In response to a growing number of requests from clients for information regarding current media trends and how they will affect their measurement, we have compiled some top-line statistics concerning audience and advertising data which are available for download by clicking on the image below:

Overview

The figures deliver some stark findings, particularly in relation to advertising, with falls in advertising revenue across most media types.

Given the ongoing debate regarding the use of advertising to calculate the ‘value’ of PR, how will this affect those organisations that use AVE’s?

The short answer is that AVE figures are declining in value so as advertising rates come down the same article in the same location will be ‘worth’ less this year than last. Of course its real value in terms of changing hearts and minds and driving business outcomes may well be unchanged.

This begs the question, how much sense does it make to benchmark PR with advertising when we are entering a recession, given how adversely advertising can be affected? In 1991 for example, UK advertising revenue fell 5%.

As Kristin Wadge recently posted, by employing more appropriate metrics (i.e. not AVEs), it is possible to demonstrate (in meaningful ways) how cost-effective PR is and how it delivers genuine ROI. Indeed, although total marketing spend is likely to decline, there is a massive opportunity for PR to increase its share of the pie as other forms of marketing struggle to prove their worth. In September’s edition of Admap, WPP media investment company GroupM predicted a 4% growth in PR investment over 2008, while traditional media advertising is expected to fall by almost 3%.

Print media – latest figures

• Circulation figures for national newspapers have fallen by 30% over the last 20 years with consequent reduction in advertising revenue

• Only the Financial Times and the Sun have bucked this trend in the last year, with both holding pretty steady

• The FT has done well out of the global financial crisis while the Sun has been aggressively cutting its prices in order to win readers

• The Guardian has joined the Daily Telegraph and the Independent in actually raising their cover prices in a desperate attempt to retain income

• According to the Quarterly Survey of Advertising Expenditure, adspend in business and professional magazines has dropped 4.8% in the 12 months to June 2008 while consumer magazines fell 2.1% over the same period

• Although many print titles are struggling, it is premature to declare the death of print. The growth of free newspapers has meant that the total worldwide newspaper circulation actually increased by 3.65% in 2007 (World Association of Newspapers)

TV – latest figures

• Audience figures for the five main ‘terrestrial’ channels have fallen by 25% over the last decade with BBC1 and ITV being the strongest hit

• Mainstream audiences have fallen with the take-up of digital TV – satellite revenue experienced an increase of 9% over the last year

• Falling audiences, combined with a reduction of the average CPT (cost per thousand) advertising rate has resulted in the total advertising revenue for ITV being slashed by almost half in real terms since the turn of the millennium.

WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell, told an industry audience in London last week that traditional broadcasting companies like ITV operating in one media, in one country would struggle in the future. ITV’s managing director of brand and commercial Rupert Howell responded to this on the BBC’s media show, by arguing that TV advertising is becoming more cost effective. He stated that current rates are equivalent to what they where in 1992, taking inflation into account. However media consultant Matthew Horsman commented that ITV was being affected by the old adage “the money will go where the eyeballs go”.

Online – latest figures

• Although online advertising expenditure has been increasing at an exponential rate over the last decade, even it is not immune from the worsening economy with a 4% fall in revenue in the second quarter of 2008

• Matthew Horsman, again speaking on the Media Show, commented that there is a common misconception about the growth of online advertising - he mentioned that while online search has increased dramatically, online display advertising has been pretty flat recently

• Online AVE figures are more closely linked with display advertising rather than search.  Since the cost per user has been static, the total cost is therefore dependent on the number of unique users. As has been posted on Measurement Matters a number of times, the real number of people seeing a particular webpage is up for debate and almost certainly a lot less than many people think.  The result of this is that online AVE's are likely to decline as the traffic figures catch up with reality.

So these are the trends up until now, but what about the future. Metrica’s Paul Kennedy has set up a poll so that you can have your say about the future of media with regards to news consumption, it would be great if you could vote.

Last week, while at the PRSA International conference, Richard posted on the Christian Science Monitor's decision to publish online only from April 2009.  This is an exciting move within the media industry as there is an increasing amount of evidence that audiences are looking to the internet for their daily news fix.  Paul Hender will be sharing some of that data on Metrica's Measurement Matters in the next couple of days so watch this space.

From an evaluation perspective, Metrica has been helping its clients to adapt to this shift for some time now.  We have been working with them as their PR plans have incorporated online media outlets and social media.  

We would love to know your views on the subject.  Let us know what you think about the CSM's decision.  Is it the beginning of an inevitable trend which will spell the end of blackened fingers, as the good ol' fashioned paper gets phased out?  Or will the big national papers always retain a hard copy?  Does the same hold true for regional papers?  Or will declining ad revenue force the smaller regional publications to rein in costs by going online only? And will the proliferation of web technology and online interaction change the entire way which we find our news?

Place your votes below and please feel free to add a comment explaining why.  We will post the results at the end of the month.

“We have the luxury — the opportunity — of making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years" explained John Yemma, the Christian Science Monitor's editor yesterday while announcing that the paper would end its daily print edition in April 2009. 

At this week's PRSA International conference, the paper was described to me as 'one of the world's best newspapers that nobody reads'.  This could be because of the unique way that it is structured - as the NY Times explains in an excellent article:

"an anomaly in journalism, a nonprofit financed by a church and delivered through the mail. But with seven Pulitzer Prizes and a reputation for thoughtful writing and strong international coverage, it long maintained an outsize influence in the publishing world."

This is the first of the media's big brands to move towards this strategy, and it should be applauded.  With the advent of the internet, blogging platforms and social media, audiences are fragmenting into smaller and smaller special interest groups, creating and consuming only the content that they want.  They want this information in real time. 

This of course is a great advantage of the online strategy.  No more do audiences waking up on the east coast of America turn to printed newspapers only to find that the match report that they wanted to read from LA missed the print deadline.  It's now there in all its glory in the online edition, report, photos, and in all likelihood some video highlights too.  And if it's not in their version of the paper, you can rest assured that one of their friends on Twitter will have told them the score and linked to the best resources for all of the details before the cornflakes are even out of the cupboard.

If your media monitoring and media analysis / evaluation is not currently covering the new electronic and social media, this is the wake up call that it's time for you to reconsider.  The media world is changing, and it's vital that we all change with it.

Finally, if you're keen to know more about Twitter please feel free to connect with me - you'll find me on the site with the username @richardbagnall. I'll look forward to meeting you there.

I'm en-route to 'The Point of Connection' this weekend, the PRSA international public relations conference in Detroit.  Having arrived late yesterday and unable to get a direct flight, I am staying over in Chicago. 

I was surprised to find literally around the corner from my hotel, the ABC7 Chicago television station.  The news studio is at street level and has a massive glass frontage.  As well as watching the presenters doing their stuff, there's also a display highlighting the station's history, milestones, key presenters (including Oprah) and changing technology over time.

Watching the presenters at work, and the hi-tec cameras recording them, made me think about the people watching them and wondering how they were doing this.  Returning to my room, I could see the same presenters on my TV.  And on my laptop.  And on my mobile phone.  And it got me thinking about how the world of media is converging and moving away from a single specialised platform to multiple platforms.  Journalists are becoming broadcasters.  Broadcasters are becoming web content providers, and websites are becoming more like TV stations.

This all ties in to a point made on Radio 4's 'The Media Show' which I listened to via its podcast focusing on Channel 4's decision to abandon DAB (digital radio) as a platform.  The problem for Channel 4 was not that the quality, or the reach of the broadcast signal, but that dedicated DAB radios have not sold enough sets in the UK and therefore are unable to deliver large enough audiences to make it commercially viable.  According to one of the guests, there is a very real danger that DAB radios in the future will only provide BBC content; all commercial broadcasters will have abandoned it. They didn't argue that digital radio technology was dead, just that single platform delivery systems (like a DAB radio) are not what today's consumer wants.

As the speed of technology continues to revolutionise the media, we need to bear in mind that it's not just the new technologies that matter, but the ability of the platforms to carry them that will dictate their importance and ultimately survival.

One final thought, as I have typed this, the Oprah show has come on the TV.  Oprah's guest today is Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder.  And no wonder as Oprah has just announced that Amazon's Kindle is her favourite new gadget.  I love the idea of the Kindle, but I love it as a technology.  As a platform, it only allows me to read papers and books.  What about listening to music and surfing the web?  When it becomes a multi-delivery platform I will be in the market for one.  Until then, I suspect it will be just the early adopters, which incidentally, if you would like to join, Oprah has a $50 discount code valid for 7 days.

For the last seven years, the media evaluation industry trade body AMEC (The International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) has been holding awards to recognise and promote the best practice in pr communication planning, research and media evaluation.  Over the years, Metrica has won its fair share of awards.  The platinum award for the most outstanding work twice, multiple gold, silver and bronze awards have all been pleasantly reassuring that we must be doing something right.

Every year though, as the media analysis industry has developed and matured, the competition for awards has got fiercer.  We welcome this.  Competition is healthy and is good for the whole PR industry as it drives innovation and best practice forward.  Indeed, this was one of Metrica’s primary motives when we threw our weight not only behind the creation of the awards scheme, but also the foundation of AMEC itself.   

But it’s always a slightly nervous moment when we wait for the announcement of those companies that have made the shortlist.  AMEC this week announced the finalists for 2008, and I was delighted that Metrica has been nominated for ten awards - pleasingly this is significantly more than any of our competitors.   Metrica has been shortlisted in the following categories for our work with the following great clients: 

Best Use of Measurement for a Single Event

• The London Development Agency

Best Use of Media Evaluation – Business to Business

• eBay UK
• Symantec

Best Use of Media Evaluation – International: Multi-Market Activity

• eBay International
• Symantec

Best Use of Media Evaluation – Not-for-Profit

• 11 Million

Best Use of Media Evaluation – Public Sector

• The London Development Agency

Best Use of Digital Media Measurement, including Social Media Measurement

• Symantec

Best Use of Integrated Media Evaluation/Research

• eBay International

And in addition, our associate director Claire O’Sullivan for  

Young Professional of the Year Award  

It’s particularly nice to read Dr Tom Watson’s comments (the chairman of the judges) on his blog ‘Dummy Spit”.  Tom concludes:

The awards ceremony is on November 19th, and obviously we haven’t won anything yet.  But I think it appropriate for me to take this opportunity to thank our clients for their support, and most importantly to thank all of my colleagues (everyone - account teams, analyst teams, admin, IT, database and development) at Metrica for the incredible amount of hard work that they put into making us the great agency that we are today.   

Fingers crossed for the big night!

Metrica has just released the latest update to UKPulse, the successor of ConsumerPulse, our PR planning tool that enables users to build and interrogate customised target audiences.  In these days of an ever expanding media universe, we have focussed particular attention on helping our clients to understand the UK's complete media consumption - the internet, social media, referral sites, networks, user generated content as well as all forms of the more traditional media.  It's thrown up some fascinating insights which seemed surprising at first. 

Given the ongoing hype around social media one might be forgiven for assuming its status and credibility were much higher… but our survey of 13,000 UK adults shows different.  While 29% of respondents felt they could trust an online customer review site only 5% said that they trusted blogs and not even 1% of respondents trust online forums.

So then I took a look at mainstream media to see how this had changed from last year's research… and more surprises!  According to our poll (carried out in conjunction with YouGov) trust in UK television stations is up a massive 24 percentage points, with 70% of UK adults polled saying they believe what they see and hear from key channels.  And national radio also performs well in the results achieving an increase of 12 percentage points in the year (from 49% to 61%).

Even the (often maligned) national newspapers managed a significant 17 percentage point increase from 2007, although this still leaves them lagging behind national TV and radio with only 43% of UK adults claiming to trust them. Trust in regional press meanwhile remains fairly static with only a one percentage point increase for regional newspapers (to 50%) and four percentage points for regional radio (also now at 50%).  The more or less static perception of regional press is what I would have expected given its previous high scores, reflecting its content and readership.

The national and social media results though I would suggest require some debate and further research to fully understand. If asked to hazard a guess at what could be behind the results, my personal opinion is that the consumers of media, having so much more content to choose from, have become more savvy about their options.   When choosing your news channel, the objectivity of the source is the key.  Generalising massively here, I would say that while social media is often authentic, it is less likely than traditional media to be objective.  Many blogs tend to focus on  'opinion' rather than 'reporting'.  And there's the issue - how much do any of us trust the opinion of someone whom we know nothing or very little about?  

Of course, this is all very broad and sweeping.  Some bloggers develop incredible relationships with their readers resulting in them enjoying very high trust ratings.  And I have no doubt that the trust ratings of different types of blogs will vary significantly.  So, for example, a journalist's blog like Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine or a well respected business blog like Richard Edelman's 6am are likely to have very high trust ratings from their readers whereas a gaming enthusiast from small town nowheresville is likely to have much lower scores. The survey questions into media trust in UKPulse do not go to this level of granularity.

Talking of well respected bloggers, we sent some of these stats to Roy Greenslade at The Guardian.  He posted about them just this morning.  We really hope that this stirs some debate and opinions - already we are pleased to see that Adrian Monck, head of journalism and publishing at London's City University and author of "Can You Trust The Media?" (a great read!) has got involved in the debate on Roy's blog.  We would love to hear your thoughts, and what questions you feel should now be asked.  It's an area that Metrica will return to in due course and which clearly merits further research too.

I'm delighted to see that Metrica's Measurement Matters has made an inaugural appearance in the AdAge Power 150 which ranks the world's top media and marketing blogs.  In a table that currently has 748 blogs listed, Measurement Matters joins the chart at a modest 558.  The index is updated each morning, and already we have climbed 37 places since yesterday.

There's still a long way for us to go until we catch such industry luminaries and great reads as Katie Paine at No 278, Brendan Cooper (your very friendly social media planner) at 382, Andy Lark at 315, Richard Edelman 6am at 124 or the fabulous Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang at a heady 29.  But watch out Richard and Glenn of Intelligent Measurement - at number 557 we're right on your tail! 

Where are some of our other favourite reads though?  Don Bartholmew's Proving the Value of Public Relations and Nathan Gilliat's Net-Savvy Executive are both missing from the list for example, but with the quality of information, suggestions and thought on their blogs, not for long I am sure.

Those of you wondering how AdAge's Power 150 ranks and scores all of these blogs can find the answers to all their questions here.

Update:

James Gordon-MacIntosh of 77PR and T4W has distilled the AdAge Power 150 list down further and provides a sub list focussing on just the UK's top PR and marketing blogs.  Loads of good blogs here to add to our RSS readers...

Here's a screen grab from a BBC online news article that I read this morning (original article).  What's so extraordinary about this?  Well, the first thing that might strike you is that it is a page from BBC News online before it went through it's latest redesign.  In fact, the article is dated 8th March 2006.  So why flag it for attention now?  The reason is that as I was sipping my cup of tea I noticed that it was the 4th most read article on the BBC's website.  Today's fourth most read article?? Nearly 30 months after it was first published?!

It gets really interesting when you read the content of the story itself - Tim Weber's 2006 article, somewhat ironically, is commenting on how an email was then doing the rounds claiming that Microsoft were contemplating charging for using a Hotmail account.  Which was true, except that the deliberations over how to monetise Hotmail had actually been going on in 2001, a full five year's earlier.  (See the report by the BBC here.)  This original 2001 article was now climbing the popularity rankings of the BBC a full five year's later.

Now, fast forward to 2008 and the story is starting to appear again.  So what is happening and what does it mean? 

First of all it shows that the consumer doesn't always check the date of an online article before they read and react or respond to it.  In both articles' case, their resurgence in popularity has been driven by people forwarding the link to their friends and colleagues without paying heed of the date.  Examples like this are fairly common on the BBC, and in other online media too.

It also shows the power of 'the long tail' with online and social media.  Articles and comments once written tend to stay around.  They're available, they're visible, they're searchable, they're forwardable.  They carry influence and they can still affect reputations.  To the media consumer, they're still real.  They still carry influence, and shouldn't be ignored necessarily just because they aren't in this week's batch of press clippings.

Welcome to the new media.  The days of yesterday's news being tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper are well and truly behind us. The way that the media works and the consumer interacts with it are changing rapidly.  Are you ready for these new challenges to your ongoing PR strategy and metrics?