Caught between two poles

Reaching mass audiences with branding messages will remain important -- that's the good news, according to Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine, quoted in the Real Media Riffs column from MediaPost.

The not so good news is that the advertising business is polarizing between the mass market and micro-targeted digital media and traditional print magazines (and newspapers) are being caught (stranded?) in the middle.

It's a thought-provoking column, and well worth reading.

[Fine knows her stuff and speaks with some authority; she has been Merrill Lynch's newspaper and media analyst for 18 years and she sits on the national advisory board of the Poynter Institute.]

Fine points to the comparison between the percentage of time readers/viewers spend with media and the per cent of ad dollars each medium attracts. For instance, magazines in the U.S. get 13% of ad dollars, but squeeze it out of only 5.6% of audience time.

Magazines have always argued (and relatively successfully) that what counts is not the amount, but the quality, of the time readers spend, which they sometimes characterize as "engagement".

(Essentially, the column's thesis is that magazines (and newspapers) have enjoyed a comparative advantage; but as readers shift from an analog to a digital world, there is a reckoning coming. The conclusion? This will create "the greatest disruption of advertising and media economies we have ever seen--at least until the marketplace readjusts itself."

If traditional media companies need to scramble to avoid becoming collateral damage from this accelerating change, does anybody have potential to come out a winner? The column suggest it will be advertising agencies!!

After their own shakeout and investment in interactive and digital capacity, it argues that agencies are poised to profit no matter how much pain the magazine industry (and other traditional media) may be facing. Go figure.