The report also notes that 74% say the impact is substantially or somewhat worse than the financial crisis, while 24% of respondents said they have paused all advertising where possible until further notice.

An article on the state of advertising industry in New York Times notes that companies including Coca-Cola and Marriott’s have stopped or limited marketing, while companies including Twitter and marketing conglomerates Interpublic Group and Publicis have suspended financial forecasts due to the degree of uncertainty.

Barrons notes that in the global financial crisis only 12% of advertising spend in the US was digital, whereas now it is 55%, meaning spend can change quickly compared to for exampel TV ad commitments, and making it hard to compare previous shocks to today.

The massive downturn is of course driven by the impact on key advertising customer segments, such as travel, retail, real estate, and for the digital platforms, small business.

Media survival… and reinvention

I am of course known for my negative view of the fate of news-on-paper, though this was to my mind always about creating a positive future for the media industry.

Right now, every media organisation must aim to survive in order to have the opportunity to participate in the upside beyond this crisis.

As I have and will cover in this blog, we will move into a substantially different world after the pandemic that will require reinvention.

People will have changed their habits in how they spend their time, what channels and media forms they pay attention to, how they make buying decisions, and where they spend.

Advertisers and the advertising industry certainly need to hope for a revival in traditional media and marketing spending. But they also must be actively considering how the world will be different, and how they need to reinvent themselves.

This morning’s news that the broadcaster Nine is “merging with” (essentially taking over) news publisher Fairfax to create Australia’s largest media company has sparked heated discussion on the future of the Australian media landscape.

Tim Burrowes, the publisher of media and marketing group Mumbrella, today re-published an article he wrote last week on how Fairfax had got things right, opening by referring to my forecasts:

One of Australia’s more influential futurists is Ross Dawson who famously (or perhaps infamously) created his Newspaper Extinction Timeline back in 2012.

And one of the risks of making future-gazing predictions is that eventually, the future happens. And at that point everybody remembers the prediction, and nobody remembers the caveats.

In 2018, the prediction that newspapers in the US would be extinct by 2017 looks a little awkward. Tell that to the New York Times. And the idea that they’d be irrelevant in the UK by next year seems increasingly unlikely.

And although it’s still four years away from his predicted newspaper extinction in Australia, it’s now fair to say it ain’t gonna happen here in 2022. And as a newspaper reader, nay lover, I couldn’t be happier.

I have already written an extensive Review of the Newspaper Extinction Timeline: What We Got Wrong and the Future of News from Here for those who want some context on the predictions and where we stand today.

In short, I acknowledged that I was wrong on the aggressive earlier dates on the Newspaper Extinction Timeline, but also noted that my dates for many other countries were very likely too far out, and I now expect a far swifter demise in many cases than I originally anticipated.

Which brings us to my forecast year of 2022 for news-on-paper to become insignificant or irrelevant in Australia.

The acquisition of Fairfax will, if anything, accelerate newspapers’ demise. There will be little sentiment on the history of newspapers in the combined organization.

Tim Burrowes noted that the market capitalization of Fairfax had increased to $1.85 billion last week, however that was no doubt significantly due to takeover speculation, and the value that can be extracted by breaking out the digital components of the company.

There is no question that Fairfax as a group has done better than some other legacy newspaper publishers around the world, mainly through its digital and other media acquisitions.

Yes 2022 may still be aggressive for newspapers to disappear from Australia. However I think there is a decent chance that there will be no or few daily newspapers by then, only weekend or community papers.

There might be value from publishing news-on-paper if it bolsters masthead brands. But if papers are loss-making, even with the help of shared printing with News Corp, that will be very difficult to sustain.

Tim is now on record saying “it’s now fair to say it ain’t gonna happen here in 2022”.

Let’s see. It’s certainly more likely as of this morning.

Image: Silke Remmery

Coverage in over 100 major publications from more than 30 countries helped to garner many, many millions of views, attract critics galore, and generate substantial debate.

While I don’t believe in predictions because they will almost always be wrong, I made an exception in this case, in order to provoke news industry executives and to stimulate useful strategic action to respond to a changing industry landscape.

The first date on the timeline – US in 2017 – is now demonstrably wrong (though possibly not vastly – we will see).

I have written an extensive review of the timeline, its original intent, and where the predictions stand now: Review of the Newspaper Extinction Timeline: what we got wrong and the future of news from here.

Please do read the review if you have any interest at all in the future of news or in futures thinking.

The timeline was widely mis-interpreted as an attack on the news industry. While I understand that it would be viewed as negative, for me the most important issue was never whether we continued to have news-on-paper, but rather how we could create a positive future for news.

Hanging on too long to a dying medium instead of focusing on growing channels was most likely to jeopardize the future of any news organization, as has been proven to be the case.

Almost all my futures work for client organizations is fundamentally about creating the future. The future does not happen, it is created. By far the best reason to engage in futures thinking is to understand what you need to do to shape the future positively.

I also believe that the future of news and the news industry will be at the heart of how we create a positive future for humanity. Unless we are well-informed we will not be able to build a positive future, individually or collectively.

That is why I have launched a new publication, Creating the Future of News. Its intent is to support a positive future for the news industry, by providing analysis, data, and a forum for constructive conversations and sharing.

The publication is still in Beta, but already has substantial data and other resources.

Please visit the site, join the community, and get involved.

Predictions are not valuable unless they inspire useful action. Rather than simply look at the future, we need to work to create the future. And the best way to do that is to help the right ideas, people and resources to connect.

I hope Creating the Future of News supports that in some way large or small. Being right or wrong doesn’t matter. Contributing in whatever way possible to creating a better future does.

Image: Paul Reynolds

Leading futurist Ross Dawson shared useful insights on how to create a vibrant future for media organizations in his keynote at the #SchibstedNext 2016 event in Olso, Norway held by Schibsted Media Group. You can see the video of the full keynote below.

Despite the widespread changes impacting the global media industry, Dawson pointed to the enduring and insatiable human appetite for information in a multichannel media world. “Arguably the entire economy is becoming based on media, the creation of messages, the flow of messages and where they are going,” Dawson observed.

Here are six key ways in which media organizations can empower themselves to create their own future, drawn from Dawson’s talk at #SchibstedNext.

1. Create a compelling vision

“The best way to predict the future of media is to create it,” Dawson told the media leaders assembled in Oslo. For today’s media organizations, achieving a successful transition to tomorrow hinges on understanding “who it is we can be, who it is we want to be, moving forward”.

Forging a compelling vision for your media organization and communicating it effectively is vital for staff to adapt to the merging of technology and humanity, Dawson said, in an era when “technology is more and more capable, taking more and more of who we are”.

Without a clear strategic vision, companies are more likely to be blinded by past successes and overpowered by technological change. As the report of the 2020 group for the New York Times recently put it:

“To do nothing, or to be timid in imagining the future, would mean being left behind.”

2. Translate experimentation into value creation

Today, in the space of a day, you can test an idea, see how people respond, and develop it further. This has become a fundamental capability of every organization in the entire media industry.

“Revenue is highly uncertain, so you need to be able to experiment, said Dawson. “For every experiment you should know what you want to learn, and when you learn that, you will be able to design the next experiment.”

Dawson referred to a basic test-and-learn model favored by entrepreneurs and outlined in The Lean Startup by Eric Ries: come up with an idea, put it into action, learn from that, iterate, and turn it into a result. “You can learn from others, absolutely, but you need to be able to create your own guidebook,” Dawson advised.

Part of converting experimentation into value creation is a focus on community: “being able to connect people, define what it is that’s common between them,” said Dawson, “to be able to create media which is relevant to all of those people, and to be able to filter that…to the individual…across many news or media organizations”.

3. Make the most of human and machine intelligence

Alongside advances in algorithms and the proliferation of convenient, high-tech user interfaces, robots and amateurs are now making music, art, video, and journalism in ways that were once limited to professionals. Dawson says:

“I believe that in the last twenty years one of the most important things is how technology has enabled our creativity. If we are looking for the best media, we must bring together the professionals — who have the expertise and the context — with the amateurs, with all of us, with the many that are enabled by technology to create new possibilities.”

Optimizing both human and machine intelligence will become increasingly critical to value creation as organizations collect ever more data and achieve new milestones in consumer knowledge and engagement.

4. Ensure a clear and dynamic platform strategy

As existing and emerging media platforms vie for our attention, a solid understanding of platforms and their relationship to value creation is essential to steer media towards a positive future.

The best platform strategies, in Dawson’s view, are dynamic and user-driven: “How is it you create value for participants? That’s the fundamental aspect of a platform,” he said, “Designing value for the participants in ways that they can create that together.”

In order to maximize value for participants across platforms, Dawson highlighted the role of data analysis, signal monitoring, user feedback loops, and collaboration with both internal and external platform creators.

5. Build on your existing capabilities and transcend their boundaries

A focus on transcending the boundaries has underpinned recent innovations in the media world, including the immersive virtual reality smartphone app available from the New York Times. Media organizations must continue to think beyond the boundaries—such as print, broadcast, and even digital—if they are to create more compelling experiences for the audiences of tomorrow. Dawson emphasized:

“You need to be able to say, what are our capabilities today? What are we great at? What are we distinct at? What are we world-class at? What is it that we are going to build on? As organizations and individuals you need to be able to map your path and capability development moving forward.”

In order to transcend the boundaries and promote innovation, media brands are learning “to actually live what they are doing so that the messages that flow outside represent who they are”, said Dawson. This involves building the flow of communication and transparency internally in ways that mirror the external values and perceptions of a brand.

6. Foster bold and agile leadership to create your own future

Even as user participation in media continues to flourish, Dawson reminded the Schibsted audience that strong leadership remains crucial, because the future of media “is not a spectator sport”. As the Law of Requisite Variety makes clear, only those organizations that are as flexible as their environment will have the power to be able to create the future.

Therefore, leaders’ ability to put a bold vision into action, to push out the boundaries and set new standards for media will be crucial to success in the industry going forward. This is especially important because, at its core, the future of media “is an experiment”, Dawson believes.

“There is no roadmap to be able to say, this is exactly where the future of media is going. You need to create that. For your individual organization, it is going to be a different answer.”

Image sources: The People Speak!, fdecomite

The transcribed interview appears as an extended article Platforms are the Future of Media, which goes into depth on some of the issues I see in the future of media. Below are a few brief excerpts, but read the full article for more detail.

Platforms are the future of media. One could argue that a newspaper in the past had its own platform, which was its distribution of paper, primarily. There, it aggregated news, advertising, classifieds and so on. So it was a platform in terms of being able to pull all that content together and distribute it to all of its readers.

But now, in a connected world, we’re starting to see just how many other platforms there are, and single participants are finding it very challenging to be able to play successfully in this world. Most prominently of course we’re seeing the social platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and now the messaging platforms as being places where people go for all of their media. The way in which we interact with people on social is an entirely valid form of media, along with the more traditional news, entertainment and education from established publishers.
…
In the future we can start to see more and more fluid platforms for news professionals. I think that starts to become a more apt term than journalist. They’re news professionals who are working with crowds, who are working with algorithms and who are working with each other, not necessarily in terms of just being an employee of the news organizations. In order to be able to collaborate with other news professionals around the world and bring together content, sometimes they will work independently and sometimes ad hoc for the right news, event or content. News professionals are supported by a platform where consumers, individuals or organizations around the world can access their content, and where a fair value exchange can happen.
…
If we look at how you participate in other platforms, I think there are four key elements in that:

1. Analyze those platforms effectively; map them. Identify what the costs are of participating in the platform. What are the trade-offs between them? Explore some of the potential paths forward, the different scenarios and how they may play out.

2. Engage with select platforms because you can’t engage across all of them; but you do need to make a commitment. Then establish contingencies that determine in what situations you are going to pull out, and what the trigger will be that moves you into a different space. If you end up choosing to engage with a platform, promote it and then get and understand the data from that.

3. Strengthen your position, given the fact that you are going inside a relationship. Ensure that at all points you are accumulating as much data as possible. You are using platforms to entice readers into a direct relationship, which The New York Times and others have done successfully on Facebook. Yes, promote on Facebook, but always use that to try and create direct relationships with audiences.

4. Apply influence as we saw recently where the editor of Aftenposten essentially changed the policies of Facebook. It was partly through, I suppose, being right, but it was also being able to take a stand prominently, drawing others’ opinions out. It is critical that if you are participating in other platforms, then you need to be able to say, “How can we collaborate with other participants, not as an individual player, but as collaborators and share our data and influence in order to make sure that we can shape that platform as effectively as possible?”

If you’re participating in a platform, you need to monitor the shifts in the landscape, engage with new platforms that are emerging and potentially develop/add onto platforms that are complementary. Once you’ve made the choice to engage with others’ platforms, which is essential in today’s distribution world, you do need to have effective strategies to participate in those platforms in a highly dynamic way, where you can respond to changes as they emerge.

The fundamental capabilities of PR professionals are more relevant than ever in our intensely networked world. Arguably, PR should be at the center of the marketing universe, since it is better able than any other discipline to deal with a world driven by relationships, fueled by connectivity, social, mobile, and power shifting to the individual.

The big question is: will the PR industry seize the immense opportunity before it?

Both in my own work and that of my companies we work extensively with PR agencies.

I have personally worked with a number of major PR globally agencies in framing the future of media. I am also frequently engaged by PR agencies on behalf of their clients to deliver keynotes at customer events and to act as a spokesperson for media campaigns.

Among the many services that our companies work with PR agencies on, notably Future Exploration Network creates compelling futurist content to support media and B2B marketing campaigns, Advanced Human Technologies does organisational and influence network analysis for designing high-performance organisations and campaigns, and MemeStreme (to be launched soon) will offer world-class interactive information visualizations.

However beyond these direct engagement points, it is clear that in a networked world marketing is being completely transformed. I believe that leading PR professionals – whose business is relationships – are probably best equipped to truly understand a world of distributed relationships, and find successful pathways to the future.

Please have look at Creating the Future of PR, join the conversations in our Creating the Future of PR Facebook Group, and let us know if you would like to contribute to the publication.

We will also be running a Creating the Future of PR Forum in Sydney this October, and will collaborate with local partners to run events in other major cities around the world.

Please do participate and pass on word to those who would be interested in this, our intention is over time to build something that will be truly valuable for the industry.

Below is a video excerpt of the opening minutes of my keynote.

You can see a video of the complete keynote here, and the static presentation slides here (though much of my visual presentation was video).

A post in INMA’s Keynote blog, Creator of “Newspaper Extinction Timeline” lays out industry’s optimistic future, described the messages I brought to the audience.

The entire news media industry was buzzing in August of 2010 after Ross Dawson released his predictions for when newspapers worldwide would cease to exist.
…
“This is one of the only predictions that I’ve made,” Dawson said at the INMA World Congress in New York City last month. “As a futurist, I believe predictions are often not worthwile because nobody knows the future. The future is unpredictable. Yet the reason why I did make these predictions was to provoke, to be able to wake people.”

If he provoked people to consider why they disagreed with the timeline, then “I’ve served my purpose.” His intention was never to necessarily be right — although he might be closer than you’d like to think.

“This is about news on paper. I think the dynamics of that are not bright. But the point is about the news overall, the future is extraordinarily bright.”

Dawson will revise his predictions at the five-year mark later this year.

We are working not just on the revised newspaper timeline, but also on developing research, content, analysis, and frameworks on the far more important topic: the future of news. Keep posted for a lot more on how we can create an extraordinarily successful future for the news industry.

Zuckerman began by running through the severe challenges for the news industry, going on to highlight branded content as the next source of growth for the industry. Below are a few slides from his excellent presenatation.

BCG sees branded content growing at a 21% rate over the next 5 years. I believe it is likely to grow faster than this.
Source: Boston Consulting Group

A study across four countries showed some variation between countries, but overall a strongly favorable reception from consumers. Overall they identified a 21% net increase in likelihood to purchase due to branded content, and a 20% net increase in affinity for a brand. However if consumers already have a negative perception of a brand, branded content will accentuate that perception.

I was very interested by BCG’s taxonomy of branded content, in particular identifying native advertising as a distinct subset of branded content. There is much confusion over the language used in this domain, with ‘content marketing’ being commonly used, as well as ‘sponsored content’, ‘corporate publishing’, and of course still ‘advertorials’.

As made clear in this framework, one of the key distinctions is in the platform used. Many news publishers focus on creating content for their own platforms, yet they also have the capability to create outstanding content for use on other platforms, and indeed even the brand’s dedicated platforms. The intent of the content, from product-specific marketing through to emotion-based branding, implies very different types of content.

There is no question that branded content will be a massive part of the future of media. Its scope is far beyond traditional media boundaries. Brands are rapidly developing their own capabilities in both content creation and platform development. However established media companies have exceptional capabilities to play extremely successfully in this rapidly growing space.

An article in Sydney Morning Herald today titled Beware Facebook creep, publishers warned opened by describing the new Facebook Instant Articles and went on to quote me:

But Ross Dawson, a media strategy adviser and futurist who delivered the keynote speech at the International News Media Association conference in New York last week, told Fairfax Media that publishers should be wary of becoming too reliant on Facebook.

He said news organisations needed to look at all alternatives to distributing their content, including building their own digital platforms as well as partnering with third parties.

“Facebook is offering very favourable terms and requiring no commitment from publishers to participate in Instant Articles, so there is no real downside in trying it out,” said Mr Dawson, who was Thomson Financial’s Tokyo bureau chief in the early 1990s and has worked for Merrill Lynch.

“The danger is that publishers become overly dependent on Facebook for distribution, with no guarantee that the favourable terms will continue. They can mitigate this risk by diversifying their distribution, and having clear plans on how they will shift their distribution if the Facebook deal becomes less attractive, particularly in restricting how they can distribute content on other platforms.”

In my keynote at INMA I emphasized how platform strategy must be at the heart of how news publishers shape their future. While publishers have their own platforms – sometimes including print – they must also consider carefully how they engage with others’ platforms.

In my email interview with Sydney Morning Herald I also noted:

News publishers need to look at all alternatives for distributing their content, including participating in third party platforms, and building their own platforms which encompass multiple participants.

In considering distributing content over other platforms, publishers need to look at both potential benefits and costs of participating, including the potential costs of forgoing other channels.

Publishers need to have a clear overall platform strategy, in which they choose which platforms they choose to engage with, but also establish contingency strategies for the case that things don’t work out as they hoped.

My comments at the conference were interpreted as words of caution, which is fair.

However the broader issue is that platform strategy is often about hedging your bets, making sure that you have strategic flexibility even if the landscape quickly changes, which happens often in a multi-platform world.

Seize opportunities, but also make sure your opportunity landscape continues to open up rather than closing down through too focused bets.

The opening keynote on the second day was from Steve Hills, President of Washington Post, who spoke about the state of Washington Post since its acquisition in October 2013 by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. He shared some fascinating insights that are highly relevant for any news publisher looking to create the future.

The big idea of what they are aiming to create is “A national edition optimized for mobile and for interestingness with a simple UX designed for stunning storytelling that is less work for the user to consume.” Bezos thinks it is critical to reduce ‘cognitive overhead’ for their readers.

Hills said that the Washington Post wants to be world class in two domains:
– Excellence in journalism. They need to invest more in journalism, as in a world of noise you need great storytelling. 
– Excellence in engineering. They need to think like a digital product company, as that’s the competition.

Innovation is a process, starting by identifying key trends, followed by a loop of experimentation, measurement, and analysis.

In experimentation, speed is critical. To do that they embed engineers in the business and treat them as “first class citizens”. Each development group owns their innovation program end to end. There are are no central services, and chaos and duplication of resources are OK. They aim to build technology rather than buy it, and focus on open source where possible. 

They have two tyoes of internal measures:
– Lag measures that tell them whether they have achieved their goal.
– Lead measures that tell them whether they are likely to achieve their goal. Examples include content quality, technology quality and performance, and customer complaints.

Paid content is the primary business model, the secondary oneadvertising. Commerce is not a priority, despite the link with Amazon.com. Hills said it is very difficult to be a walled garden, you have to give content for free as well as aim to convert readers to subscribers.

The newspaper is creating new lines of business, notably aiming to sell its ARC Digital Platform for Media as software as a service. The intent is to generate revenue from the platforms they develop to defray the costs of what they are doing.  They have designed ARC as a suite of tools, significantly using open source including WordPress, moving away from the concept of a monolithic CMS.

The Washington Post has done very well over the last year, with total digital traffic up 66% to 49.4 million unique viewers, and mobile up 93% over the same period, significantly ahead of their peers. In Q1 2015 its absolute year-on-year growth is the highest of any US publisher.

Washington Post has some great foundations to work from, including its brand, internal talent, and now backing by Bezos. However it is important to remember that it was on a rapid downward path and had to be sold, it is not all rosy. The path they are taking appears highly promising, and other news organizations should study their approach.