The financial reporting season highlighted the strength of digital operations among major publishers. Almost all digital divisions recorded strong profit growth, with Fairfax Digital being a stand out among Fairfax’s results in particular. While 9MSN has had its difficulties, Jo Pollard’s appointment as CEO, is a good result for a great business. Among all this success however, the industry still hasn’t managed to get cross media integration right. While there are some exceptions, such as Channel Seven’s Olympic packages, publishers have yet to prove that integration at the publisher level consistently delivers value to clients.
The proposition for why integration should work is compelling. Through using all a publisher’s assets in concert, the audience is immersed in a content experience that works to the strengths of each media. An advertiser is able to leverage greater impact, and a broader set of messaging opportunities, through this higher audience involvement. For example, if you are using print and online, the print campaign delivers great impact through a large creative pallet and high quality colour production whereas online allows you to explore an advertiser’s offer at the click of a button. Sounds perfect! However the problems start arising almost immediately.
Firstly, audiences use different publisher channels differently. For example, one of the best entertainment sites in Australia is the Sydney Morning Herald. The entertainment section is young, female skewed, dynamic and celebrity focused. The print Entertainment section is none of these things, although it serves as a comprehensive listings and information product, with good arts profile pieces.
Secondly, the advertising cycles are different. Online media is usually scheduled monthly and planned up to 3 months in advance. This is largely due to the longer digital creative production times and the way online media CTR performance builds over several weeks. Many traditional forms of media are more tactical and planned around shorter bursts . Cancellation policies between media channels are also different, even within the same publisher, making true integration planning and buying difficult to move and manage.
A final point is that most publishers have set up separate integration teams. The Integration Director is the poor soul tasked with negotiating through all the businesses within a publisher to pull together cross media deals. Many an integration specialist knows the desperation of wishing somebody would give them the time or information they need to do their jobs. Apart from major event sponsorships, the integration team is outside the daily running of various advertising businesses and rarely given the best deals on offer for packages.
There are other reasons why extensive cross media packaging is difficult to achieve at a publisher level, however, my point is that most integration attempts have simply increased publisher’s salary costs and generated a handful of interesting event and product launch sponsorship deals. It is a problem that weighs heavily on media owners as they are justly proud of all parts of their business and see genuine advantages if clients spend across multiple products.
Perhaps a better way to achieve true integration is to look at parts of the existing industry that already handle integration well. Media and advertising agencies, by definition, are skilled multi-channel media practitioners. Their core offer is to integrate strategy, planning and buying activities across all media and multiple media owners. Granted, some agencies are better at new media than others, but a more collaborative approach between agencies and media owners to integrations is likely to deliver greater returns to the industry as a whole.
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