Wikimedia commons. The advertising scales are tipping toward digital media.
You can no longer coast very long in a media job (or any job, really) without learning new skills. In radio, it wasn’t that big of a leap to move from cueing up vinyl records to cds in the later 1980s. Learning digital editing over cutting tape with a razor blade around ten years later took a little longer to get used to (but it was much easier once you took the time to learn it). Now every year or two we have a major overhaul in how we produce and distribute online content. I’m sure this process will only speed up in the couple of decades before I can think about retiring. Don’t get me wrong. It’s exciting. But you might as well take the phrase “This is how we’ve always done it,” and throw it in the trash can (sorry, I don’t think we can even recycle it).
Business insider reports the UK will become the first country where half of the advertising revenue is spent on digital media. Having worked almost my entire adult life in traditional media, this jumps out at me, though it is not a shock.
I had already been in radio for a few years when I first heard of the “worldwide web.” I remember struggling with raw HTML (no editors) starting to build a radio station website (I left the job before finishing). I remember general managers asking “Why do we need this?” Most websites didn’t do much back then, but the answer was “so we won’t get left behind.”
A big factor in the UK forging ahead in digital advertising is the fact that Brits embraced shopping via mobile phone. This is another area where some broadcast companies got the jump on everyone else, who are now left to play catch-up (trust me, I get asked all the time why the stations I work for are not on iheartradio. The answer is that it is owned by our largest competitor).
A lot of people have the impression that traditional media has been left behind, but the truth is, many in print and broadcast started working years ago to migrate online. There’s a lot more competition online, because your competitors are not limited by the number of broadcast licenses available, but traditional media folks are among those pioneering new media approaches. People may not realize that by now, many of us spend as much time producing an online product as we do our on-air product. The article also mentions how a growing percentage of newspaper revenues are now from online advertising. My radio company also starting making that a major priority a number of years ago. As internet connectivity becomes available in more places, it may be true that you won’t receive programming in the same way, but even if the traditional transmitters go away, we’ll still be here. But we won’t be sitting around with our feet up.
baxterberkely 