The Future of Media conversation continues among Steve Buttry, Howard Owens, and Steve Yelvington. Howard thinks the solution is establishing the internet platform of a media brand as a separate business untethered from from its traditional platform. Steve Buttery thinks the answer is to create new ways marketers can connect with customers. Steve Yelvington asks "what should we be doing to build an audience . . .?" Most of the active participants in this discussion are journalists. I bring a marketing perspective. I don't pretend to be a journalist (as evidenced by most of these posts, thank you for indulging me that), but I am an experienced and proven marketing strategist. My recommendation to the journalists and publishers is to bring marketing in-house and get to know your customer.
Based on my experience, Steve is very correct: “(we) did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers.”
Traditional media brands have been treating the internet as
a way to increase the supply of ad inventory.
This strategy is flawed for two reasons.
Increasing supply usually results in lower prices. Especially when demand is eroding -
advertisers have never been more dissatisfied with ROI. More supply and more clutter offers no
respite or chance of improving value.
Launching an internet product "untethered to the
traditional media brand is not the solution to this problem. Just ask MLB and MLB.com how productive it is
to compete with yourself. Perhaps the decision was right in 2000, when, as Clayton Christensen suggests in the Innovator's Dilemma, there was too much to lose for MLB to innovate online and a separate leadership team was needed to blaze the trail.
But today, I'd argue we are past the disruptive innovation - the low price, low quality, experiments - phase. The "CB Radio" has happened. There are many really great technologies which are not leveraged to their full capabilities and won't be until they are combined to create an end-to-end solution, as "Hammer" articulates so well in "Combinatorial Innovation" (borrowing the term from Hal Varian)
We are past the "Innovator's Dilemma." Media has too much to lose to NOT innovate. The impact of the economic crisis on advertising will not be reversed. The days of mass advertising are over. Marketers are demanding more than exposure, they want performance.
The industry needs new sources of revenue from consumers and marketers, alike.
Before Media "explore(s) how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers,” Media needs to take back the marketing function from 3rd party distributors and explore how to connect with its own customers.
Publishers/Programmers, Technology, Marketing should collaborate to identify how each platform will add incremental value to the consumer and the brand's bottom line. To create incremental value, the media brand should leverage the unique advantages of each platform to express itself and evolve its relationships with the audience. A fully integrated, multi-platform media brand will deliver a whole much bigger than its aggregated parts.
No media company is organized like this.
Invest in "owning" marketing and getting to know the audience in a disciplined, productive way. "Free for all's" are not productive. And they are not representative. The majority is offended by the uncivilized, egotistical ranting of individuals who discriminate based on "confirmation bias." The majority is diverse with many points of view, most are interested in being educated and participating in civilized debate. They value journalists who facilitate and would pay for an opportunity to participate in real time events from anywhere, moderated by these journalists.
The ROI on this investment will be two-fold. First, media will acquire the skills to derive a share of exponentially growing $ consumers are spending on communication media. Second, media will be able to leverage these skills to fill the needs of marketers struggling to find marketing tools with measurable ROI.
