The news last week was full of headlines about how conventional advertising media agencies have been hit – and hit hard – by the recession.
Campaign magazine’s table of the biggest UK media agencies showed eight of the top 10 suffered a drop in billings between 2008 and 2009 – including a more than 10% slump by number one agency MediaCom, a 16.5 % fall by number four Mindshare and a 22.5% plunge by number six Starcom UK Group. The headlines also showed that WPP Group, which owns Mindshare, saw its profits fall by 16% in 2009.
But is there more to these figures than just the recession? We are now living in an age where companies are realising that they can rely less on traditional media vehicles such as newspapers, radio and even television and can instead speak more directly with their customers through digital media.
We already see print media owners struggling as newspapers and magazines grapple with ever-shrinking page counts and staff cuts. The long-term trend may be that the fragmenting TV marketplace, radio and other conventional media will be facing similar issues sooner rather than later.
Before the recent news on media agencies seeing their billings slump, we had a lot of talk in PR Week about Richard Sambrook, former head of global news at the BBC, jumping on the PR bandwagon to become “chief content officer” at a global PR agency to help clients create written, video and audio pieces.
This recognition that, in future, communicating with customers, stakeholders and the public at large will be about more than traditional PR – ie. placing articles in print publications or arranging broadcast interviews for clients – is nothing new to us here at Lindsell Marketing. Generating content that can fuel PR initiatives, marketing campaigns, websites, sales programmes and other ways of talking to the marketplace is a future that has already arrived here.
So while the recession may have accelerated the process, the change we see taking place in the way companies, government departments and other organisations communicate with the world around them is a permanent shift we have seen coming – and that includes PR as well as other traditional ways that companies communicate. The key going forward will be to develop the right content to fuel the new communication engines that are replacing traditional media vehicles.
Tags: advertising, communications marketing, digital marketing, marketing, media, recession