Media and Advertising Growth Strategies
As the media environment continues to face the perfect storm of decreasing ad revenue, business model scalability, and increased competitive pressures, it's as important now as ever to focus on ways to increase value for core customers and audience. For a media property, this can take place in a few ways as the digital landscape becomes stabilized and usage normalizes across channels. A recent Forrester study, highlighted in an article on CNET, indicates that the usage of the Internet is stabilizing as people engage more deeply with their digital consumption. This should translate into a more stable media ecosystem and relative value associations for both advertisers and content providers.
The Advertising and Marketing Industry continue to find innovative ways to adapt to the evolving market conditions, but the pressure will continue to mount on the media industry. To keep viability, there a number of key areas to keep focus to ensure stable revenue streams from both short and long term perspectives. To begin, let's review a brief description of why media are facing their current conditions.
People Still Love Content
In the case of the traditional media model, the name of the game was always eyeballs, the constitution of those eyeballs, and most importantly the volume of the eyeballs.
Both from content perspective, as well from an advertising monetization perspective, it was this m
arketplace of access to the multitudes that made the media industry what it is today. However, with the proliferation of technology that offers people boundless choice, the age of access and control has shifted, and people are more active in the choice of their content consumption.
One fact that is sometimes overlooked is that the audience is still out there, and people have not gone on a content diet. There is still tremendous value, and it's more important now than ever for the media industry to deliver value to both their audience, and to their advertisers.
The Engagement of Audience
While it could be argued that the overall marketplace is suffering due to variety of factors, it is
still true that an engaged audience is a valuable audience. One of my favorite websites that understands this is Pandora. They have done such a solid job at delivering an easy to use and visually appealing interface that helps the audience achieve the goal of listening to internet radio, easily and with relevant music based on my interests. While Pandora does have a fantastic music affinity matching engine, I think it's the ease of use that makes it such a brilliant destination.
Often, content publishers are so focused on the short term current monetization models that the actual lifetime user experience does not make it to the top priority list. The mindset is that it only has to be good enough to attract people long enough to serve them advertising.
Since there is so much measurable behavior online, and the long tail nature of the web generally reduces the volume of people consuming any given piece of information, we have reached the age where relevant, easy to find and easily consumed content will win audience loyalty, and thereby ad revenue.
In my next blog, I will continue to explore the changing media landscape, and focus on the metrics that matter to the end user and what publishers can do to monetize them effectively.
Hi Brad - many thanks for this post, the more I read the more I realise that the internet and social media will form the core strategy and investment for many advertisers in the next few years. We've put toether an article on advertising strategy and would value your input from a digital point of view - any comments much appreciated. Many thanks. Tim
http://www.marketing-made-simple.com/articles/promotional-strategy.htm