Alan, you are so spot-on with this. Simply incredulous. How can a tycoon of a media giant like Rupert Murdoch have been so in the blind? For so long? How is it even possible? Its like living in the 1970s and investing in new ocean liners to capture a share of the trans-atlantic tourist travel. NO - by the previous decade it was clear that travellers preferred jet airliners, and by the 1970s the trans-Atlantic shipping companies were going belly-up in every country with passengers abandoning the ships for the faster and cheaper jumbo jets. (oh, and a funny side note, my first trip across the ocean was indeed by ocean liner when I was six in 1966, we took the Dutch ocean liner Rotterdam from Amsterdam to New York)
Here my two cents to this story. The Business wrote on April 14, 2007, about the fate of the American weekly magazine TV Guide. TV Guide once became the world's first magazine to hit the impressive print level of a billion copies sold per year. A smash hit publication in the American market year after year after year after year. But in 2006 - in one year - TV Guide circulation fell by 55%. Hello ! An industry staple. A print magazine reporting on another legacy media - TV - and sees its circulation crash by more than half, in ONE year. Man, that hurts. And yes, now we have the blind leading the blind. Yes, combine print with TV. Why? Because it works better? No doubt..
But they are BOTH part of the media that are in permanent decline. Way past their peak. WHY NOT combine print with internet or mobile advertising? To combine one declining media with a GROWING media. Same for TV, don't pair up with another loser, join with either online internet advertising or even better, with the most powerful advertising media of them all - mobile !
Wake up legacy media. A new sheriff is in town and his name is mobile. And yes, see 7th Mass Media for much more.
PS - if you have a good story for us around mobile as the 7th mass media channel, let us know, in particular if you have one of those cool new concepts which make a new service seem that amazing it feels like magic, let us know. We'll blog about it. We want to celebrate your success ! Oh, and that goes with all topic areas of our blog, obviously, anything in communities, convergence, engagement marketing etc. Let us know.
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