20 Jan 10

Is the future of press looking rosier?

Alex Kirk, Account Director offers his take on the market

You can see how they all got confused, the poor dears. As Sean Adams pointed out in his Sunday Times column this week, it’s been a good ten years since all newspapers and magazines were supposed to have been ruthlessly killed off, replaced with a shiny digital-only future. But while, like jetpacks or food in pill form, this was clearly arrant nonsense, few coherent or even sensible approaches to moving print online have appeared since the turn of the millennium. For example, a common solution has been to try and just replicate print on-screen, even to the point of including absurd, expensive and bandwidth-hungry apps that turn a virtual page for you, like suggesting that all emails should be delivered to your house by hand. While elsewhere the paywall arguments continue to rage, there are also signs that with emerging technology, the brand power of press titles will soon bring a fresh breath of life back into the industry with benefits for publisher, reader and advertiser alike.

The latest shot across the bows of the good ship Free Online Journalism were fired this week by The New York Times, who have indicated they too might quite like to get paid for people reading their work on the NYT website. This is a huge move for the NYT, easily the USA’s most illustrious paper, and one well-known and regarded in the geekier parts of the world for its fantastically transparent and usable API, which allows anyone to mash and share its data in new ways. This sits in a bit of a contrast to their aligning themselves with the Murdoch camp, who recently blocked NewsNow access to their links, and are threatening to put everything News Corp ever produces behind a paywall so ferocious and high it could be sold to North Korea.

Meanwhile though, the world of technology marches ever onwards, faster than even Murdoch can block it. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, there was huge amounts of slavering over the Skiff Reader, a proof-of-concept machine for delivering text-based content over 3G or Wifi networks. In Apple-land, breath is already baited for Steve Jobs’ next big trick, a much-rumoured lightweight tablet computer (otherwise known as “a big iPhone, then”). Publishers are getting excited about these sorts of things already – Conde Nast for example has committed itself publicly to developing applications for these sorts of devices, even though no-one has any idea what they’ll ultimately look like.
Talk about getting pulled in two different directions – technology is encouraging new directions, and the development of innovative platforms, while simultaneously Murdoch and the NYT are looking to impose paywalls and search engine restrictions. It might be ten years into the new millennium, but it’s fair to say the press industry still hasn’t quite got it together yet.

The good news out of all this for us media folk though is fairly clear. An awful lot of eggs are being put into the mobile basket, be it tablet or reader-shaped, and this is hugely exciting for the press industry, for the consumer and for advertisers. Adverts are, as a rule, only really irritating when you’re not in the market they’re targeted at. Even the Gocompare.com opera singer would elicit less teeth-grinding fury if you only saw it when your policies were due. The ability these devices will provide to deliver personalised, appropriate advertising is a huge shift for current printed-word content providers - it’s already possible online, and it’s coming to TV in the coming years, but now it looks like press will be joining in too.

Implications for media types are pretty giddy. An ad that’s targeted, relevant, allows two-way interaction, is shareable and mobile, through a channel with the history and ready-made audience of a brand like The Times or The Guardian represents all the good data bits of direct marketing and all the fluffy content of brand work, but without the spam. It’s ironic that the press - the medium which spawned the entire advertising industry - is coming late to the party. But while TV and online media-owners have already got stuck into the punch and snogged the best-looking girls, heads will still be turned if our inky-fingered friends do, finally, show up, because what they bring is enormous brand strength, and an audience that’s both well-researched and loyal to their brand.

As with all things, strategic preparation is key if advertisers are to effectively use these emerging technologies. Receiving narrowcast personalised content is already possible through aggregators and RSS, but many advertisers remain purely broadcast entities, ill-equipped for a future of personal communication from business to consumer and back again. There are steps that all advertisers can take now to start to future-proof their communications - data and content strategies in particular will become ever more important to marketers and agencies as better technology is put in consumers hands and richer content is delivered, and the ability to think beyond traditional advertising will separate out the future leaders from the dinosaurs. Brands like Amazon already use customer data extraordinarily well, while Starbucks and Dell have implemented nigh-on personal channels of communication with their customers, and while the vast amounts of data this produces on individual consumers is challenging to effectively store and use, it gives them a definite edge on their competitors. Knowing that I’m a 16-34 male is one thing – knowing that I specifically like football and live music means an advertiser can talk to me like a human being, not a demographic.

Quite simply, the press needs to work out how to survive, or – quite simply – it won’t. However, if the big titles can start to use the technology that begins truly to threaten its existence, it’ll create opportunities for all concerned. Many are already labelling 2010 as the Year Of Mobile (again), or the Year Of The Tablet (having never seen one), but perhaps a better result for consumers and advertisers alike would be if it was the year that the press finally got to grips with the digital world it now inhabits – if so, it’ll be good news for all of us.