Last week, I read a well-done blog from a writer and social-media consultant named Paul Gillin lamenting the death of BtoB Magazine, which Crain Communications said it is folding into Ad Age as of the first of next year.
What especially caught my eye was this observation:
“The advertising market for business publications is in free fall, and since most of the magazine’s advertisers are themselves B2B media companies, BtoB has suffered along with everybody else.”
Being a student of the media industry, and a content specialist on PR News, I wanted to know why. On the PR side in particular, I would argue that a decline in advertising—in media covering media certainly, but in a lot of print media as well—portends serious challenges for the PR profession.
Consider that as newspapers decline, and advertising in traditional print brands shrinks, the space available for news will also decline. That, of course, means the space available for you to tell your stories via journalists shrinks as well. That's a dilemma worth preparing for. And I'd argue that media relations is the most important function in PR.
Consider too that as traditional print media declines fewer journalists will be called to the industry, and those who are might well be less capable. Again, a challenge for PR pros who need to rely on reporters who know their beats and get things right.
What's more, as traditional print brands decline, their influence declines with them, meaning that you, as PR pros, need to find the new kinds of influencers. That's not always obvious, and it means you're going to have to balance the old with the new for a long time into the future.
So why is all this happening? I have a few theories, and I like to test them out on other smart people. Sometimes they agree, and other times I suspect they think I’m way wrong.
So I wrote a comment to Gillin’s blog that asked him what he thinks is driving that free fall. Specifically, I asked:
• Is it that print advertising has become an inefficient way to deliver brand messages?
• Is it because software products have emerged in the media industry that render third-party suppliers—advertisers—less essential? In other words, is it a case of, 'we can build, so we don't need to buy?'
• And also, do we buy less? For example, online, we don't need a printer in a continuous relationship, we need a Web development firm just once every few years.
• Is advertising in free fall too because new channels and technologies have emerged—such as Facebook, Google and database-management tools—that allow marketers to more effectively identify and communicate with prospects?
• And if that's the case, does that mean that the audiences that media companies have traditionally aggregated are less valuable and less compelling to marketers?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. I don’t even know if they’re the right questions to ask. But something is driving the decline in advertising, not just in media on media, not just in b-to-b media, but in many print publications. My friend Jim Elliott says that advertising will come roaring back. It always has in the past. We shall see. What's new is the volume of alternative media now available, and the ways in which people consume media.
—Tony Silber
@tonysilber