The Hindu Business Line : ‘Indian print media needs to prepare for storm of digital migration’

Chennai, March 24 Mr Earl Wilkinson uses the analogy of a meteorologist tracking the progress of a storm on his radar to emphasise his point: that a storm in the overwhelming form of the Internet and digital migration is coming to eventually envelop the Indian print media.

“In the short term you can’t see the trends, there is going to be more advertising, more readers, more titles than today – but what you have to see, though, is that the storm is coming and that storm is the Internet and the digital migration,” says Mr Wilkinson, the Executive Director of the Dallas, Texas-based International Newspaper Marketing Association (INMA).

In an interaction with Business Line on a brief visit to Chennai, Mr Wilkinson says that that the underlying trends developing elsewhere in the world are there in India as well, whether it is consuming news via a mobile phone or computer-based Internet, but its potential is hidden by the population and advertising growth that everyone is seeing.

Mr Wilkinson says the US media saw the storm coming in the mid- ’80s and early ’90s and did nothing about it and then had to play catch up when they began to lose audiences, circulation and loss of certain advertising categories. While the US print media, which is going through the worst period in its history, reacted in panic to the advent of digital media, Indian publishing houses, he says, have the time to calmly create a digital infrastructure to straddle different media. While emphasising that publishing houses here have taken to multimedia better than their counterparts around the world, he says that they have not created enough synergies between various media.

The advent of new media has also created an issue for advertisers as audiences are now consuming little chunks of media through the day and advertisers are reacting to that to say that they can no longer invest in only one medium. “The question is how do newspaper reorganise themselves to meet this new reality; it’s a tough conversation. There is some value in readers reading the print newspaper in the morning, reading the Web and mobile during the day, and how does the advertiser’s creative relationship with the publisher capture brand loyal eyeballs across these media during the day?” he asks.

Media houses also need to recognise the shift in thinking, he says, as it all about the spaces and not the product per se. Says Mr Wilkinson, “It’s all about the audience and the product had better be in conjunction with it; it’s not about owning one big audience but owning lots of little audiences and connecting them together.”

The INMA, which has 1,200 members in 82 countries, provides global best practices and marketing ideas for newspaper companies looking to grow amid profound market change. Over 80 per cent of INMA members are newspaper professionals from marketing, strategy, advertising and circulation. Members exchange ideas through a bi-monthly magazine, multiple Web sites, discussion forums, conferences and workshops.

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