As it faces a bleak future, Dominic Mills translates the gobbledygook flowing out of the Guardian – and, in praise of the Super Bowl and TV, challenges the industry’s obsession with precision marketing.
If you want to understand why the Guardian is in the mess it’s in – as reported by itself here – its own jobs page is a good a place to start.
Here you will find 27 jobs listed as current, some of them posted almost a year ago but still apparently vacant.
All this at a time, as the Guardian itself acknowledges, when it will have to cut hundreds of jobs.
So, any takers, for example, for these posts?
– Associate Editor, Mobile Innovation Lab – Guardian US
– Mobile Developer, Mobile Innovation Lab – Guardian US
– Media Relations Manager – Guardian US
– Software Engineer, Tools, Process and Innovation
– Front-end developer, editorial – Guardian Australia
– Guardian Response+ campaign manager
– Journalism: Positive Action scheme (disability)
– Journalism: Positive Action scheme (ethnic minority)
Hmmm. Like me, you’re probably wondering what those jobs are about and why the Guardian needs them. Not many of them are to do with either journalism or selling ads, the two most important types of jobs for publishers.
But, hey, this is the Guardian, on a mission to spread well-meaning liberal values to the known English-speaking world – whether they want them or not – at any cost.
The numbers demonstrate why this is a vanity project of major order. In the last five years, annual operating costs have risen by 23% to £268m, caused for the most part by the appointment of 479 extra staff, one third in Australia and the US.
[advert position=”left”]
And, er, revenues…? Up just 10%, with print last year down 25%. And all this during the relatively benign economic climate of the past four-five years, certainly in the US and the UK. But as the climate turns rougher, what next?
It’s going to be very tough: as the Guardian acknowledges, print revenue fell faster than anticipated last year, and digital revenues grew slower. When even the Daily Mail is suffering, less robust entities are going to feel the squeeze.
Here’s my translation of what Guardian editor Katharine Viner and chief executive David Pemsel said last week. Note: they’re both learning corporate-speak fast.
Viner: “…a growing and far deeper set of relationships with our audience will result in a reimagining of our journalism.”
What she means: “Citizen journalism is cheap, so we’ll get our readers to do it for us.”
Pemsel: “It’s very easy to look back and say the Guardian has made mistakes.”
What he means: “FFS, why have I inherited this pile of shite? It’s all the fault of previous management.”
Pemsel: “[But] I think the big strategic pillars around the role of membership, the role of the international offices and more and more digital capabilities, if you ask whether they were right, the answer is absolutely yes.”
What he means: “I haven’t got a single new idea. So we’re sticking with the old ones.”
Pemsel: “This is not a paywall. We do not want to stem our ability to broadcast to a wide audience.”
What he means: “Of course it’s a sort of paywall. But the Times does paywalls, so we’ll have to call it something else. And anyway, nobody will pay for our citizen journalism, so there’s no point in putting it behind any kind of wall.”
Pemsel: “[Guardian Labs]…will make a far, far, greater contribution.”
What he means: “We’re going to be puffing the arse out of our advertisers – what’s left of them, anyway – so if you want any of this bollocks about ‘independent-minded journalism, go and work for the Mail.”
Pemsel: “We need to be an agile, lean and responsive organisation that can respond at pace.”
What he means: “The management consultants told me to say that and I don’t understand it.”
Super Bowl: vanity = sanity
If the Guardian’s travails represent the perils of vanity (chasing uniques) over sanity (making money), next week’s US Super Bowl may, at first glance, be the same.
But maybe not. Maybe it’s more nuanced than that. At $5m a 30-second pop, it’s easy to think it’s all about vanity. Especially when at least half the audience may not be interested in or relevant to your product.
And there’s none so vain as a CMO on the make and an agency with half an eye on some awards.
But I’m not sure that it matters. Because the Super Bowl (and the Oscars and, over here, Christmas/World Cup etc) is the point in advertising where vanity and sanity meet – providing your ad catches the public imagination.
Charles Vallance, the V in VCCP and a man I greatly admire, has a nice phrase that sums up the issue. He calls it the ‘tyranny of targeting‘.
I’ll use his words, because he puts it with great elegance: “Ad campaigns, as a result [of targeting] can become a kind of private conversation between a core audience and an advertiser. But advertising isn’t supposed to be private. It’s supposed to be overheard, shared, stumbled across and discovered.
“…Much of the power of a message lies in it being overheard. Modern media analytics is in danger of reducing the medium back to being the medium alone. If we continue down this path we may end up on a fool’s errand, mistaking accuracy for effectiveness and precision for persuasion.”
Quite so. If there’s a better explanation of why the Super Bowl (and TV) matters, I haven’t seen it.
In our current obsession with precision – the card played ad nauseam by the digirati – we’ve forgotten why vanity can also be sanity.
—
[If you’re in need of any further defence of marketing serendipity, have a read of BBH’s Sarah Booth – who was also inspired by Vallance’s views – Ed.]
