Welcome to the Dove Direct Print and Marketing Blog. Today's post, "2019 Changes In The Media Landscape," reviews how media is evolving and what the ramifications of these changes mean. In this flurried, nano-second march towards commanding the digital hierarchy, iconic brands, marketing gurus and start-up organizations, continue to grapple with a degree of uncertainty. Organizations are striving to ascend the proverbial digital ridge of enlightenment, albeit with the intent of rendering their competitors irrelevant, while battling it out on the media landscape which is undergoing a seismic shift, if not an outright quake.
One thing is for sure, based on last year's media changes, 2019 will offer us a winding road of twists and turns throughout the media world. Brands and marketers opt to acquire clipboards and cameras to create branded storylines, while the titans of industry gobble up smaller companies to gain dominance, while employees are sent out to pasture.
Media consolidation, including that of Twenty-First Century Fox by Disney, left hundreds of employees out in the cold, searching for jobs that may not be on the horizon. To that end, many other media organizations are being swallowed by the megalodons exhibiting extreme wealth. Case in point, AT&T took Time Warner, and Ziff Davis seized Mashable, at a highly discounted price, not to mention Jeff Bezos' acquisition of the Washington Post. Media consolidation is about controlling the content, from its inception to its distribution and touch points.
Content Remains King
That now infamous quote from the movie, "Field of Dreams," "If you build it, they will come," is the mantra behind most brand content strategies, with the current field of megalodons believing that such a plan will yield even more revenues. Moreover, 2018 experienced one of the most successful years at the box office.
A Netflix original netted some 45 million viewers, and other major media outlets are constructing profitable digital audiences via legacy content. According to Todd Beilis, principal and partner at Deloitte Digital, "If you create great content people are going to consume it. They're going to consume it with subscription or consume it with advertising, but they will consume it." Take the NBA, for example.
The NBA App allows fans to have instant access to breaking news stories, game results, scores, individual and team stats, and even the capability to watch games live on their mobile devices. However, it's true that in the case of the NBA, the content is about the ongoing lives and games of the teams and athletes. However, besides being able to watch the games on television, YouTube Live, or even HULU, (Hulu has live sports!) the NBA is rapidly expanding the number of touch points consumers can use to access the NBA product.
Content Overload
As more media conglomerates partner with businesses to create more content, the ocean of content becomes overwhelming. So much so, that if consumers were inclined, they could subscribe to hundreds of channels on Direct TV, Dish TV, and Xfinity.
Couple that with On-Demand and consumers have thousands of pieces of viewable content to consume. Given today's choices, a person could watch eight hours a day, 365 days a year, and devour 2920 hours of programming which is a mere pinprick when compared to all the available programs, including streaming, cable, and satellite television mediums, pay-per-view and on-demand availability.
Data Management Concerns
In 2018, there was more focus on big data's collection, dissemination, analysis, and implementation. Neal Helf, the controller at simpli.fi, stated that "Data has been the biggest change in that there's so much more of it."
Marketers and advertisers entrenched in creating new business models based on data technology advancements are being hard pressed to deal with scaling due to the rapid growth. The bigger the scale, the more efforts are required to keep pace with accountability. As a result, emerging analytics present a constant crusade to keep pace.
The real challenge is the ability to determine which data streams produce the best value. Also, due to the massive amounts of data traveling throughout the digital spectrum, new regulatory issues are coming into vogue.
The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California's Consumer Privacy Act represent a peek at the first major government efforts to relegate how organizations collect and use data. Regulators are mandating substantially new standards of consent opt-in before companies can directly target users or gather their data.
The Print World
It is against this backdrop, that 2018 data points to more print collateral, specifically direct mail marketing collateral as a choice tactic by the marketing and advertising community. The DMA points out that in 2018, print outperformed digital. In essence, when looking at how mediums perform, the DMA report states that print outperforms digital in terms of brand recall at 75%, while digital arrives at 44%.
In an overcrowded universe of content options, direct mail marketing stands a much better chance of being seen, read, and call-to-actions taken. Moreover, many other data reports targeting print suggest that demographically, there are significant advantages among various groups who prefer printed collateral for sales information. Millennials prefer reading printed collateral for sales info as well as book reading. The 18-24 demographic would rather read a printed book versus reading on a Kindle or other device. Other stats, embracing direct mail marketing initiatives include; 78% of auto purchases are made via direct mail, and 73% of consumers prefer direct mail for brand communications.
2019 will continue to push content consolidation, mergers, and acquisitions, which no doubt will produce new ramifications in the media world. Brands and marketers alike will have a multitude of challenges getting consumers to access and view all that content.
Meanwhile, physical mailboxes cannot be hacked, contain a more palatable number of content messages, and have a high propensity to send consumers to digital destinations, which is a far more reliable way to cut through the digital content overload.
The Net-Net
We are all under the siege of megalodons seeking to own it all. As mergers and buyouts continue, the media landscape will continue to serve up its marketing challenges. If the content remains king, small to mid-size size brands will need to rethink their content strategies and integrate them with great storylines. Direct mail marketing can be designed with storytelling and push the content envelope. Thanks for reading, "2019 Changes In The Media Landscape."
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