$208 per listener/viewer
Posted: September 28, 2009 Filed under: advertising, newspapers, PR budgets | Tags: advertsing budgets, NPR Leave a commentNPR stations have been doing their pledge drive lately. One of their appeals for members said that roughly $45 Billion is spent each year on TV and radio adverts. This equates to $208 per viewer/listener per year they say. They rather neatly point out that this money comes from the viewers and listeners as they buy the products that get advertised and some of that money is then spent on that advertising. They then go on to point out that some of your $208 is spent with radio stations you hate. Good point. Indeed I hate commercial radio for the most part because of the ads, which is why I listen to NPR most of the time. This got me thinking though. If the average listener/viewer has $208 spent on them each year for TV and radio adverts, then I’d assume they get about the same again from all the other paid advertising approaches such as print ads, online ads, billboard ads and sponsorships. That means that each of us is spending roughly $400 a year to persuade ourselves to buy things.
This number may seem high or low depending on how you look at it. To me the number looks very low when I think of how many products and services a year that I buy. I’d guess I buy products and services from over 100 brands a year. That means they each get roughly $4 a YEAR of my money to spend on advertising to me. Which means the adverts would need to be pretty darned amazing don’t you think? Put another way, it seems almost pointless to spend money on advertising…
Traditional media is getting more important as fewer people read it
Posted: September 15, 2009 Filed under: News, newspapers | Tags: importance of media, traditional media 2 CommentsTraditional media is shrinking. This shrinkage isn’t yet to a point where it will die any time soon but as we all know the media is becoming an ever smaller universe. Online readership is doing far better than print but still the overall trend is towards a smaller media landscape. So does that mean as PR people we should care proportionally less about the media? It could be argued that we should, since people are spending their time doing other things than reading the news or watching TV. I’d argue the opposite however. I believe that even though fewer people are subscribing to newspapers or watching the daily news on TV, that traditional media has not lost its position of power when it comes to influencing consumer behavior. While the number of people that may read an original article may be falling, the potential influence of that article is potentially greater. Only 20 years ago the idea of seeing a news article and forwarding it to 100 people was at best a time consuming and expensive exercise. Today, anyone with Internet access can do it. In other words, 20 years ago, a news article was as powerful as the people who happened to read it that day (give or take a few people that found it later in their library). Today an article is as good as the number of people that read it and then forward it PLUS the number of people who then find it later when doing a search on Google, PLUS the number of people who find it because someone blogged about it, PLUS the number of people that found it because it was tweeted about, PLUS… you get the picture. I’d therefore argue that even if traditional media circulation is dropping, it’s importance is not. Just as there is a computing law that says the power of a network is proportional to the number of computers attached to that network, I’d argue that the power of the media is connected to the number of people linked to the media. Traditionally that link may have been a subscription. Today it’s a hyperlink.