Leveraging traditional media to maximize ROI for clients
By Bill Reynolds, VP/Media Director for Erwin-Penland, a full-service advertising agency headquartered in Greenville, SC and part of Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos:
These days, it's all about New Media. If it's not digital, it's dead. Every day it seems we witness the introduction of some new media channel or technology with potentially game-changing impact. It's a very exciting time, and I'm just as interested as anybody - especially since one of my current assignments is to expand my media team's capability to distribute content, via whatever new or old channels make sense.
At the same time, though, there is another, darker theme under all this New Media excitement: "Big Media" (Old Media) are Dying. Whether spoken or implied, there is the inference that New Media can only rise if Old Media simultaneously declines.
Don't Bet On It. These doomsday scenarios are doomed to be wrong. How can I claim this? Let's start with the fact that they've been wrong before. Radio was supposed to kill the movies; TV was supposed to kill radio. Cable TV was going to be the end of the broadcast networks. Then VCR's were going to kill commercial TV. Then remote-control zipping and zapping. Now the Internet is supposed to kill TV altogether. Or DVRs. Meanwhile, TV audiences grow every year, the number of TV sets per household grows, the amount of money spent on TV sets keeps going up, the amount spent on TV programming keeps going up.
The reason the doomsayers have been wrong is because they failed to anticipate that the "doomed" media would react and adapt. Market forces may cause a severe correction in advertising prices or subscription revenues, but then they change their cost structures to less-expensive programming or expand their distribution - like when radio went from primarily comedy/drama to music/talk after TV came in, or network TV programming shifted to reality shows and extended its distribution to cable, international markets, DVDs, and now YouTube or Brightcove, or their own websites. So my prediction is that the big media today will still be big tomorrow - they'll just be different, and there will be other big media around that are small (or don't even exist) today. And that prediction implies that today's big media will have changed in ways that make them still valuable to advertisers.
Certainly, these changes will not come without pain. Stock prices may decline, people will lose jobs, maybe some wealthy media owners will become less wealthy. But that should not blind us to the fact that these media continue to reach audiences and provide potential value to advertisers.
Take radio for example. You don't read a lot of good news about radio in the trades and general business media lately. However, many of our clients are retailers - marketers who measure results in weekly or even daily sales, and who depend on advertising to maintain and grow their businesses. These clients continue to use radio as a central part of their media mix. Why?
• Value: Radio is relatively cost-efficient, reaches a lot of people, offers demographic selectivity, provides creative promotional opportunities, and reaches people when they are on the go and near the point-of-sale. OK, so none of this is news - but then it hasn't gone away either.
• Results: Our clients can see the impact on sales when we run radio (and conversely, when we don't). It doesn't always pay out, and it's not always enough to counter competition or other negative market forces, but it does work.
• Innovation: The last few years have seen a stream of innovations in radio, from new programming formats to new advertising formats to new channels (HD Radio), new measurements (PPM) and new marketplaces (electronic media exchanges). Some see these experiments as the desperate acts of a medium in trouble. I don't - I view them as proof that it will adapt to the competitive forces at work. Many of these innovations won't take hold; others will come up that we don't know about yet. But in the long run, I feel confident that radio will be around, connecting with audiences and providing value for advertisers.
So, while we are grappling with the challenge of learning about New Media, let's not forget that Old Media will continue to have an important place at the advertising table.
