There've been two great pieces about news and newspapers this week. This one from Steven Johnson (which I wrote about in this week's Campaign) and this one from Clay Shirky (which I think I'll write about in next week's Campaign and which is neatly summarised by the above frame from Matt Fraction's Iron Man.)
And then Ben Hammersley twittered this:
And I wondered why we'd not heard the voice of advertisers or media planners much in this debate. It could, of course, be that I'm reading the wrong stuff, but I don't think anyone from these worlds has bubbled up noticeably in the opinionsphere. And I wondered why not, and why no one has asked them and what they might say about these things. I'm not an advertiser or a media planner / buyer so I'm guessing here. But I talk to quite a few so they're not wholly random guesses. (Also, I think I might properly ask some of them these questions and report back. Just like a real journalist.)
In the meantime, these rambling things occur to me:
Advertisers and agencies don’t depend on a single medium. They’re multimedia beasts. Most could very adequately cope without newspapers. They could probably ‘buy round’ the death of any single media channel. So they’re not so concerned about the possible death of a particular industry, they’re certainly less concerned than the people in that industry and those adjacent to it (who tend to do most of the opinionating.) So they opine about it less because they care about it less. Not that media channels like these ever die anyway. They fade but they don't disappear.
All this turmoil is creating tremendous short-term advertising value. And advertisers are always looking for that. Media agencies are particularly attuned to exploiting that value. Little bits of revolution, proliferation or destabilisation always create opportunity for the canny buyer to find some good deals. Newspapers are in trouble? Probably means there are some deals to be had. Telly’s cheap, so it’s worth piling in. Over the next ten/twenty years advertising buyers will make tremendous amounts of hay trading one channel and one supplier against another as new equilibriums (equilibiria?) are established. Historically advertisers have tended to get good value out of media revolutions. It’s when everything’s solid, locked-down and established that supply gets too well managed and rates go up.
And while everyone’s making the most of this short-term value the smart advertisers are making plans to bypass the whole thing anyway. They don’t really enjoy giving money to media owners even when they’re getting great deals. So they’re increasingly creating their own, direct communication channels. Most of them will never wholly replace paid-for media, but they'll replace quite a chunk.
And, of course, advertisers don’t really buy media, they buy audiences. And the audiences aren’t going anywhere. Individual news organisations might disappear, maybe many of them will, but the news audience will remain. And they’ll be supplied with news by someone. And unless we see a sudden proliferation of BBC-like organisations then they’re likely to be ad-supported in some way. So why should advertisers worry? Particularly, as we’ve discussed, they’ll probably be able to get good rates out of the confusion. As Mr Shirky says, we’re living through a revolution and the old stuff is likely to break before the new stuff arrives. But, in the meantime, we’re likely to see a proliferation of places to advertise, not a diminution.
And it can't be ignored that many advertisers and media agencies are going through their own version of the revolution that's afflicting newspapers. And many of them are doing exactly what Mr Shirkey describes here: "Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse." Most media agencies are too busy worrying about their own profitability/survival to be worrying about newspapers.
So this might seem a bit, well, hard-hearted and ungrateful to the newspaper business. Don't advertisers care about our marvellous product and our century-long relationships? Don't they have some obligation to support us in our of need? Well, no, they don't care a lot. Partly for hard-headed commercial reasons, as discused above. Partly, I suspect, because newspaper culture has always been the most studied in its contempt for the businesses that buy the ads* and that doesn't make them popular. Particularly in the US, that resolute wall between adsales and journalism has become so entrenched in the culture that many journalists are horrified when it's suggested that they should think about how their work gets paid for. Fair enough, they don't want to be influenced by commercial taint. And when the newspaper was the only advertising game in town, they could get away with this. But it means that the people who make the product and the people who have to make money from it live in completely different cultures, only ever joined right at the top. And that's going to make it hard to find new revenue models, new relationships with advertisers, a future.
Which reminds me of something at the end of Mr Johnson's piece: But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.
If we are going to create a new news ecosystem involving advertisers (and a lot of people would be grateful for that money) then we're going to have to do something about that institutional bifurcation between content and commerce. We're going to have to design the relationship between the two with the care of a good experience designer.
Think about the experience of watching telly right now.
Someone (ie Sony) designs the box. Someone else (say Sky) designs the programme selection interface. Someone else (say the BBC or ITV) designs some of the channels, other people design the others. On each channel the programmes, the idents, the sponsorship bumpers, the trails and, of course, the ads are all designed by different people. And all these different designers have very different aims. Which is why the experience of watching telly is often spoiled when the ads are much louder than the programmes. We've grown used to these messy media experiences, there's something good about them. But this mess of competing requirements in a single experience channel makes it really hard to improve the overall, er, experience. Or to design a better new thing to replace the disappearing old things. This feels like a discipline of the future. Something we'll need to think about in the newly fecund news/media environment. I'm not arguing that editorial should be cowed by commerce. Or that branded content is the future. Or any of that stuff. I don't know what the answer is. No one does. But I bet it'll involve a world where the content people know more about what the commerce people do. And the product they both work on is designed to work well for both of them.
Anyway, I'm running out of steam now and I'm being told to stick the kettle on. So I'll leave it at that.
Good night all. And if you have been, thanks for listening.
*Which is not to say that content people in other ad-funded businesses don't also evince enormous disdain for, well, everyone that's not them. And especially advertisers. Of course they do. It's just that newspaper culture has become particularly holy about it.