As Media Fragments, PR Adapts

There can be no doubt that big change is occurring and the trend is for more and more people to get large portions of their news and entertainment from non-traditional, online sources.

While commercial television audience figures continue to tumble and subsequent ad revenue falls, over 30 million users are visiting Yahoo News and Google News daily. YouTube claims 3.36 billion video uploads in January 2008 and BBC iPlayer 3.5 million programmes watched in the first 14 days after its launch. In addition, the number of people reading and writing blogs, subscribing to RSS feeds and visiting social media sites continues to balloon on a daily basis. Many blogs and social media sites are attracting more readers than major national newspapers!

This has significant consequences for the media, traditional media is fragmenting, online media is spreading and as it spreads, it fragments too. Don’t be surprised when the likes of Bebo, Facebook and MySpace launch sub-brands, more targeted versions of themselves that appeal to different sectors. Media diversity is everywhere, for example, mobile phone companies offer news and entertainment on their websites, search engines that used to be for searching the web, now offer news, entertainment, blogs, RSS Feeds etc.  With so much media choice, reaching target audiences becomes as diverse as the media itself.  Many organisations may not even know where their target audience is anymore? And where they are today, may not be where they are tomorrow. Naturally this is having a profound effect on PR and marketing.

As the traditional media landscape continues to adapt to the pressure it faces from online media, Davies Tanner continues to look at ways we can ensure our clients do not fall behind. We have been keeping abreast of these changes to the media and adapting our PR campaign tactics to take advantage.