📰Modern mass media = A mess. Here's how you can benefit from it.
Chaos is opportunity: Context Collapse #195
Note: This article is intended primarily for journalists, public relations professionals, analysts, academics and marketing folks. But don’t let this stop you!
I’m about to say something very unoriginal: The media landscape is a mess right now.
Magazines and websites keep shuttering. Local newspapers are a shell of their former shelves. Streaming services keep slashing budgets and introducing new restrictions. Online advertising is rife with fraud. The kids are spending all their time on YouTube and TikTok and it just gets really weird sometimes.
Welcome to the 2020s.
But I’m here to help. Here are a few action steps for riding the chaos to SUCCESS. Yes, amazing wonderful success no matter how you define it.
1. It’s all about the microdemographics.
Once upon a time, demographics were simple for brands, agencies and publications. You had a couple of age, gender, race, geographic and income brackets. After making allowances for variables and a handful of cross-demographic television shows, magazines and media outlets, you had a reliable way of guessing who was consuming what.
Those days are over.
A range of technological innovations that started with cable television and continued through the world wide web, the rise of social media, the rise streaming services and the complete removal of technical obstacles to video production by post-2015 smartphones mean that the old days of large demographic buckets are over.
Take advantage of this by honing in on small demographics who are interested in the same weird niche-y stuff you/your business are interested in and make your content indispensable to them. If colonial America cooking videos on YouTube and life on offshore oil rigs on TikTok can sustain massive audiences and revenue (and they do lol), you can find an audience for your niche. Just hammer away at it until it happens.
More after the jump. But first… a word from our sponsor.
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2. Advertising is getting weird.
Return on investment on internet display advertising is plummeting. Publications who thought they could sustain themselves on digital ad revenue are getting a nasty surprise. Netflix is suddenly embracing advertising after years of thinking they were too good for it. Retail endcap displays are getting QR codes and the ad agencies are putting more thought into the landing pages for the QR code than the actual fucking endcap. YouTube commercials are turning into elaborate minimovies. You know the score.
Take advantage of this by making your craziest advertising and promotional ideas happen. Hire some 1099 developers to make a mobile game for your brand. Put a random loss leader on Gumtree. Find some truly weird swag to send to your work-from-home clients and potential clients to promote your business.
If conventional advertising isn’t working, use it as your green light to get weird. Go.
3. Brand drift is real.
Brand drift = when a brand or publication’s identity or public perception shifts in response to marketplace changes.
It’s easy to find examples of brand drift. CNN recently overhauled their on-air roster to include more right-wing voices in hopes of capturing viewers and ad revenue from Fox News. Coverage in the New York Times has become more left-wing as a result of a shift in revenue from advertisers (who skew more cautious) to subscribers (who skew more partisan).
Brand drift is very, very real. Yesterday’s hot publication might be devoting themselves to short articles designed for SEO or lower-cost videos designed for minimum investment and maximum ad revenue. Retail brands may completely shift their marketing and branding approaches after receiving an investment round.
Use media brand drift to your advantage by capturing audiences others leave behind. If you’re doing marketing for a retail brand whose biggest competitor is shifting to “value-conscious” cheaper products, that’s a perfect opportunity to position as the upscale alternative. If you are an editor at a publication who has a competitor that’s pivoting, that’s the perfect opportunity for you to find some new readers from that old publication’s regulars.