Are print media going to die with Connected TV ?

This is the question every single media owner should have in mind to project his company in the future.

In many cases, an advertiser who has the choice between a $5,000 ad in a magazine, or a few spots on TV at the same price will chose the latter. It is not a matter of efficacy, it is a matter of status. We have all learned during decades that TV was the holy graal of respectability for a brand.

It's now been 10 years these advertisers have been invited, again and again, to spend their ad dollars in digital. The real digital market is fine, and there is the other one, called "programmatic" or full automated market. Most of the time, these huge amount have been split between dozen of intermediaries before reaching the media it was supposed to in the first hand. It's called programmatic, but I call it bullshit. Programmatic digital advertising doesn't work, because more than half the global traffic on the internet doesn't exist. We've seen thousands of fake websites with real audience, but also billions of fake users visiting real websites, for the ego of the advertising agent, and the advertiser itself. But for what result ? Campaigns post tests show top of mind is close to zero; exposition is more than 1,000 brands PER DAY between all screens. Clients are throwing money out of the window for each campaign, and only a few brand take a real profit from programmatic advertising. But everyone in the industry makes money out of it, so why complaining? It's fraud, period. It's fraud and people don't dare telling it to their clients. Google, Facebook eventually get the biggest share of the cake, and have created monopolies, with hardly a few legislators now trying to balance this unprecedented access to wealth, and power.

Now what's next ?

With Addressable (or connected TV), brands will have the opportunity to reach consumers on a very granular basis. That is a huge difference. When programmatic advertising was promising to display ads on thousands (hundreds of thousands) of websites, not any single human being was able to verify . With CTV, it is now going to be a different game : advertising will return to what should be the rule: limited inventories on verified and credible media, with real audience. This is the revenge of the global players (TV, Radio companies, mostly) which graveyard had been dug deep by these companies I was mentioning earlier. They will do as much as they can to get this money back, providing targeted messages to recover once unlimited advertising revenue.

How can print media survive ?

With this massive fight coming between now wealthy companies, and once immensely rich Empires; print media are going to play the referee and can chose to remain on the tiny side seat or try to make it an opportunity.

Traditional media, and especially print, are the inventors of News and Photo Journalism.

I love the motto of Pris Match "The weight of words, the shock of pictures", which, in French, rhymes. Their content is key, and their readers are eager to get legit info with no filter. Quality of content goes with quality of support: when TV has brought 4K, print is still printed on toilet paper. Fashion brands continue to spend advertising dollars on nice glossy magazines, because it gives a beautiful representation of their image. Print is the only way to make sure your message is clear. It is also the only way to have a client test a perfume. This is the path to follow.

But what print media have forgotten, is to make the media-buying experince relevant, interesting and efficient. Try to call the New York Times to get the price of an ad: I have been doing this every year for the last 10 years. Not a single change. Countless of calls with eventually no response, noone calling back, and if ever an "open rate" where noone dares telling the client the average negotiation rate is 85%...letting the advertiser chose Facebook or Google where they don't negotiate at all, even if they don't reach their target.

It's time for media companies to rethink their sales process, and get rid of the pain point: sales people.

The media industry used to be a brand driven one. It is no more. Advertising business is a data driven one. Forget about your old school sales people. Clients need tech savvy sales supports, and the seller is now a tech. Not a sales person. It's hard to say, but it is the truth. Ask your clients when they last spoke to a sales person at Google ? Never. They don't have sales people. And if they had, they would never have been able to scale this big. You don't want to speak to people anymore. This is sad, but I am not the inventor of digital tactile screens where you have access to everything in just a matter of clicks. You don't want to spend hours lunching with a guys explaining his magazine is the best. This has ended. You trust the data, and only the data. Sales people are lying or, in best cases, omit telling the truth. Data doesn't lie. Data as far as you ask can be manipulated, cross-tabulated, mixed: it is an endless resource for who is savvy. You don't need sales people anymore, you need to know your target, you need to know your audience, you need to know your sales cycles.

You need to promote, to market, to re-invent and to rejoice the media buying experience. And eventually to make it simple, transparent and fast.