Ronnie Simpson's Blog

Companies in the US seem to appreciate online news coverage more than clients in Europe. There is a sort of sniffy, old world view here that if isn’t in the “Irish Times”, “Irish Independent” or print media then it doesn’t count.

It may be time for PR, advertising and marketing to reconsider the value of online. The thought was triggered by a recent report on BBC TV that for the first time Internet advertising in the UK will exceed national newspaper advertising in 2006. National newspaper advertising is forecast to take 13.2% of the total UK advertising budget compared to 13.3% for Internet advertising.

Search advertising, where businesses pay to reach customers trawling for information on websites such as Google, accounted for more than half UK web advertising in 2005. While Internet advertising is expected to grow by 39%, national newspaper advertising is forecast to fall by 9% according to GroupM, a WPP company.

These forecasts might be taken with a pinch of salt and certainly do not mean the end of print media. But it may be wise to watch where the smart money is starting to move. CNETnews.com has reported that in the US, Ford Motor has reduced its magazine advertising allotment from 23.5% to 21% last year but increased spending on the Internet to 3.5% from 3%. According to AdAge.com the company’s overall advertising budget remains flat. Ford, General Motors and Absolut Vodka all reportedly plan to spend some 20% of their marketing budgets online this year.

In Ireland IAPI estimates that Internet advertising takes only between 2 and 4% of the total advertising cake. But Steve Shanahan of IAPI was quoted in the Irish Independent as saying that the medium is growing rapidly with 460 online campaigns running in the first quarter of the year compared with 242 in 2005.

One of our clients, Salesforce.com, one of the fastest growing companies in the technology sector, heavily uses online campaigns in its marketing. The online programmes include email marketing, web seminars, banner advertising, paid Internet search and email newsletters. It is also a big believer in PR and uses its own CRM tools to measure the return.

From a PR and news point of view I believe that online media has been underestimated especially in relation to the business-to-business market and even Investor Relations.

The great power of online is that it delivers news directly to the desktop or mobile of an individual. It achieves the marketing ’Holy Grail’ of one to one communications.

For example, you can have news stories on competitors or sectors of interest delivered to you as they happen by Irish sites such as Electricnews.net. I also use MarketWatch.com to alert me on news as it happens on international clients or firms in which I hold shares. These powerful services are free. Unlike print, relevant news is delivered personally as it happens. Online is one way of reaching your audience in an increasingly fragmented media world and, to use Toffler’s term, ‘demassified’ market.

Because online news needs to report on a minute by minute basis it is a hungry beast and so gobbles up stories. The elephant needs constant feeding which PR can deliver. (One reason perhaps why US firms issue so many press releases in a month).

In my view online is now the fourth wave in terms of news delivery alongside print, radio, TV. But for heavier reading/analysis I personally still like the stain of news print on my fingers rather than peering at a computer screen or printing off hard copies. It may well be that the Internet is doing to specialist news what radio and TV did to general news. Ie Print media no longer delivers the news but analysis and opinion.

At the height of the dot.com boom, there were real concerns amongst print media that the Internet would take over and that daily newspapers would become digital. That has not happened. But it may now be time to re-look at our sniffy European attitudes to online news media (and marketing) and recognise the increasingly central role it has to play.