A fresh look at media relevance

Almost all major media companies are struggling one way or another to get black numbers on the bottom line of their balance sheets. Yet, many of them seemingly continue to do what they have always done with no - or only very little - real innovation.

Of course it takes a lot of energy, guts and change management to really take a hard look at the fundamental model, you’re operating by. But the question is whether most of these media companies really have any real choice? And no, this is not a discussion about technology, print vs. digital et all - but about vision and strategy.

So what could this entail? First of all, I would start by asking whether the end goal of media companies always should be to produce news as fast as possible and as much as possible? Don’t get me wrong. News are great. But when everybody does more or less the same at the same time, news becomes a commodity with a lot of inherent wasted energy and lacking from an audience willing to pay for it all. It just doesn’t seem that viable to me.

So if we make the assumption that the ‘all news’ theory is up for review, what could a new way of looking at media operations be? Well, for a starter I think its important to think about the customer/audience and the relevance of what you do. Because the key to success in financial terms is to produce a product the advertiser and hopefully also the customer/audience wants to pay for.

Here we get into cultural relevance. I read about Gannet’s new approach of not only doing more local sites, but actually doing sites for local moms. And I thought this was one of the rare examples of something being both relatively straight forward and devilishy brillant at the same time. Why?

1. Because it’s local. Lots of advertising dollars in local - one of the only areas of advertising NOT struggling currently.
2. Because it’s targeted towards loyalty. Moms love to chat and discuss about their kids and will likely do so with other moms, they actually have a chance of meeting up with in real life. Plus moms tend to want to stay more involved with local things like kindergardens, schools, crime etc.
3. Because it - because of the two above - provides new relevance for the media companies.

You could of course argue that pretty much everyone else could do the same. And yes, they could. But the media companies still have that not so little thing called brand that should be able to put them ahead of the competition. Furthermore you could exhange the ‘mom’ part for pretty much any other niche audience and replicate the formula.

As an addition to all this, media companies could work with the formatting of their content. Lenght, use of multimedia tools and bullet pay-offs (aka “Why should I care about this?”) comes to mind as new and more innovative ways of presenting and promoting stuff in order to strike a chord with the customer/audience.

On top of all this - and having abandoned the ‘all news’ credo - the media companies could experiment with including gaming elements into its offerings in order to drive even more loyalty, time spent - and advertising dollars. There are so many lessons media companies could learn from the gaming industry in this regard that its just painful they haven’t really started yet.

It may seem like all of this could turn serious media companies into fun parks and cheap eyeballs. I don’t think it will. I think the brand will still stay strong. And I think that the media companies would even be commended for being able to reinvent into a role that’s actually relevant and of real daily value to its customers. And then there’s the old saying that only the winner writes the history.

Vad NU! is a consultancy company owned by Mads Kristensen and specialized in helping clients take advantage of the business opportunities created by new media. Click to learn how I can help you and your company.