Last Thursday I was chairing a discussion regarding the future of printed media in Spain under the threat of the new digital environment. It took place in the OME (Online Marketing España) fair, the most important one regarding Digital Marketing & Advertising in our country.

First of all a few words about the fair itself: it still has to improve a lot to be at the same level AdTech is, but anyhow I think it was quite a success. We should only compare them when a comparison between UK/USA and Spain digital markets is possible. In the meantime the right measure is the evolution of the fairs’ numbers between last years’ first edition and this second one… And these numbers reflect the success of a market whisch is to reach 700M€ in 2008 from 2007’s 380M€…

Visitors: 4,300. 35% increase when comparing with 2007 edition.
Exhibitors: 81. 38% increase when comparing with 2007 edition.
Lectures: 65. 70% increase when comparing with 2007 edition.

But let’s concentrate on the debate. Marketing and General Managers from the online divisions of the most important printed media in Spain sat at the table:
Juanjo Amorín: General Manager, 20minutos.es
Arturo Pérez Marín: Marketing Mager, Prisacom (El País, As, …)
Carlos Gómez: Internet Marketing Manager, Unidad Editorial (El Mundo, Marca, …)
Juan Luis Moreno: New Markets Marketing Manager, Vocento (ABC, …)
Gumersindo Lafuente: General Manager, Soitu.es

The discussion was based on the economy of attention, a term coined by the famous economist Michael Goldhaber: nowadays users count on so many sources of information, that the most valuable thing we have is time to check any of them on which to focus our attention. Thus mass media can not trust any longer on their brand awareness to be sure their webs will be the place where new prosumers will look for information.

I opened fire asking the following question: “when I was in the taxi taking me from IE Business School to the fair, I heard on the radio Fernando Alonso’s F1 car is going to use a new spoiler that will allow him to compete with the Ferraris on Sunday’s race; as I happen to be Asturian and very fond of car races I will check the news in the Internet first thing after I get back to my office; what will I do? Will I go to as.com or marca.com and have a look at their headlines? Or will I visit Google and simply type ‘Alonso new spoiler’?”

During the debate, we discovered quite soon that some of the pure players (like Soitu) think they do not have to do anything but wait for their visitors to come because they trust on their journalists’ prestige and so on. Besides there is one clear fact: the whole sector invests important amounts of money on SEO but are not willing at all to spend a single euro on SEM/PPC.

But big mass media have already realized they have to do the extra mile to stop the terrible lose of online readers they are suffering due to functionalities like iGoogle, Google News or NetVibes. How are they reacting? In two main ways:
• By developing services based on news on contents which gain reader’s loyalty and ensure their coming back once and again. An example will be Marca’s Marcatoons, a series of cartoons realeased every working day which refer to sports new form a funny point of view. Others would be news widgets which can be taken to any other web/blog or sponsored chats with celebrities who star in the news…
• By offering multidirectional communication to its readers. Thus the majority of news offer the possibility of uploading comments which engage users who keep coming back to check the answers to their comments

What do you think? Will the mass media have to give in and start paying SEM campaigns for being able to compete with search engines’ news?

Best regards

Manuel A. Alonso Coto