Posted: Nov 13, 2009 1:42 PM
Updated: Nov 13, 2009 1:43 PM
The bigwigs gathered in New York this week at a City University of New York conference to discuss "new business models for news." It's a noble effort and one we should all applaud, for we certainly could use a new model for monetizing news content. As I read about these things, however, I continue to feel that this is missing the point of the business disruption, for the future is all about advertising, not content. The business of media is advertising, not content, and there's plenty of opportunity in the changes sweeping advertising.
There will be no magic bullet coming down the pike that returns content to its glory position, because in order to have that kind of value, content must be scarce enough to generate huge audiences, and as Steve and I have been writing for years, that's just not going to happen. An economy based on scarcity is home to the blockbuster, and it's getting harder and harder to create those these days. Just ask Hollywood or the music industry. In his brilliant 2005 essay "Micromedia, Connected Consumption, and the Snowball Effect," Umair Haque has noted that the blockbuster is giving way to the snowball, one that begins rolling downhill and gets bigger as it continues rolling.
But even bigger than the scarcity issue is the evolution of advertising, for the people with the money don't need blockbuster events anymore to get the message out to their constituencies. This is the real disruption that threatens media companies and why no conference on content is going to make a significant difference for the media business. However, inside this threat is also the real opportunity that exists for media companies, for a working knowledge of how to by-pass the blockbuster is held only by the few right now. We need the courage to attack ourselves by becoming THE go-to people at the local level who exist to share this knowledge - to enable commerce by helping local businesses use the tools available to everybody, even tools that aren't our own.
We know how to use social media to draw attention to ourselves. We know all about Twitter. We are experts in the Web, hosting the biggest sites in the market. We know about search and about search engine optimization (SEO). We know all about video and can help advertisers build YouTube channels and other venues for video. We ARE the knowledgeable people in the marketplace. We just need to turn loose that knowledge to carve out a profitable corner for ourselves through the enabling commerce.
Gordon Borrell is hosting a conference in February with various companies that are making serious money online. Many of these are positioned in the above niche and are moving into local markets as pureplay companies doing nothing more than reselling Google, Facebook and other applications that meet the needs of the advertiser. The big difference with these companies is in the relationship they strive to obtain with local merchants, as Gordon explains:
The selling relationship between legacy media companies and their advertisers reminds me of a marriage going sour, where the husband keeps telling the unhappy wife how lucky she is to have him around. It's vividly clear when you look at the "Advertise With Us" tab on traditional media companiesí websites, then look at the websites of their pure-play competitors. Traditional media companies, unfortunately, tout their enormous audience and their 100-year-old brand. It's all about them. The new boyfriends -- companies like Yodle and Local.com -- are looking into lonely eyes and talking about what they're going to do for YOU, the advertiser. Go to MerchEngines.com and tell me what you see in place of the traditional "About Us" tab.
This isn't a new message. I'm encouraged by the progress I see, particularly from newspaper sellers. Many publishers have transformed their companies sales staff from order takers to consultative sellers. That's great, but many more need to be converted or the upstarts are going to continue to breaking up a lot of marriages.
At the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association annual conference in Florida last month, I shared a futuristic vision for local media in which the sales department morphs into an organization that more closely resembles an ad agency than the typical sales unit of today. We're not the only game in town anymore, and our response, so far, hasn't done much to help local businesses conduct commerce. We're still too busy selling advertising adjacent to content. That's why it's such a huge opportunity, and like so many other things we've encountered in the Media 2.0 journey, we can either engage the community or sit back and let pureplays steal the money that once use to go to us.
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