I read two articles today that I thought perfectly illustrated the challenges that traditional media and advertising companies are facing. Their future audiences/clients are online, avoiding a lot of the brand names and old media has no idea what to do about it.
In a recent article in The Economist titled “Who Killed the Newspaper?” two facts jumped out at me. One was that “Britons aged between 15 and 24 say that they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.” Related to this was the point that “In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the Internet”. Now to most Internet savvy people this is not new news. The success of Craigslist has a lot to do with the decline in newspaper classified ads. But combine the decline in ad revenue, with an older generation readership and you can see why some people wonder about the long-term viability of newspapers. Are they going the way of networks news and subsist on drastically lower viewers/readership?
Which leads me to a recent article by Bill Tancer at Hitwise who showed some clickstream data to News sites. Not surprisingly the demographics showed a heavy weighting towards the 55+ crowd compared to the 18-24 group.
So now we have two cornerstones of “old media”; newspapers and news that are seeing their demographics skew very heavily towards the 55+ age group, both online and offline. While I do not have any print media information, I would really be surprised if those demographics did not match the newspaper and news data.
So as “old media” slowly fades away, you need to reach out towards the under 30 crowd if you are a traditional ad agency – How are you going to do that? That is the challenge that the agencies are facing. How well they approach social media optimization will play a major role in the long-term success of the traditional media agency.
