Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ilija Brajković, CEO, Kontra
The Cause for this article was my semi-provocative post on – imagine this – Facebook
A relatively interesting discussion developed about all of that. Which media is better for what, and everyone was beating their own drum… I was just wondering what drum that was …
Surely there are agencies that know about media buying more than me. Of course, this is their core business. Certainly my experience is limited, because I have never bought an ad on TV, and they certainly have tools and methods that can measure a lot. But the thing that I’m not certain about is that they always work in the interest of clients, or to they buy media space in places where they will get a greater kick-back.
And so today we have a situation where Google + Facebook duo holds 61% of all online budgets. How will the media buyers adapt to this? For now, things are good for them. They got lazy, and the money is still pouring in. They couldn’t care less for the way Ekrem publicly scolded them.
And then there are the huge changes in the habits of consumers, so let’s look at them a bit.
Press
The press is undeniably the biggest loser in the last 10 years. We can say what we will, but when you enter a bar today, people are looking at their smartphones, not newspapers. At a conference once, someone from the Večernji List was saying that they still have their loyal subscribers, to which someone from the audience commented loudly: “And what will happen when they all die soon?” You also have a newspaper extintion timeline, that tells when the daily newspaper will become irrelevant, and for Croatia it is anticipated sometime around 2029, which is very close. How many young people do you see today reading the daily newspaper? You don’t! So, in 10 years, it’s pretty much bye-bye for press.
Radio
Television didn’t replace the radio, but television wasn’t even supposed to replace the radio. Radio is listened today primarily in two cases:
- In the car on your way to work.
- As background noise at work.
In neither of those cases is television appropriate. However, technology has drastically changed the options to consume music. Before, you had to listen to the radio in the car, because you had nothing else but a cassette player or a CD player. Today, all newer vehicles have the option to connect smartphones via Bluetooth and stream music from them, and what do you think what younger generations prefer? Okay, it takes me literally 5 minutes to get to work by car, so I don’t even try to connect my smartphone, and instead listen to a song or two on the “traditional” radio, choosing the station that is playing music at that time. But no ads. As soon as ads start, I start switching stations.
The second situation is listening to the radio at work. Yes, there are still plenty of offices where a crew sits and listens to the radio (in Zagreb the stations of choice would be Antena, Narodni…) in the background while working. But look around you. That is also changing. Before, that was the only way to consume music, but today we all have Spotify (not yet available in our country, but people always find a way), Deezer, YouTube … and we listen to the music we want, with our headphones. I look at my team at the office of Kontra, and no one, absolutely no one is listening to the radio, they all have headphones on, listening to the music they want, on the channels they want (while I’m writing this, Carl Cox – Essential Mix 2018 is playing in the background, 2 hours of pure music, without a single ad). Only one colleague doesn’t listen to anything. She says she doesn’t like background noise and likes silence while working. Can you reach us with radio ads? The situation here is still somewhere in the middle, people are still listening to radio in one of those two cases, but trends are brutally changing because technology allows it. What was impossible 10-15 years ago, today is a standard. So, in 10 years or so, it will be more or less bye-bye for radio as well.
TV
I will agree that television has a tremendous impact and that it is very important. Especially if you want to do “big” campaigns. But you still have to look at the trends. 15 years ago, how many channels did you have? Now you take a cable TV, and you get 100+ channels, and on top of that some special benefits like HBO GO, Pickbox and the like. And then there’s Netflix. And this new technology has given the consumer so many options that you no longer have to watch HRT (but you will still regularly pay your subscription). Hunting users across all these channels has become much more difficult – almost impossible – since it’s no longer enough to lease space on the 3 largest national media houses, because the user is watching … god knows what. There’s so many choices that even they have no idea what they want to watch. And on top of it all, some upstart Netflix joins the party and then you get a situation like this:
This Facebook user (data known to author :-)) is a target group for a lot of advertisers: in the thirties, above-average pay … But you can’t reach him with TV ads, because he owns a TV, but doesn’t watch “TV”. He uses the device of TV exclusively for consummation of content via Netfix, to which he gladly pays their due. Can you see the change? He doesn’t ask his friends “What’s good tonight on TV?” He looks for recommendations of Netflix series. And add to all that a bunch of illegal content that users download and consume on TVs or on computers, and what you get are younger generations that watch TV less and less. Before, TV was the home entertainment centre. Today (thanks to technology) it’s a smart TV connected to the Internet. Nowadays, users choose what to watch and when to watch it, not when TV house tells them they would watch it through their TV program. And what will happen in 10 years-time? I won’t say “bye-bye”, but new models of TV subscriptions will have to be introduced, some pay-per-view things or god knows what… the device called TV will definitely remain an important element of home entertainment, but the question is what content will it reproduce? Will it be the content pushed on us by the television companies, or the one we choose? And let’s be realistic, no one says “let’s TV and chill”, there’s only “Netflix and chill” :-).
Can you sleep at night media buyers?
But media buyers are not important. They will all adjust. It’s just that they will have to adapt extremely quickly, because technology has changed a lot of things, and has changed the way we consume content and where our attention is focused. These are tectonic changes, such as the talks of the artificial intelligence and its influence on the world, self-driving cars and their impact on the world and the humankind, the need to introduce minimal income for all, because many people will become unemployable… These are things that are here now. They are happening. Yes, there will still be people who buy vinyl LPs, who will buy old bikes because it’s hype to be a hipster, who will buy gasoline powered cars and drive them on their own… all that is nice, but trends are a tricky thing. When something goes in one direction, there’s no turning round. There are people who use faxes today, but do we think this is the technology that we need to focus on in any form or shape?
Ok, stop yapping,
to accept new things
is sometimes dificult for people.
For them the best player is Pele
and best musician is Zele
Hladno Pivo song “Teško je ful biti kul”
Technology has changed the way we consume content, and thus the way we, advertisers / communicators, reach the consumers who consume our content. And there could be a lot less dough for media buyers in the future. They will have to turn to the channels you lease with a mouse click.
But maybe nothing will change significantly. Maybe even 10 years from now our media buying agencies will still be making media plans as they do now. Maybe we’re all gonna install a gramophone in our cars, because #hipster. Or maybe they’re in the woods.