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Upbeat about print media

The print is what pays the bill, says Earl J. Wilkinson

Earl J. Wilkinson of the International Newspaper Marketing Federation finds India the ‘most optimistic media market in the world.’ In a chat with George Jacob.

“The digital storm is coming,” said Earl J. Wilkinson, executive director, International Newspaper Marketing Association (INMA), in a voice almost a whisper. He has sore throat after flying into the humid conditions of south India from the freezing cold of the Swiss Alps. “The storm has left a trail of devastation in the U.S. and Europe.”

Mr. Wilkinson is here to prepare the media to be best-positioned to react to whatever the storm brings with it.

The Hindu caught up with him when he arrived in Kottayam to make a presentation on ‘Newspaper Outlook: Big Trends and Big Ideas Worldwide.’ He was here not with answers; but with a bundle of questions and as part of his endeavour to know what India could learn from the U.S. and European experience. And what it could contribute to the global newspaper industry.

According to Mr. Wilkinson, the West was not prepared for the digital revolution. When it happened, they found themselves totally ill equipped to react to the challenge. They failed to see that “daily newspaper circulation had suddenly become a more complex story than we as an industry chose to portray.” They did not realise that the value chain had changed and continued to focus on the mass market, creating the biggest product to attract most advertisers, oblivious of the emergence of niche markets. They failed to create products to serve these tightly-defined audience, so that they could sell advertising around target audience. They failed to see that technology and abundance were disrupting traditional information consumption pattern. “Technology had created alternative access points for information, creating a concierge class for news feeding,” says Mr Wilkinson.

Mr. Wilkinson finds India “the most optimistic media market in the world, both for the reader and the advertiser. As the Internet was slow to develop, the media here were able to see the disruptive storm coming and had time to prepare themselves for it,” he said. He is optimistic about media as a whole, particularly print. “The print is what pays the bill,” he says.

With 360 million literate consumers not reading a newspaper, the potential for growth is immense. Advertisement

spending is only 0.34 per cent of the GDP against the global norm of 1-2 per cent, he says. He lists the reasons for optimism: top publishers are committed to growth, both revenue and market share; influx of foreign capital and experiences; English language newspapers are good at mixing the “sizzle” with the “steak” while language newspapers are good at reaching the middle class readers door to door, at an intimate level. The companies possess multi-media though most of them have not unlocked the value of synergistic multi-media.

The key to success lies in discovering the hidden assets of the Indian newspaper, Mr. Wilkinson says. Brand-loyal readers who can be converted into a community, valued journalists who can be trained for multi-media functioning; the presence of a large distribution network, which is second only to the postal service; immense cash flows and capital budgets; large advertising sales force, who he calls the “feet on the street who scares even Google” — all could be pivotal to the new strategy being evolved to challenge the digital storm, he says.

He foresees an Indian media where consumers choose to consume news on many platforms; advertisers chase consumers across platforms and ‘Newspapers’ create new platforms, reinventing themselves as ‘multi-media companies’ — media companies who no longer struggle for big audiences, but ‘own’ lots of niche audiences and network them. The U.S.-based INMA has 1,200 members in 82 countries. It provides global best practices and marketing ideas for newspaper companies, identifies and communicates trends to its growing community and shares the membership network’s vision and ideas with media industry leaders.

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Upbeat about print media

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