Meeker and the wave of militant mobile rhetoric
Print is still a hugely effective advertising medium, writes Rufus Olins, CEO, Newsworks – and if you want proof of that, don’t look at the numbers alone; ask an advertiser who isn’t chronically anxious about proving their tech credentials.
Mary Meeker’s annual report is essential reading, even if you’re aware that this financial analyst turned venture capitalist has a reputation, stretching right back to the dotcom era, for cherry-picking her evidence.
This year it’s been fascinating to witness how her state-of-the-digital world report has stimulated a wave of militant rhetoric. Much of it bandied about by mobile specialists. Much of it, sadly, sarcastic and strangely peevish.
The catalyst in most cases was Meeker’s assertion that, while people only spent five per cent of their media time with print, it still accounted for 19 per cent of ad spend. Whereas mobile, which accounts for 20 per cent of our time, takes only four per cent of spend.
We don’t have room to do justice to the flawed nature of the thinking here. (One respected observer described it as “barking”). Suffice to say that some commentators took these numbers and used them at face value to argue that the media market just isn’t “getting it” – and that media agencies are failing in their duties towards their clients.
That was only the beginning. We then saw a quaint revival of the notion that ink-on-paper just shouldn’t exist as a delivery mechanism in any way, shape or form in the 21st Century; and a related notion that some media owners are plain ridiculous for believing they can envisage a multi-platform future for themselves.
Sound familiar? It’s this rhetoric itself that sounds outdated and out-of-touch. Even in 2009, when Jeff Gomez created a fundamentalist rallying cry when he published Print is Dead, few seriously believed that print was ever likely to vanish in a puff of smoke.
No one with any common sense or experience, at any rate. It’s a cartoonish video-killed-the-radio-star sort of a notion. After all, radio and cinema both survived the meteoric rise of TV in the 1960s. So did magazines and newspapers.
And of course we know a lot more now about print’s prospects than we did in 2009. Recent Enders research pointed out that, currently, more than 16.5 million print products are bought or distributed in the UK every day. That’s more than 7 million national newspapers, 3 million local daily news sales, 2.5 million magazine sales, 500,000 book sales, 2.5 million free newspapers and 1 million free magazines. As Enders rightly stated: “Print reach remains extraordinary in the context of hyper-connected UK.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin you’d have to be spectacularly uncharitable to deny newsbrands their proud place in helping to further the digital revolution.
They’ve been especially innovative in developing new formats, both on the editorial and advertising sides, for mobile devices. That’s before we even begin to consider the fact that a huge number of links on Twitter are to pieces of newsbrand journalism. Without newsbrands, there’d be considerably less substance to chatter on social media.
You can legitimately argue that traditional media owners have been every bit as good at acquiring technology as technology companies have been at developing content.
So, does the marketplace really need a revival of good old-fashioned fundamentalist rhetoric? We suspect not.
And, yes, obviously we’re aware that some of the posturing is designed primarily to excite a tiny peer group.
Advertisers are unlikely to be impressed. Print is still a hugely effective advertising medium. And if you want proof of that, don’t look at the numbers alone; ask an advertiser who isn’t chronically anxious about proving their tech credentials. An Apple, say. Or a Microsoft. You (and Mary) can find a gallery of their print work, here.