UCB International Blog

I  found this a very interesting article written by  Jack Waterford and printed by the Canberra Tines in Aussie on July 4th the highlighting and underlining of some of his words are my doing, where you read advertiser exchange it for donor and I believe it begins to have some relevance to us.  I have also edited the article to take out  some Aussie content, if you want to read the unedited version, click here.

Here’s the main points from Jack’s article (my perspective):

THE ULTIMATE nightmare of the reporter in this technological age is of the day when she is sent to cover a matter of public importance to discover that she is expected to file something immediate for her newspaper’s website, then do some breathy radio for the company’s radio station, a stand-up, from a laptop, for the company’s television network, a series of updates through the afternoon for all of the above, then a thoughtful and considered piece of analysis for the company newspaper that evening. Probably with some digital photos of the action.

Once it was newspapers which set the agenda, with broadcasters tending to find their speaking points from the morning papers. Now radio news and current affairs, and commercial talk-shows, and, increasingly, internet sites and blogs have forced their way into agenda-setting, newspapers often following stories initiated by them. Commercial TV is not breaking much news, and tends to draw up its shopping lists from what’s running on other mediums.

( note the mention of internet and blog sites as a legitimate news breaking source, this will become even more important ( in my view) as more and more people become aware that  their news source may not be as impartial as it once was…or that the news source does not reflect their values… Gaz ) 

With or without government media rules, the market has become more difficult. People have access to more media, and not only through the internet. They are pickier, and many have less time to spare, so the struggle to gain and hold attention is greater. All the more so when it is appreciated that, from the accountant’s point of view, the purpose of gaining that attention is so that paid advertising messages can be passed on. The money which can be extracted from advertisers is an equation of the number of people who have been given the opportunity to read, hear or see the ad, and of their demographic quality whether they are the sort of people who might buy the goods in question.

( If you change the word advertiser to donor/listener/viewer it  starts to have meaning for what we do… Gaz )

Newspapers have been slowly losing circulations, free-to-air-television slowly losing watchers (and not only to video markets or pay-TV; more and more people have simply turned off) and in other mediums, such as radio and television, it is a bigger and bigger struggle to be heard among the competitors.

Newspapers are still the market of choice for mass audiences, but those who can offer much smaller audiences dense with potential buyers are making money too. The Fairfax strategy, ultimately, is to have vehicles in virtually every medium in its prime marketplaces, so that, say, an advertiser who decides to use radio instead of newspapers, or rural and suburban weeklies rather than Big Print, or the internet instead of any of the others, will still be spending money at the same company. Not only that, but Fairfax aims to have (and has in some senses already achieved) better packages of the market, in whatever medium, than anyone else.

In south-eastern Australia a big advertiser can find a one-stop shop in almost every combination. If, probably, not so absolute that it can really misuse its market power, given that there will be several combinations, not least News Ltd, in tough competition. ( not only the advertiser but also the end user…who can now find one media source that satisfies their needs….be it radio TV print internet…Gaz )

Once one reaches a certain critical mass of market on offer, there are enormous synergies to be obtained in a media company’s advertising departments and administrations. No doubt there will be more overlap between mediums, but even there, audiences quickly discover when one medium has merely recycled the offerings of another, or that the eyes reporting an event are doing so not from the perspective of a person from one place and mindset but another altogether. ( we can turn this to a plus…not a negative….Gaz )

If there is a real lesson from the new combinations of atoms and molecules of the past year it is that things can fall apart as quickly as they can coalesce.