While surfing I gathered a few really interesting links about the future and challenges met by traditional media with the digital era :
- WSJ is forecasting even more gloom in Newspaper Ad Sales. "Print-ad revenue plummeted 9.4% to $42 billion in 2007, according to an NAA estimate released Friday. Classified ads, which account for a third of the total, were hit especially hard, down almost 17%."
- It is maybe due to the fact that Communicators Are Out of Sync With the Way Consumers Use Media and that some are already realizing hit and shifting their media spendings, according to Ketchum?
"The way communicators dispense information is out of sync with the way consumers use media. Consumers Rely Most on Personal Experiences and Experts When Making Decisions.Advice from family and friends is the No. 1 source that consumers turn to when making a variety of decisions – ranging from purchasing consumer electronics to planning a vacation – and advice from an expert rates highest when making medical decisions and purchases based on a product’s environmental impact. Despite the strong evidence that friends, family and experts play a key role in influencing decisions, only 24 percent of communicators report having a word-of-mouth program in place.
Advice from family and friends is the No. 1 source that consumers turn to when making a variety of decisions – ranging from purchasing consumer electronics to planning a vacation – and advice from an expert rates highest when making medical decisions and purchases based on a product’s environmental impact. Despite the strong evidence that friends, family and experts play a key role in influencing decisions, only 24 percent of communicators report having a word-of-mouth program in place. Communicators must focus on speaking to individuals, not just broadcasting to the masses, when getting their messages across to this new ‘public of one."
- Mahmood N. Al-Yousif wrote an interesting article on the Huffington Post, about the complicated relationship between new and old media, the western and arab media. He says : "Sites like the Huffington Post which generate over 100 million page views a month through to the Jordan-based Maktoob which enjoy over 270 million page views and many hundreds of thousands of registered users and over 100,000 registered blogs. These sites use all the new approaches and tools to attract more eye-balls (...) something that traditional news papers cannot emulate without intrinsically changing their business models (...) The sad irony; however, is that a large proportion of what is posted in new media sites is almost always dependent on what has already appeared in news papers (...) Entrepreneurs and publishers should recognise that pressing for change through innovation is right now. (...)The potential for this new media is multi-facetted: it's impact is economic and cultural. (...)In the cultural aspect, this media is dichotomous as it could be used for both closing the cultural gap between East and West as well as expand the fissures between the two."
- Google is on the raise and Newspapers are too pessimists (and freaked out to rethink their model?). "So, while newspapers have told me directly to my face what won't work, what isn't in their business plan, how holy their journalistic quality is, Google buys another property, puts another beta program into the consumer space, imagines what is possible. Google is an optimist. Newspapers are pessimists. I honestly don't care what happens to newspapers. The market is the jungle. The market is natural selection and will take care of this debate without us."
- IHT gives some good hints to print media on what advantages to develop to attract advertisers
- there are a lot of opportunities to leverage Traditional Media Placements in an Online World and Gregg Stewart from Search Engine Watch has published some interesting thoughts that many traditional media players should be reading... He is even imaginating that "publishers may negotiate traditional media placements on performance-based pricing scenarios similar to the CPC"
- Hopefully some counter example in the media world are showing that when excellence is there (I am talking about the amazing Monocle magazine (from Tyler Brûlé, an ex Wallpaper guy)), perfomance is following up too. One of their ex collaborator of have published an amazing analysis about their online strategy and design choices during this 1st year of existence
If you have found some great links about the subject, feel free to share them with us ;)
