A lesson
in digital marketing recently came out of the very un-digital world of
newspapers and highlights that the gap between old and new media may be
larger than ever. Briefly, the Seattle Times took out a full-page ad in
its own paper for a political candidate the paper's editorial board had
endorsed. Why run an ad for free? To convince political campaigns that
ads work. To old-media pundits this sounds nuts, more so for the fact
that the ad, which is running every day until the election, takes a
political position and jeopardizes the newspaper's position as impartial
observer (the Times became the third-largest contributor to the
campaign by dint of advertising). But this is a tactic all too familiar
in the online world. As anyone who's signed up for a Google AdWords
account knows, you will soon find a coupon in the mail for $100 of free
advertising if you're not spending enough in the opioinin of the search
giant. And that's the retail end. For major advertisers and the traffic
nodes of the internet, exchanging ads for goodies down the road in the
hopes of demonstrating their effectiveness to marketers is the norm, not
the exception. Barter is the online economy. Most major media websites
share advertising revenue with portals that can deliver eyeballs. Search
companies share ad dollars with media sites that can deliver searches.
Merchants share sales with search companies that deliver leads, and so
on.
So why the major fuss kicked up over what amounts to
a house ad (a house ad is when you see an ad for the Wall Street
Journal or a related product in the Wall Street Journal)? Partly this is
the quirky realm of traditional journalism on a local level—the Seattle
Times outlived its competitor, the Post-inteligencer, and arguably now
wields unrivaled media power in its market. But I detect a level of
frustration with old media companies by the many people who want them to
adapt and survive—there's a level of humiliation that comes with giving
away thousands of dollars in such a public manner and the fact that the
Times didn't even have the go-ahead from the candidate is doubly
embarrassing. Would this happen online? Maybe once online news sources
have the credibility to lose in the first place.
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