One of the first ever newspaper ads appeared in 1704 in the Boston News-Letter. Promoting a plantation as a great real estate opportunity it is a good example of how things stay the same and thankfully how things change.
300 years as an advertising medium makes news publishing one of the oldest we still use today. A testament to its popularity with advertisers through the years and the value that societies have placed on quality news over time.
But unfortunately, this success and heritage has also had an unfortunate consequence – that despite the medium evolving significantly in recent years, perceptions of news have been slow to change.
I speak to media industry leaders regularly and a more recent conversation I had confirmed something we at ThinkNewsBrands have known for a while - that News Publishing is still thought of as a print format.
This is despite it now being delivered via websites, apps, digital newspaper replicas, social media, activations and partnerships.
According to Raj Gupta, Chief Strategy & Growth Officer at UM Australia, people seeing news publishing as “print” is the greatest misunderstanding that surrounds it.
“I think the biggest misconception about news publishing is that it only exists in a print format… when the reality is news publishing exists across a lot of different media and a lot of different types of media.”
Sian Whitnall, co-CEO at OMD Australia agreed saying “[media agencies are] still talking about print and the physical paper, when we’re acknowledging that news is now a more omni-channel concept.”
Ms Whitnall pointed to legacy terminology and out-dated agency system labelling as things that needed to evolve in order to build a more accurate perception and better use of News Publishing in media planning.
“If we look at any of our internal systems and we look at spend and investment levels, it still says print,” Ms Whitnall said.
She called on the industry to consider “changing our labels and how we think about the medium.”
That was a sentiment shared by co-CEO, Laura Nice, who said “maybe we should be talking about Total News and changing the language.”
Taking a broader view, Jacquie Alley, Chief Operating Officer at The Media Store, indicated agencies had come to overlook the effectiveness of News Publishing in a media landscape that has been dominated by social media and search in recent years.
“I think we just forget how powerful it is and how often we’re doing it and are completely unaware of it,” Ms Alley said.
Find out how News Publishing can improve your media mix.
contact@thinknewsbrands.com.au
Left to right: Nik Doble, Laura Nice, Sian Whitnall, Jacquie Alley, Raj Gupta
Vanessa Lyons is the Chief Executive Officer of ThinkNewsBrands.
ThinkNewsBrands helps advertisers and their agencies understand how advertising in today’s news content drives real business results.
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