Many companies will invest considerable effort seeking positive publicity in influential media sources, and then fail to benefit from the masthead value of that exposure. Originally a seafaring term relating to the brass plate attached to a ship’s mainmast that memorialized its owners and builders, a publication’s masthead lists the members of its current editorial and production staff. The industry term “masthead value” can be defined broadly as the level of stature, credibility and influence associated with a specific media source. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has high masthead value; the Wall Street Transcript…not so much. Masthead value can be relative. A respected trade or prof
In the not too distant past, the sole purpose of a press release was to provide journalists with information likely to be of interest to the public; containing what media sources still call “news value.” Prior to fax machines, paper press releases were delivered by human messengers to major wire services such as AP, UPI and Dow Jones, which in turn communicated the information to their subscribing media outlets over a broadtape machine – which was much like a financial ticker tape, but used a much wider roll of paper. For non-daily news sources such as magazines, press releases were often sent through the US Mail. Regardless of how they were delivered, press releases served an important role
By most measures, Ray Dalio has achieved great success during his 65 years on earth. Unlike Donald Trump, Dalio didn’t inherit wealth. As a middle-class kid, he delivered newspapers, shoveled snow and was a caddy during the summer. The company Dalio established in his apartment in 1975, Bridgewater Associates, is currently the world’s largest and most successful hedge fund manager, with more than $150 billion in assets under management. Recently, Dalio was ranked by FORBES as the 30th wealthiest person in America, and the 69th wealthiest person on the planet, with a personal net worth of $15.2 billion. So in a highly competitive landscape populated with nearly 10,000 hedge funds, how has Bri
The original purpose of white papers as a B2B marketing tactic was to produce objective information, packaged as quasi-academic research, to validate a company's or product’s value proposition. White paper sponsors sought to educate, inform, raise comfort levels and eventually initiate sales conversations with prospective customers. White papers gained significant adoption as a content marketing tool concurrent with the rapid growth of new technologies that often required detailed explanation or context for non-technical buyers. Over time, however, the market education function was largely assumed by research firms such as Gartner and Forrester, whose opinions carry greater credibility than
