The newspaper industry needs to go with the flow of the “digital tsunami” to survive, says one of North America’s foremost media marketing experts.
Speaking at the Canadian Newspaper Association conference in Toronto yesterday, Rishad Tobaccowala, chief innovation officer for Publicis Group Media and CEO of its “futures” practice Denuo, noted that newspapers are now part of an increasingly wired world in which there are more mobile subscribers (3.3 billion according to Morgan Stanley Research) than there are credit card holders, the Internet population has swelled to 1.1 billion, and six of the top 10 most visited websites as of February 2008, including YouTube and Facebook, didn’t exist just three years ago.
Tobaccowala urged newspaper and marketing executives to pay attention to how people are watching, searching and sharing digital media, and doing so while on the move. “That is the future of a lot of media,” he said.
Tobaccowala said several trends are changing consumer behaviour including self-marketing, on-demand options, self-education and peer communities. Calibrated interaction, he said, sees consumers dictating when and how they interact with brands, while portability makes it possible for a North American consumer to see the latest Sony products on its Japanese website, while all the “horrible stuff” is on the U.S. site.
The key for newspapers is to follow these trends, he said. “Nothing is more powerful than the trend.
“You can be mediocre, aligned with the trend [and] you will be successful; you can be brilliant trying to go against the trend you will lose. Guaranteed.”
It is both the best and worst of times for media and content companies, said Tobaccowala. The worst because it has become difficult to reach mass audiences due to increased fragmentation.
However, it’s the best of times, he said, because content matters—“People are watching, reading and listening more than ever before”—interaction is surging, there are “huge untapped markets” both globally and across devices, and powerful new monetization engines are being developed.
Newspapers have a distinct advantage, Tobaccowala told the crowd. They are trusted “navigators in a sea of information and stimulation” and they offer consistency—“in a circus I need a ringmaster,” he said.
Among the keys to weathering this digital tsunami is making newspapers accessible across different platforms like mobile and the Internet and developing new video content.
These are punishing times for the U.S. newspaper industry, which has seen its share of ad spending plunge from 39% in 1940 to a projected 15% in 2007 according to a recent report in Advertising Age, and one media guru—Jeffrey Cole of the Center for Digital Future at the University of Southern California at Annenberg—predicts the medium will be extinct within 20 to 25 years.
The likely prognosis for Canadian newspapers, Tobaccowala said, lies somewhere in between his native country of India—where they are the fastest-growing medium—and “the depressing hell” of newspapers in his home city of Chicago. He cautioned, however, that “what is happening in the U.S. may be more likely to happen to newspapers in the future than what we are seeing in India.”
