Make Digital Marketing Work

Its the season for top tens and predictions for next year.  Never to be one for missing out on a trend we include our predictions for 2010 below:

1)      Digital marketing will come of age and stop focusing on tactical disciplines.  Leading on from this the value of strategic marketing will become better understood by digital marketers and welcomed by clients

2)      Publishing will experience an extremely turbulent year and many publications could potentially be put up for sale discontinued or merged together

3)      Google will stop being viewed as the enemy of publishers and acknowledged as a valued partner

4)      Online broadcast of TV content will become a huge issue for TV companies and lead to similar scenes as we have seen this year for news publishers

5)      The concept of a mobile wallet will become a common thing for consumers

6)      The world wide web and mobile web will converge as mobile browsers become as common as laptops

7)      Wifi in the city streets for everyone

8)      Display advertising will enjoy a short renaissance followed by a larger debate about banner ads use and effectiveness

9)      Offline and integrated marketers will face a huge task as they move from a broadcast media model to one that is customer led.  Not everyone will be able to adapt.

10)   A pure digital agency will secure lead agency status by a times 100 company

Oh and one more for luck

Arsenal will win the FA cup!

What are your predictions and what do you think of ours?

I found the news waiting for me this morning that Media Week is to be removed from the newsstand and another of my favourite Haymarket Business Media titles, Revolution is to become a quarterly supplement giveaway with Marketing Magazine.

According to the story I read, Media Week is going to retain an online editor and utilise the staff of Brand Republic which is a several times a day destination for my browser.  The brand is also going to survive (at least for now) as the Media Week Awards and the Media Week Annual Conference but that must be slim solace for a brand I’ve known in the industry for a very long time, not to mention the staff who are being cut.

Revolution is going to be published as a supplement to Marketing Magazine which the press release says is unaffected by the changes and also backed by what the press release calls a “Blogging initiative in 2010”.  Not sure what that means, but along with New Media Age, Revolution acts as my compass in the industry and I for one am going to miss the title a lot.  When I worked in New York Revolution opened their offices at the same time as we did and the two ex pat crews had a drink or three on Bleeker Street several times.

It is the first of what I suspect are going to become more regular announcements from magazine and newspapers of layoffs, restructures, consolidations and new initiatives all aimed at cutting costs to make up the shortfall from falling circulations and advertising sales.  It’s a brutal world out there now if you are in publishing and we send our thoughts out to anyone at Haymarket who has been adversely affected.

We put our thoughts down about newspapers and magazines in previous blog posts, and we saw Nick Gregg offer his advice in a piece entitled The 5 key action points that might save publishers. Similarly  Robert Andrews gave out his advice in his piece Four Controversial Ways To Save Regional Papers Online, and that struck us as intrinsically the best way for publishers to think.  Utilise the assets you have in new markets to preserve funding for your product.  The move away from print to online is now pretty irresistible and unless publishers have got a strategy in place to meet it, more and more titles are going to disappear or be consolidated and it is going to happen very quickly.

I have been finishing off my blog post about Magazine publishing and its proving to be too lengthy to post in one go but a couple of things appearing in the Guardian also caught my eye recently which ask some pretty important questions of the publishing industry in general.  The first one is the move by Murdoch to remove News Internationals content from Google once the paywalls have been implemented.

This is a bold move and in some of the discussions I have seen appearing on the web the following comment seemed to sum up a view that whilst harsh may have some truth in it if things continue to play out as they have been.

“ Everything he’s doing is looking increasingly petulant and misguided.  He’s a relic of a bygone age, lashing with what monetary clout he still has against his increasing irrelevance”.

As a self confessed intellectual snob I certainly won’t miss content from the tabloid arm of News International and removing it from the world’s search results to me is a bit like cleaning up the distorted noise on a 1940s swing recording, but that is not all that we are talking about here.  The full list of News International titles includes The Times, The Sunday Times.  Whilst these are absolute bastions of British journalism, it would be rare for a truly news worthy story to appear uniquely in these titles.  As I pointed out in my blog post about newspaper publishing on the one hand you have the BBC content and on the other you have a multitude of bloggers and citizen journalists who are all capable of writing their own story and gathering opinion from around the world that will all then be available across the web in seconds.

News International are never backward about coming forwards with their criticism of the BBC and the younger Mr Murdoch’s recent tirade against public funded news coverage demonstrates his beliefs very clearly.   Rupert Murdoch has pledged his support for the Conservative party at the next election and the Conservative Party has made a pledge to look at the BBC’s charter.  Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt whilst speaking to the Financial Times was quoted as saying “We are looking into whether it would be appropriate to rip up the charter in the middle of it, or whether one should wait”.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see what the master plan is.  Newspaper publishing is fighting for very big stakes at the moment and the BBC offers a free alternative to those plans.

This leaves citizen journalism though and we are yet to see how this thorn is addressed by the fourth estate.

Also in the Guardian was another article Foreign media count cost of UK libel laws in which it announced that titles form overseas are considering whether to continue to publish in the UK.  This content is protected by laws of Freedom of Speech abroad does n not enjoy the same protection here and as such title owners are considering whether to block access to their sites and withdraw the foreign titles from circulation in the UK due to the threat of libel.

These all seem to me to be a classic case of an old world meeting new technology with new conflicts seemingly appearing every other day.  The Internet is very good at asking questions of an industry, it did it first for software and is currently asking questions of the music industry. The rule of thumb the Internet has proved time and time again is that the advance of new technology is as unstoppable as a tidal wave.  It is up to industry to adapt to technology or become obsolete.

Personally I don’t think that removing your content from Google is a great move, because the alternatives will not stop the story appearing.  It will only stop your point of view appearing, and I think being included in the conversation is better than not being included in the conversation.

Whether it is business models or the diversity of domestic law pertaining to an industry, the Internet is causing a dramatic rethink and more than likely a few sleepless nights for existing media owners.  If they do not accept that the broadcast model as we knew it is morphing into something new then they will be the ones who will increasingly marginalise themselves and therefore become increasingly irrelevant to the conversation.

I wrote yesterday about book publishing and predicted that the book was not dead and would continue with its admittedly minority but niche audience.

Newspaper publishing is less clear.  Over crowded tubes and the increasing switch of commuters to pedal power has made a noticeable difference on the number of Times and Telegraphs left behind on the 7:43 to Liverpool Street in the mornings.  Murdoch correctly predicted that news would be delivered digitally.  What he failed to predict was the way that the value of news was commoditised and made freely available.  On the one hand, the BBC has its mighty news service which breaks stories of interest throughout the day and on the other hand citizen journalism is providing some excellent news coverage that is trusted by more and more people.  Then there is Google that aggregates it all together and makes it available at the type of a search string.

As a child I remember watching the movies of the thirties which many would say was the golden era of newspaper publishing.  Reporters took on heroic levels of importance with a dogged determination to find the story and rush it to the editor’s office for inclusion in the morning episode.  Even Superman was a journalist at the daily Planet and everyone knows that Spiderman took the pictures that mattered for the Daily Bugle.

Today however both Superman and Spiderman would have problems.  Whilst they were holding the train one handed to stop it plunging into the river,  everyone down below would be pointing their camera phones whilst a blogger sat in Starbucks and published the story as it happened.  Superman could fly faster than a speeding bullet but could he conceivably fly faster than a wireless connection with broadband?  I suspect not.  Krypton’s last son would get scooped every time.

Please excuse me for vanishing into my childhood for a second but I think the analogy highlights the problem perfectly.  Daily newspapers were all about the scoop and the strength of commentary.  Even with super powers it is difficult for the news agencies these days to replace the person on the ground equipped with modern communication methods, so what hope does a mere mortal with a press pass have?  Similarly an army of young boys in short trousers can never  build a distribution network as efficiently as Google with its ability to help people “read all about it”

One of my favourite movies when I was growing up was All the Presidents Men, which is probably also journalism and newspaper publishing’s finest hour.  The complex story showed two dedicated professionals use every ounce of their experience and professionalism (as well as a few little strokes) to get the story that ultimately removed a president from office.  Never before, never since was the ethic of journalism so well highlighted.

I found myself wondering how it would go down if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein found the story today.  Would they have waited to publish in the Washington Post or would they have released it piece by piece in an anonymous blog to gather information in the form of other anonymous comments which would then be tweeted and linked across the world.  One can imagine deepthroat.wordpress.com becoming one of the most read blogs in the world if it did play out like that and all the Presidents men wouldn’t have been able to stop it.  The recent story of Trafigura which was first reported in WikiLeaks shows that the Internet is understood by everyone at the top of a story as a way to circumvent even legal attempts to stop the story being told.  No need for Superman in that little episode.  All you need is the power of the Internet.

Newspapers are hurting there is no doubt about it.  Times and Sunday Times bulk bundles ceased to be given out to airlines and hotel chains this week and joins the same move by the guardian and Observer a few weeks ago.  So what can publishers do to stop them taking their place amongst the ranks of the Dodo?