🔎Context Collapse: PR? Marketing? Advertising? In 2024, They're All The Same.
Business storytelling in the post-mass media world: CC #292
Once upon a time, marketing, public relations, advertising and trade journalism were separate things.
They’re not anymore.
Legacy media is collapsing and most companies are better off making their own content.
My argument for a long time—and what I’m writing about today—is this: There’s no difference between marketing, public relations, advertising and brand content anymore.
So let’s get into it.
Where does earned media fit when most journalists are self-employed and self-publishing?
“Earned media” is, in PR-speak, publicity gained through promotional efforts other than paid advertising. This usually means press coverage, social media content strangers make for free, word of mouth, and other forms of promotion. The opposite of earned media is “paid media”—in other words, advertising.
I recently spoke with Katherine Spiers about this. I’ve known Katherine since we both worked at Gawker Media (remember them?) on their travel blog (remember those?) Gridskipper. Katherine is an incredibly savvy observer, skilled writer and talented entrepreneur who knows the industry… and works in the complicated world of food media. Here’s what she had to say:
At the end of 2017 I was laid off from a second full-time media job (it was a fourth or fifth time if you count my full-time freelance clients dissolving), and I decided to build my own media company, a podcast-first collection of properties called TableCakes. Podcasts are still our main product but we're pretty heavy into newsletters now, too. My experience as a food/travel writer with PR contacts (and their pitches) has become increasingly frustrating as I see most of my journalism peers also move to independent work - public relations seems to have not noticed the change, or is pretending not to, anyway.
Staffers employed by publications, both print and digital, usually have an expectation to complete a certain number of articles in a given time period. When I was food editor at LA Weekly, my section had a quota of three online posts per day. That meant that, even though I didn't particularly care or find it useful to know that, say, a chip company had partnered with a local sports team or a candy shop had collaborated with an ice cream company to create a new flavor, I would sometimes write up a little blurb because I needed a third post for the day. So, I understood why I was bombarded with PR pitches along those lines.
Now, I have a podcast and a newsletter about food history, and a newsletter about LA's hidden gem restaurants. I still am constantly pitched to cover two-for-one bagel sales and $500 whisky-pairing dinners. Aside from these not matching my content (that's old news), I don't understand why these are offered as earned media, rather than paid media.
Where does earned media fit when most journalists are self-employed and self-publishing? We don't need to write about anything we don't want to. We (sometimes pretty desperately) need an income.
I've tried responding to PR pitches with my media kit, rates included - and an explanation that I know PR and advertising are different, but I'm not doing earned media - but that's been met with silence or confusion or derision. I don't know if it's clients or agencies that are more uncomfortable with merging paid and unpaid, but it's apparently a no-go.
After almost 100 years of public relations professionals needing to explain their jobs to everyone, I imagine the last thing they want is to merge with their bully of a cousin, advertising. But as a self-publishing lifestyle writer, I can't think of a different solution to saving the health of at least three industries.
Katherine Spiers writes about Los Angeles here and the world here.
I’ll go one step further and argue that public relations already merged with advertising. And with marketing too.
How so? Let’s find out.
User Generated Content Changed Things:
Once upon a time, broadcast television networks like ABC, cable television networks like CNN, magazines like Sports Illustrated, newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle and things like movie theatres dominated the media industry.
If advertisers wanted to reach customers, they paid money for ad space to these outlets. Even beneath the mass media and there was a profitable world of trade and specialty press (different industries, specialty topics like cars and gardening, niche topics, etc.).
You could make your own media, but it required time and dedication. Making a public access television show required considerable technical skill, as did recording and selling your own music, making a ‘zine, or breaking into the art world.
From a PR, marketing, and advertising perspective, that meant that each of them worked through distinct channels: PR professionals would cajole media outlets into covering their clients. Marketers would help clients reach customers. Advertisers would promote their clients through paid channels.
Then… first slowly and then quickly… ordinary people could easily make their own content.
Little things happened at first. People could leave Yelp reviews with their honest feelings about restaurants and dry cleaners. Bloggers could write articles and reach hundreds of thousands of readers from their home computers. Teenagers could set up MySpace profiles for their band and reach listeners worldwide without having to go on tour or even leave their homes.
Then things happened really quickly. YouTube and TikTok made it easy for anyone to make video and share it worldwide. The iTunes store, Spotify and streaming turned music from a physical into a digital commodity. Technological innovations meant it was easy for anyone to create professional-quality content on their smartphone. Economic innovations meant that smartphones—and data for them—became cheap, easily available and embedded into the culture worldwide.
Presto. We were thinking of this in terms of PR and advertising, but the biggest cultural shift since the printing press just took place.
People Really, Really Like User Generated Content:
Back to PR, advertising and marketing. Some funny things happened when ordinary people were able to make their own content and share it globally:
Hundreds of millions of people worldwide realized they liked consuming homegrown content just as much as (if not more than!) consuming content from the “professional” mass media.
Network effects meant that platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and YouTube scaled as venues for discovery and sharing very, very, very quickly.
Legacy media—from newspapers to magazines to television news and beyond—began sharing content for free online that consumers would normally pay for.
All of these had a biiiigggggg effect on the PR/marketing ecosystem. Three of the biggest changes were:
Many content creators became “influencers” with large audiences of their own. Even influencers with comparatively small follower counts in the tens of thousands (say, a YouTube creator who focuses exclusively on home improvements for bungalows) are sought-after partners for brands targeting their audience.
A formerly top-down hierarchy of media and distribution channels was replaced by a constantly changing web of part-time, full-time and legacy media creators working on video, audio/podcasts, photos and text-based articles that PR/marketing/advertising pros must target.
Consolidation on the part of legacy media as many outlets shut down and others became “zombie” outlets republishing old content while a few winners like the New York Times, Bloomberg and New York cornered the market on paid digital subscribers.
Every Brand A Content Creator:
This new world post-user generated content marketing/PR world we are in is completely fucking foreign to everything that came before.
If a new retail store opens and the local newspaper is too underfunded to cover it and the local TV news shows rely on syndicated content to fill airtime, how are they going to get publicity?
They’re going to post to local Facebook groups and invite local Instagrammers and TikTokers to visit their store if they know what’s smart for them.
If a B2B tech company is updating their software platform and the trade press for their sector went out of business two years ago and they’re praying TechCrunch or Fast Company pays attention?
They’re going to have their in-house experts post on LinkedIn, send targeted emails to customers, do a whole bunch of keyword-based advertising and maybe, just maybe do an instructional series of YouTube videos and a podcast series promoting their brand to potential customers.
I could go on and on all the way up to the Fortune 500 but you know what I will say…
But getting down to brass tacks:
The post-user generated content world = A transformative shift in how brands communicate.
YouTube and TikTok are the media now! The old idea of silos for earned media and paid media and public relations and marketing and advertising are 1000% obsolete.
Brands and businesses need integrated approaches to publicity. This means telling their own stories and creating content instead of hoping that media outlets cover them.
Welcome to business storytelling in 2024. Let’s go.
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Thank you for including me! I think both sides of the aisle have growing pains coming our way...