Where is the value in the print media industry?
It seems like there’s been an increase in talk around the fate of newspapers and magazines over the last few months. For some reason, it’s also been a fairly consistent topic of conversation at dinners and parties I’ve attended as well. Everyone is pretty certain that the model needs to change but no one’s quite sure how.
I don’t have a solution either but I think that the transformation that’s happened in the music industry is quite instructive in many ways. Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora puts it pretty well:
“Online radio is a tremendous promotional mechanism for artists, particularly the legions of working musicians that are excluded from most broadcast playlists. It also has the added advantage of being one click away from direct action from listeners — such as purchasing, joining a mailing list, looking up concert dates, etc. Online radio has the potential to dramatically increase the immediate and tangible impact of listening on an artist’s fate — no more, “What was the song I heard on the drive home?”
The chart below summarises some of the main shifts that I see happening.
Essentially we are moving from a world where radio play generates revenue to one where radio play drives revenue. From radio play being content to radio play being the ad. While there isn’t a one to one correlation between music and the print media industry, I think the same principles needs to be applied in thinking about the shifts.
Like radio, printed media no longer own the audience. Music fans go directly to their bands’ MySpace pages or to their concerts. So where are print media audiences going?
I think articles like this one titled Suit your Shelf, that ran recently in Adweek provide a clue:
“If you want to see one of the reasons why shopper marketing has been carving off an ever-bigger slice of the marketing pie, just compare the number of weekly shoppers at major retail chains with the number of Americans who tune in to top TV shows. Take Dancing with the Stars and American Idol, for example.”
In print media brands were the ads, and the editorial was the content that drove people (hopefully) to the ads. As in radio, the audiences are now larger for people going to the brands themselves and I think that opens up the same shift for editorial. From content to advertising.
Of course we have tons of taboos around this sort of thing and rightly so. We don’t want our news media in the hands of corporations. However, lots of content isn’t news, it’s information that could probably enhance the value of products, services and experiences. Also, in an era of citizen journalism, the fear of a controlled news media has become lessened.
So instead of content being centralised and delivered solely by magazines and newspapers, content could be distributed at point of purchase or at point of contact with the brand. In a further twist, this content could, in fact, become advertising for the content producer or publisher to drive traffic to them back from the brand. Rather than brands paying for placement within content, content producers would “pay” for placement within the world of the brand.
As I’m in marketing not publishing, I’m straying fairly far from my area of expertise here, so there’s bound to be a number of big holes in my thinking. However, I think that bigger thinking around this topic is definitely required. What are your thoughts?