Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 7:00AM Standing in the midst of marketing history
For me, Monday was another in what is beginning to seem like a version of Bill Murray's movie, Ground Hog Day.
Last Monday in the Wall Street Journal two different-but-not-unrelated stories reported the decline of traditional print media. This comes on the heels of a story just last week on Conde Naste's decision to fold four publications, one almost seven decades old! So you can appreciate what's going on, let's look at each of these separately-but-briefly.
On Monday, WSJ's Shira Ovide reported in "U.S. Newspaper circulation falls" staggering drop-offs in newspaper readership levels over the past year. Examples of include the San Francisco Chronicle's drop of 26% and the Star-Ledger in New Jersy, down 22%. Gannett's USA Today average weekday circulation fell 17% during the same period. Not specifically reported in the article, but also coming to my attention yesterday, coincidently enough, was the report that Rhode Islands own Providence Journal was down 19% year over year. [Incidentally, for the same period the Wall Street Journal itself showed a slight increase, becoming the country's largest newspaper by weekday circulation.]
Last week, Russell Adams' story, also in the WSJ, "Ax falls on four Conde Nast titles" reports that after a two-year advertising revenue down-turn--which includes one-year preceding the beginning of the recession--Conde Nast eliminated four magazines, including the 68-year-old Gourmet, Modern Bride, Elegant Bride, and Cookie, a parenting magazine.
Finally, the WSJ's Shira Ovide reported in "Fortune Magazine cuts back number of issues" that Fortune Magazine will cut back its' number of issue slightly more than 25%, again due to loss of advertising revenue.
It hardly seems necessary to point out that in the scheme of things any one of these developments is noteworthy all by itself--taken together, the story is an enormous one. Let's point out what is increasingly obvious: First, the way we as a people gather information, see the world around us, learn about ourselves and society--this now is changing very rapidly, faster than most think; this is not just an inflection point, it is a radical "left turn" on our way down the road of time!
How we collectively communicate through print about the "stuff" of life--and how we learn about the commercial offerings that are available to us as consumers, well, that's about to be accomplished in completely different ways by virtually everyone in the not too distant future. This will be the case, not because everyone necessarily chooses to--various media vehicles are simply going to vanish!
Which leads to the second major point: the full-blown demise of some incarnations of modern print media is at hand. Many newsprint operations today are operating on skeleton staffs; if not true already, further cuts will no longer will be confined to "fat," but instead will go to the "bone." One-year drop-offs in readership of 20% at at time can't continue for many more years without the full collapse of the economic model of the enterprise itself. This is due, in part, to the reality that as circulation drops advertisers will be unwilling to pay what amounts to an increasing rate to appeal to fewer and fewer prospects. Thus, within a very short time, look for the complete demise of newspapers as we have known them--indeed, there can be only a very few reporting periods of newspapers decline in the range of 20% left.
Third, while "the recession" is the proximate event that much of tradition media's decline is attributed to, there are other causes as well. Americans are increasingly less voracious readers, spending more time--take your pick here: on-line, sleeping, playing, listening to iPods, or working--rather than digesting traditional magazines and newspapers. In effect, it doesn't seem culturally important any more, nor to be necessary, for most of us to read, in a day and age where so many other things compete more effectively for our time, attention, and information!
It may not seem all that cataclysmic, but believe me--you and I are in the middle of a big-deal shift in information delivery, when we wear our business and marketing "hats," as well as information acquisition, when we play the part of being consumers of information. It's happening all around us and, indeed, we are the cause, in part, of key print media's decline.
Wait, you say--won't this all be restored when the economy comes back? Hardly. Print media was slipping away before the recession--now the recession is accelerating the decline of advertising dollars that once was the main-stay of the industry. For now, most of that advertising money is sitting on the sidelines now--you can't make people spend money they either don't have or don't want to spend; when consumers start consuming again--the damage to the advertising infrastructure will prove to have been permanent.
You can be sure that in terms of our being both the consumers and the managers of the enterprises that use the tools of media in such pursuits, the future will be very different media-wise...and so will we on both counts. All the things in marketing media history we think so quaint...like the old Sears catalogue, the BermaShave signs along the highway, pictures of families sitting together in the living room and listening to the radio--all of these evoke a nostolgia we entertain only when we read about marketing and media history.
Guess what? Our faces are going to be in the quaint pictures of the future that depict people who used to read newspapers and magazines as a way to get their consumption news and information--and our grandchildren will ask us what that was really like!
It may not seem like it, but yes, you are standing the midst of marketing and media history, believe me!
Reader Comments (1)
For a different perspective, take a read of this Slate article: http://ow.ly/xjOs