Thursday, January 19, 2006
Is Advertising/Print/Radio/TV/PR Dead?
byI see variants of this type of headline too often. Insert the appropriate word. Is advertising dead? Is print dead? Is TV dead? Is PR dead? The answer to all these questions is no. Usually, these stories are about the older, traditional forms of the media in question: offline advertising, free terrestrial radio, broadcast TV, etc. Granted, all of the aforementioned are undergoing tremendous change, but anyone who thinks they are dead is mistaking mortality for what is really metamorphosis. In fact, usually when I see headlines like this, it is obvious someone is advertising for you to read the story, and simply using a dramatic headline as the hook.
Is one-way, mass media advertising dead? It’s not dead, but it is certainly being augmented at a rapid pace by more relevant and targeted forms of two-way, interactive advertising such as behavioral marketing, pay-per-click, online ads served around targeted content, interactive talk radio, niche programming on cable or satellite and more targeted print advertising. Marketing is changing more from “telling” somebody about your brand to finding ways to interact and engage the customer. However, there are still loads of people who just want somebody to make it easy by hearing it on the radio or watching it on TV.
Is print dead? No way. Reading information on a computer screen may be fast, but there is something far more friendly, fun and tactile about “curling up” with a good book or magazine. You don’t often hear people talk about “curling up” with their computer. Print advertising is undergoing some dramatic change as it faces tremendous challenges from online media, but print advertising will never go away. It will adapt. You see more magazine ads and newspaper ads directing people to intermediate steps in the buying process such as Web sites. Newspapers also face tremendous challenges, but this is a tough, resilient industry. Newspapers understood the importance of content, long before the Internet came along. While they are now facing a world where anyone on the Web can be a publisher, newspapers have far more experience at being publishers and turning content into profit.
Radio has changed dramatically, but it is not going away. People said radio would go away when television became popular. It didn’t go away. It morphed into something new. That is happening again as free radio faces challenges from iPods, radio over the Internet, satellite radio, podcasts, audio books, digital music channels on cable TV systems and more. These competitive pressures will change free radio, but they won’t eliminate it. Radio survived television. It will survive and probably thrive in a new way.
The same can be said for television. There’s more competition: broadcast TV, cable TV, satellite TV, video podcasts, DVD rentals, IPTV (television over the Internet). If the TV industry would embrace HD programming instead of trying to delay it, they might protect their market position better, but that does not seem to be the case. At any rate, TV and TV advertising will face resistance if television advertising rates continue to go up and viewership goes down or is fractionalized. Will it go away? No. Will it change dramatically? Probably.
Similar arguments can be made for PR. It is alive and well. The Internet has not marginalized PR; it has empowered it. Want to get the word out quickly to a billion people? It’s possible on the Internet. Old school PR will need to learn new school tricks, but the tremendous changes in the PR industry should never be interpreted as a sunset. It’s a sunrise.
The communications industry in this country is negatively affected not so much by the fact that things are changing, but more so from the rate of change. The world is now on Internet time. On Internet time, changes that seemed to take a decade in the past are now condensed to a year or two. That puts a great deal of pressure on the business models of almost all communication channels...especially the more traditional ones.
Alexander Graham Bell said, “When one door closes, another one opens.” I firmly believe that another door is opening and anybody who says traditional advertising, print, radio, TV or PR are dead are just dead wrong. The acceleration of markets, the advances of technologies and flattening of the world economies will bring about tremendous change. While advertising and traditional media services may lag this change...change they will. In the end, it will be consumers who benefit most by having an incredible diversity of entertainment, information and communication options instantly and pervasively available.
