Last year I announced that change was coming to B2B Marketing and urged marketers to get ready…
Earlier this week I wrote about the decline of trust in traditional news media, CEOs and government officials and the corresponding rise of the employee-brand. I argued that now is the time to build your personal brand to help build our businesses…
While the signs that the traditional marketing playbook is dead are all around us and the large majority of marketing sucks, even I was shocked to see the recent cliff-diving trend in advertising revenue…
And whether you work as a corporate marketer, a media mogul, a consultant or within an agency, this chart is something we all need to understand…This changes everything!
Business Insider’s Founder, Henry Blodget (@hblodget) predicted back in 2007 that “newspapers are screwed“.
He ran the numbers and realized that as traditional newspapers and magazines follow the audience and move to an online-only model, that ad revenue would decline significantly while content costs would stay the same.
Henry predicted a 40-50% drop in print ad revenue and the decline of many newspapers…And many traditional media supporters ridiculed the notion. Remember those numbers: 40-50%.
This week, Mark J. Perry, University of Michigan Professor of Economics, covered the latest numbers from the Newspaper Association of America and created this chart:
Mark mentions that “it’s another one of those huge Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction.”
But he also calls out how the decline has been so dramatic that despite ad revenues being at a 60-year low, the greatest decline came in the last 4 years where revenues dropped more than 50% from $46 Billion to $21. Henry Blodget’s prediction was actually conservative.
Lessons for Marketers
- This is not just about newspapers…
- Customers are rapidly rejecting traditional marketing approaches in traditional channels.
- Marketers have been slow to respond, creating a gap between customers behaviors and the marketing mix.
- Content marketing and social media that seeks to meet customer needs is now more important than ever!
- Businesses need a sound content strategy that holistically considers audience content and channel needs.
- The future of marketing was digital. Marketers need to skill-up on digital (and social and mobile) and fast.
