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June 23, 2007
EDA's media problem or why I have come to dislike startups
About a week ago, people working for electronic design automation (EDA) companies got a nasty surprise. EETimes had decided to lay off the leading journalist writing about EDA. Over 17 years, Richard Goering developed a formidable reputation in the sector to the point where if he didn't write about something in EDA it probably didn't happen. It was part of a larger programme of layoffs at publisher CMP Technology that also led to the departure of editor-in-chief Brian Fuller.
Across its IT and electronics publications, CMP is losing about 200 people. However, EETimes took some heavy hits. The EDA people, in particular, did not respond well to the cuts, understanding that the journalist who put the subject of EDA on the front page many times would be gone by the end of June.
"Are regurgitated press releases the future of EDA 'news' now?" asked engineering consultant John Cooley at his Deepchip site, which has become the best water cooler for chip designers currently online. At that site, Gloria Nichols of Launch Marketing, a PR, wrote: "I am trying to figure out how we are going communicate EDA's 'value' to the outside world when our independent, credible sources are shrinking."
However, Vitalcom's Lou Covey, another PR, pointed out an uncomfortable truth: the publisher did not see EDA coverage as a generator of ad sales. In a conversation with one of the managers at CMP, he was told: "Lou, we can no longer support industry segments that fail to produce a discernible revenue stream."
In many respects, EDA was lucky to have a full-time person covering it on any paper given its size relative to the semiconductor and electronics equipment markets. It is less than 2 per cent of the size of the chip business and a vanishingly small percentage of the trillion dollar-plus electronics business. However, there are good reasons for covering EDA even if covering it does not bring in ads directly. And they continue to be good reasons.
EDA can serve as an indicator for things happening in the wider chip business and it provides a good source of information on where the chip and system businesses are headed. You can't design any of these things by hand: you need complex, often obscure tools to get them done. Want to know what people are up to? Have a look at what they are buying.
That's the good side of EDA. But it's not all gravy. You have the vendors themselves to contend with - and a good many of them are helping to make themselves irrelevant to the journalists who do want to cover the sector. In turn, that will see more magazines distance themselves from this corner of the electronics business. The malaise is one that afflicts many vendors in the electronics market, but the EDA guys have the most to lose.
The guys running marketing for a good many of these companies have decided that promotion is all about messages. To make sure the journalist writes about the message and not what they have actually done, they try to keep back as much information as possible. It reaches ridiculous levels at times, especially among the early-stage startups.
Ahead of the Design and Test Automation in Europe (DATE) conference, one startup had lined up some press interviews. The PR doing the company didn't contact me - she never does - but I tend to treat these things as a blessing these days. It's all more time for the conference itself. It seems I was lucky. A journalist who did do one of the meetings complained at DATE that the marketing veep doing the
The core problem was a pattern that is now common to early-stage startups: they all do the same dance of the seven veils. It's become a PR formula. First, the company is in "stealth mode", which means you don't publicise what you are up to. Actually, what this often means is that people turn up to give presentations at conferences through this period. When you as a journalist try to write a feature that refers to some of this information and you try to check some things, your calls don't get returned. It cuts both ways: I don't tend to be that receptive to companies that do this during the next phase.
And that next phase is the company launch. This is where the company leaves stealth mode and talks about what it is doing. Well, almost. This meeting is largely about "messages" - all sizzle, no steak. Again, there is a formula: some slides banging on about time to market, rising complexity and design costs; a reference to Ron Collett's annual study (probably three years out of date) on how many chips are duds first time round; a description of some specific design problem; how Company X has a solution; and that's about it.
That's because you have to wait for the actual product launch for any details of what the company actually thinks it has done. That is assuming you don't get a "technology announcement" in the meantime or, even worse, a series of so-called announcements that don't actually convey any useful information. For these, they generally roll out the marketing veep who can look you in the eye and say "I don't know" when you ask a technical question (but can rattle off an answer to an engineer who asks more or less the same thing - again something I have seen demonstrated on a panel at a conference).
That's a whole lot of time and effort for what is, at heart, nothing more than a product launch by a company hardly anybody has heard of and with zero track record. It's difficult to see this situation enduring when few people have the time to sit through even one of these Powerpoint-driven meetings. It wouldn't be so bad if half these companies took part in interviews for features we happen to be writing on related subjects. But they are working so hard to ram a product presentation down our throats, they don't want to get involved in something that might mention a competitor.
The message push is not isolated to startups. Some (but by no means all) of the big guns have started to adopt the "message is everything" approach. Take Cadence's "design with..." push. Or the company's attempt to rebrand ESL as "enterprise system level" rather than "embedded system level" design. You have to dig deep to find the structural changes in the bit that actually matters to engineers: what happened to the tool. The saving grace is that, if you keep banging away at them, you will eventually get to the detail you need to write something vaguely useful.
However, it is time that is often better spent chasing up other leads. It's a bit wearing to have someone insist on sticking to the presentation when you've asked to do it as an interview and get to the end where the first question is: "Yes, but what have you actually done?"
It is not just that the trade press that is drawing back from EDA; many of the EDA companies are effectively drawing back from the trade press by turning interviews into a set of canned talking points. Just in case you wanted to know: I saw exactly one early-stage startup at DAC.
Posted by Chris at 2:07 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
You can put hacks and flacks in the same room but you can't make them like each other
The Design Automation Conference (DAC), normally held somewhere on the West Coast of the US in June each year, is the only technology conference I have attended where one of the fringe events is a session that attempts to bring together hacks and flacks in the same room. It's all meant in a spirit of togetherness although, if you read the transcripts from previous years, the undercurrent of hostility is pretty clear:
[From a marketer to a journalist] "And who nominated you? Who elected you to be an advocate for the engineering community? You don't have the right to be an advocate for anybody. You should be an advocate for the truth."
This year, a cheer went up from the crowd when Mike Markowitz, marcom at STMicroelectronics aimed a jibe at the other panelists: "All I've been hearing this morning is a lot of self-serving information". His fellow panelists were all from the media side: two journalists, a guy from a sponsored-podcast network and another running a website.
Unfortunately, the moderator, Novas CEO Scott Sandler, didn't leave a whole lot of time of questions or comments from the floor, so the 2007 event did not have much room for robust discussion. Given the events that followed DAC, that was a bit of a shame. There were things that should have been aired in that forum that were, instead stayed buried. What we did get was an advert for sponsored podcasts from a sponsored-podcast provider together with broad agreement that electronics engineers and Web 2.0 don't seem to mix all that well, although I don't think the picture is that simple.
Steve Leibson, who operates as a mixture of evangelist and writer within IP supplier Tensilica, had one reason as to why we don't see a lot of obvious participation from engineers working in electronic design other than through sites such as John Cooley's Deepchip.com, which provide a way of anonymising responses. They often can't comment publicly on how design tools and other products are working because they are constrained by non-disclosure agreements.
Mike Santarini, one of the editors at EDN, added that it was unlikely that an engineer at a company like AMD was going to publish a schematic and ask: "Can you help me fix this?"
John Furrier, CEO of Podtech, did have one insight, which is an obvious point but frequently missed in discussions of how to reach an audience: "Users go to where the information is". Unfortunately, that was mixed in with a surprisingly ambitious estimate of how many people downloaded a sponsored podcast of Cadence Design Systems CEO Mike Fister and observations on how journalists had discovered blogs and started using the rumours carried on some of them to develop stories, as though this was some new kind of behaviour.
I've got news for the Podtech people, journalists have been picking up on rumours for some time now - it just happens that blogs and message boards provide additional sources of them. I never ceased to be amazed at how Web 2.0 pushers seem to believe that people never communicated with each other before comment forms appeared on websites. Blogs and message boards simply act as amplifiers for existing behaviour, they aren't necessarily changing behaviour.
Brian Fuller, then editor of EETimes, explained what a lot of people running marketing in electronics companies seemed to have missed: "You guys are in the media business, whether you like it or not. If you don't get into it, you will have someone else take that position in your place."
Unfortunately, many companies have adopted the approach of assuming that audiences form automatically around media, no matter how shiny, new, dull or crass it happens to be. Take a look at the vapid nonsense put out by Podtech on behalf of Cadence from the company's DAC party, which concludes: "In truth it was a great event and everyone left a winner." Yep, that's going to get engineers watching in their droves.
I made the point from the floor that companies run the risk of losing the audience that they have now by embracing Web 2.0 and ditching more traditional media and events. This is even when the online forums attract nothing but tumbleweed but a few thousand people were filing into the centre for an old-fashioned conference and exhibition.
I added something on what has become a favourite hobby-horse of mine: how the product-centric approach to press relations now taken by most companies in this sector is simply not working. That triggered an observation from Santarini that demonstrates how much companies only half understand, at best, their role as media producers: "You guys seem to be sending out more press releases than you used to be. And it's stuff like: 'The marketing manager is scratching his ass next Tuesday'."
To underline the point, he noted that the panel started with breakfast at 7:30 in the morning. Yet, before it kicked off, he had received 40 emails "of stuff I don't want to look at". The curious thing is people do seem to be finding it hard to understand why that should be a problem.
Posted by Chris at 11:51 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Hard to reach
This is a depressingly familiar telephone conversation:
"I'm glad I've got hold of you. You're very difficult to get hold of."
"Am I? Why?"
"I've been trying to call you, but this is the first time you've answered the phone."
"Did you try leaving a message? I didn't get any voicemails from you and it's a bit difficult to return a call if I don't know who's calling."
"No, I didn't leave a message."
"So why are you telling me I'm hard to reach?"
"Er..."
This kind of episode annoys me more than it should, but it's surprisingly common for me to get back from a meeting and check the caller ID on the phone to see the same numbers come up time and again from PRs who, frankly, are never going to get in touch because they won't leave a message. This, apparently, goes down in the reports prepared for their clients as "attempted to contact".
As Charles Arthur pointed out recently, asynchronous communication works very well with journalists. Try using it: leave a message or, better still, send an email. That way, I'll know if you are trying to get in touch with me and it doesn't matter where in the world I happen to be: I can pick up phone messages more or less anywhere, which is why I don't tend to publish my mobile number widely. Channelling Uri Geller, on the other hand, is not nearly so effective.
Posted by Chris at 8:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
