Information overload

For those of you who have been following the news during the past few weeks you will surely by now be aware of the fact that many of your favourite hard copy newspapers and magazines will soon disappear from the shelves.

Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on ALL business, and that resulted in companies trying to survive by reducing staff numbers, supporting Working From Home (WFH) and trimming on the costs lines of their respective businesses. And when the CEO, CFO and CMO start to interrogate the business plans as well as the management accounts and income statements it will always be easy to reduce or cut the marketing budgets. This is a bad mistake to stop marketing when times are tough as it will be so much more difficult and costly to regain traction (and customers) when the economy bounces back (as it will!), but who can blame the management teams when they are forced to make very difficult decisions to keep their companies going.

However, reduced marketing budgets has a knock-on effect when most of the marketing spend is still planned in traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, radio and TV and out-of-home media. Newspapers, in particular, are businesses with expensive human resources, large and costly production facilities and complex distribution channels. Cover price only covers approximately 12% of the cost of producing a daily newspaper, and the balance of income is derived from advertisers who are now scaling down or simply cease to advertise. News media publishers are therefore forced to move the business model from paper to digital, cutting out the printing and distribution costs.

This would have happened eventually, but the perfect storm created by Covid-19 has simply hastened this decision. Consumer eyeballs are increasingly on their screens, and mostly on the smaller screens of their smart phones. Big international stories will always break on Twitter and Facebook, then flow into the more comprehensive news channels such as News24, and if the story is ongoing you may find an in-depth analysis in your Sunday paper….if it still exists by end of week.

Sarel du Plessis, COO