.

Rick: Are the solutions to these challenges likely to emerge through collaboration among various experts? If so, how does that type of collaboration take place?

Navraj: Yes it takes a village: process, design experts and CAD experts. We don’t have all these folks at Synopsys so solutions require collaboration with the ecosystem, which consists of semiconductor foundries, industry special interest groups (like the PCI-SIG), and customers (of course!). This makes my job a lot of fun, actually.

Rick: How is your blogging activity different from your role as a director of product marketing?

Navraj: I keep the two separate. Blogging is more free(er) thought. My day job involves managing a team of experienced PMMs, driving the product roadmap, ensuring design wins by working with sales. The two endeavors cross sometimes – I like to use the blog to talk about some industry challenge or a new product announcement. I try not to make the blog an exclusive pitch for Synopsys products. That would be a turn-off, in my opinion.

Rick: Finally, how do you come up with ideas for blog topics?

Navraj: I’m never short on ideas! What I try to do is link two very different ideas to come up with something new (my favorite artists do this, like David Bowie and William Burroughs). For example I wanted to describe the differences in the Synopsys mixed-signal IP business and the Chipidea model, which was more custom orientated. I used the analogy of mixing a Strauss waltz with a Punjabi bangra – this was our opening wedding dance.