MarketingProfs

I’ve recently joined MarketingProfs as Research Director and I’d like to offer some insight to anyone interested in my take on digital media. I have worked in digital media research my whole career, but my father started out as a reporter for Time Magazine back in the 70s and has spent the last 20 years working as an editor for a print magazine–a niche medical journal. We talk about the future of media and monetization models the way most fathers and sons talk sports. He will occasionally call me up and demand to know whether I’m purposely killing his industry or not.

Today he sent me a link to an article in Fast Company entitled “Print Media Is Dying. Online Revenues Are Tiny. What If the Ads Are to Blame?” As always, it got me thinking and writing.
My emailed response to my Dad ended with a terse “systems that don’t work die.” And as I wrote it, pessimism washed over me. My Dad, a smart guy, is freaked out by the idea that the activity he has spent his whole life doing will simply vanish. And, Cliff Kuang (the writer of the piece and also, assumably, a smart guy) clearly doesn’t see things the way I do. I’m a fairly confident individual, but it’s easy to falter when those we lean on stumble.
What seems so incredibly obvious to me is that the value of information is changing, and as it does, it is dragging media monetization models with it. The value of scarce, immediately relevant, actionable information is quite high–that’s why Google pockets about one out of every two dollars of online ad revenue. The value of non-scarce information is practically nothing. That’s why inexpert opinion (i.e. national reporting from just about any local newspaper) isn’t worth the quarter consumers now refuse to pay for it, and instant-expert bloggers aren’t any better. On the other hand, want to know what a real expert like Warren Buffet thinks about the economy? You can trust the Wall Street Journal to pry some quotes out of him, or you can subscribe to Buffet’s Twitter feed and keep tabs on him yourself. That sort of access is unprecedented and having it changes everything.
As magazines, like my Dad’s evolve, they may be hard to recognize in their new incarnations. But, I really believe they won’t die when they transition to digital as long as they continue to do what they are supposed to–provide valuable information to their readers at the precise moment the reader needs it most, and occasionally before they even know they need it. Valuable information is usually monetizeable. As long as my Dad can figure out how to satisfy this demand for information from consumers, while making it easier for his advertisers to get to future customers through him than it would be to do so directly (setting up their own content distribution via Twitter, email newsletters, etc.) then marketing revenues won’t dry up and the magazine gets to stay in business as an information middle-man, or if you prefer, an expert.
Too often, publishers used to CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) pricing models let advertisers take over the online publication and plaster ads everywhere–essentially spamming the audience with unwanted ads. That system just doesn’t work any more. On the other hand, pricing models that promote good advertising practices, such as CPA (cost-per-aquisition) or CPC (cost-per-click) make sure everyone stays happy. The publisher makes money, the consumer gets the info they want without wasting time, and marketers get access to hot leads they would otherwise have trouble finding. I call it the win/win/win scenario, and think it should be the goal of anyone interested in the future of media or marketing–myself included.
I’m not saying that if everyone switched to a CPC model tomorrow, all our troubles would go away. What I will emphatically say is that we, as an industry, need to come to terms with the fact that the old ways of doing things aren’t sustainable. The systems we rely on, the models we employ, the metrics with which we measure, and even the language we use must all change. I don’t have all the answers, but because of what I do, I’m able to collect thousands of great ideas and present the best ones to you. For me, the future of media is a personal matter. Let’s make it work.