The Media’s addiction to print based media
One of the conversations we have quite often with companies when it comes to their online marketing strategy relates to the advantages of ranking highly in the search engines with a direct response online presence versus the effectiveness of offline PR and exposure in magazines, radio and television. The Middle Eastern market is interesting because at this point in time, there has to be a mix of both online and offline media. This is because this market is still about 4 or 5 years behind the likes of the States, Europe and Australia. It won’t take that long to catch up, but at the moment there are a number of obstacles, mainly from an infrastructure perspective that prevent a 100% online model from being the norm. However, as is true of most trends, those cutting edge strategies and methodologies in the developed markets filter down into most other markets, especially those of emerging nations that NEED to be seen in a certain light.
Matthew Ingram over at GigaOm put together a great article with an awesome graphic to show the time spent within media and the amount spent by advertisers in that medium. The correlation is intriguing, not least of which as Matthew says ‘ the analyst noted that about $50 billion worth of advertising was going towards print and other forms of “old” media when — based on the amount of time spent — it should be going to internet-based media (at that point, print was getting about 12 percent of the time spent by users, so it has fallen another five percentage points since then)
What is evident is that in the developed markets over the last 2 years there is a growing trend to more advertising spend shifting to the internet and online. There is still some caution of course, and one of the reasons that this hasn’t happened quicker (and one of the reasons MNG is in business) is because there is still some insecurity about the effectiveness of things like social media marketing. There is a lack of education in the market, especially in the Middle East and so people are a) not able to fully grasp the ideas and strategies that are available to them and b) no-one want to be the pioneer, it’s very typical of companies to ask within the first few minutes, for examples of work you have done for other people. Now there are so many elements to the online marketing jigsaw that what has been delivered previously is 9 times out of 10 going to be completely irrelevant to your own requirement. But it’s this requirement for social proof, and the security that someone else has done something like this and seen success. No one wants to be the pioneer that adopts the new strategies and really steam rollers over their competition because none of them have a clue how they are generating so much business for themselves.
What can be said is that there is no argument that traditional print media is losing it’s effectiveness. They don’t want to admit this because print media has traditionally generated billions of dollars in advertising revenue and they need to maintain that they have massive reach still to keep this up. But you can’t argue with 900,000,000 users. This is where the market has gone, and that’s just Facebook alone (which many wrongly class as the be all and end all of social media) it’s not, it’s a small part of the Social Media Marketing jigsaw piece. How do we (companies) monetise this platform/reach, well that’s the question that’s about to be answered. One of the answers we believe is video – exposure and reach are massive when it comes to this particular form of media, it engages more of our senses and makes our sites stickier, so people hang around longer. A company launched recently here in the UAE is capitalising on this knowledge. Check them out at www.ezeliving.com – the service they offer will blow you away in terms of using video to gain exposure for keywords you want to rank for, within 24 hours. Quite audacious I know, but the proof is already there for you, so you can have that piece of mind that you are taking on something that is ‘new’ but tried and tested. Tell them MNG sent you along and Shah, Alex or Paul will be happy to help.
