Transforming traditional Media
Posted on 25. Mar, 2010 by admin in Avusa Media News
The internet has changed the world, connecting a quarter of the world’s population, reaching the furthest reaches of the globe and creating convergences of people and information unparalleled in human history. It has invaded every aspect of modern day life revolutionising how we do business, interact, have relationships, process information and manage our lives. No business can afford to ignore the internet.
Internet advertising is cheaper and the channel itself has spawned a consumer profile that is young, hip, technically savvy, easily bored and remarkably vocal. Instead of just consuming news, they generate it – tweeting, face booking and blogging to challenge the traditional domain of newsrooms.
This generation views hard copies of newspapers and magazines as “yesterday’s news” and online technology and applications as the new information frontier. Traditional print media has been badly affected on various fronts and the pressure is on to maintain revenue streams while expanding into digital formats.
While the penny may have dropped, the pace of change has been slow characterised by a dogged need to tread the high moral ground related to skilled, well-researched, beautifully written news that can be trusted by the reader. No one can deny that most online content flies in the face of many journalistic ethics with hearsay printed as the fact and equal weight given to the musings or ranting of self appointed social commentators and those of heavy weight reporters. However while the internet is quick to punt its value with even Google placing print advertisements, the newspaper and publishing has been slow to defend its territory.
But it’s changing.
A group of major US magazine companies launched one of the largest print advertising campaigns ever created to promote the vitality of magazines as a medium. The campaign ads debut as color spreads, with headlines such as, “We Surf the Internet. We Swim in Magazines” and “Will the Internet Kill Magazines? Did Instant Coffee Kill Coffee”? The print campaign targets advertisers, shareholders and industry influencers in order to reposition the broader discourse about magazines and the printed word to challenge perceptions about the medium’s relevancy and longevity and the important cultural role that newspapers and magazines play within a society.
While these campaigns may help, the greatest challenge for publishers lies in transforming their traditional formats and revenue streams. Companies have risen to the challenge in varying degrees that span recreating digital versions of their publications to the fundamental restructuring of their business where advertising sales is not the main source of income but one aspect of a platform of marketing solutions and services. Custom content development, database marketing by building specific databases for advertisers and targeted communications programs on their behalf, customer insights surveys and lead generation are rapidly being pursued as bona fide business units within integrated media houses.
Print format publishers have often been the seed company that grows into a larger mult-media media house. It’s an intelligent premise based on owning various channels: newspapers, magazines, TV, radio and online sites in order to offer integrated packages with incentives to advertisers. As media companies expand their income streams into non-traditional mediums, more work has to be taken internally to unlock the potential of this winning scenario. Multi-channel partnerships, cross pollination of forms and formats, shared newsrooms and content have led to some exciting developments for both publishers and advertisers.
As traditional publishers transform their businesses to take advantage of the best the Net has to offer, readers and advertisers reap the benefit of what once seemed like an unworkable relationship.
This marriage between traditional print and digital mediums has energized both industries leading to new breakthroughs of form and content better able to serve the needs of a global community in the 21st millennium.
