News media ad buy question receives a clowning response: “It’s all about the money, bozo”
By Mark Ritson
Last week’s column in The Australian generated a fascinating response. I wrote about the apparently illogical drop in news media advertising by advertising agencies (down 30 per cent in two years), given readership was slightly up (+2 per cent) and companies that bought direct from news media companies, without the assistance of an agency, continued to do so at almost unchanged levels (-4 per cent). Why, I speculated in these pages a week ago, are agencies buying less and less advertising in news media?
About half the responses I received pointed to the much-trumpeted advantages of digital media over newspapers to explain both why news media was in a tailspin and where the money was moving to. But while the advantages of digital media help to explain its growth over the past decade, they do not explain a 30 per cent drop in news media ad spend in such a short space of time. Especially given much of news media’s own offer now lies with premium digital advertising in online editions.
Another set of responses pointed to the young and beautiful media buyers who populate the nation’s advertising agencies. Because these young, urban twenty-somethings do not buy or read a paper themselves — the argument goes — they labour under the misconception that no one else reads them either, hence the decline in ad buying.
This excuse, very popular among news and TV executives, also does not wash. I’ve looked at the link between the personal media consumption of advertising executives and the link to their stated media recommendations to clients in the past. The average media planner does indeed spend a lot less time reading news media than the consumers they target. But there is no correlation between their own newspaper consumption and their recommendation levels for news media advertising. The people who work at media agencies are professional, they do not confuse their own behaviour with the target consumer that their client wants them to reach.
It was the third, much smaller, set of responses that caught my attention and finally seemed to explain the drop in news media advertising. As one agency insider impatiently put it to me in a personal email that also asked for anonymity: “It’s all about the money, bozo.”