The Media Superiority Complex
April 7th, 2009 by Kathryn Koegel
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Recent media research studies and press announcements have seemed almost sad in their defensiveness. Last week a study commissioned by CBS in conjunction with Conde Nast concluded that online ads are worth a miniscule percentage of a :30 TV spot or a magazine ad http://www.mcpheters.com/news/TVMagazineAdsMoreEffectiveThanInternetAds.htm. The MPA attacked online and the argument that time spent with media should equate to ad spend in some way (http://www.magazine.org/research/magazines-deliver-most-ad-value-per-minute.aspx). A consortium of top publishers has asked Google to change their search ranking system and automatically give higher status to their sort of “professionally generated” content (http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=135433). Why is it that TV networks and magazine publishers attack the very medium that may be the future of their content? At the same time, how can publishers honestly think that “quality” determiners can be developed and enforced for content online?
If you look under the hood at the two studies noted above, you can see the flaws in the argument: in the first, people were put in isolation and told to watch a half hour show without the ability to change the channel or get up and eat or go to the bathroom; similar lack of other stimuli existed for the print portion of the experiment. Stranger still, the online ads in the study got 1% click through rates. How realistic is that? In the MPA study, MRI media consumption recall data was matched with more recall data from a Deloitte survey where consumers were asked to rank media that impact on their purchase decisions. A nice, not exactly transparent exercise, that is hardly useful for buying media. Sure we get it, there’s a whole lot of print that connects with consumers so well that the ads become as powerful to the consumer as the content is. Online has a similar connection in areas like travel and automotive. TV still gives advertisers a great standard wedge of time to tell a powerful story with sight, sound and motion. Online can do the same – with a much lower clutter factor – but the usage is so dispersed – at least for now — that it cannot gain effective reach for an advertiser.
“Big media” is all suffering from a superiority complex entirely naïve in the current media environment. Media is all about change – albeit some of it painful – and to stand in the face of it is to face extinction. In case no one at the associations and publishers was noticing, there is an enormous recession on that is impacting millions of Americans – just because a lot of print journalists are out of work doesn’t mean their situation is any more profound than that of an auto worker – or even an aerospace engineer in the mid ‘70s to use a more far ranging analogy. In times like these, I challenge trade associations and media companies to get out of the “we deserve to win” mentality. It’s just not useful for marketers and for the health of the advertising industry content producers depend upon.
Advertisers want to reach consumers, and in the US, for the most part, media is ad supported. Consumers are voting with their phones, their wi-fi routers and their DVRs. As marketers, our challenge is to be-dazzle them with great pitches that fit whatever way a consumer decides to get information and communicate. Have we found the definitive way to engage consumers through online advertising? No, but chances are that the more we understand how consumers use various aspects of the Internet and all of media, the better able we will be to create messages that resonate and find placements that reinforce the value exchange in ad supported media.
I’ve yet to see a “media neutral” research study that was of any use to a marketer trying to make sense of all their disparate media options. The questions we should be answering are about how distinct media (and by this I mean everything from short form video to newspapers to social media) fit into the larger media mix by product type, and by product lifecycle. Why not resurrect studies like the IAB’s XMOS, which helped to put online display on the map in the minds of brand marketers. This time, let’s go into it without the obvious results. Perhaps I am living in a fantasy world, but shouldn’t the MPA, the IAB, the CAB, the NAB and any other media trade association interested get their members to collectively fund media mix modeling studies that incorporate inputs from all dimensions of this radically changing media world?
We are in a media ecosystem as Randall Rothenberg of the IAB so rightly noted, now why can’t we act like it?