Is everything going online...

Attention: The Media Online – Kagiso Broadcasting opinion piece

Date: March 2009

Is everything going online – including every advertising cent?

By Omar Essack
Kagiso Media Executive Director: Broadcasting

I hear the hype all the time. I’ve often even bought into it, believing that traditional media is on a slippery slope to oblivion. Then I wake up from the nightmare and look at consumers and how they behave.

The Internet is a wonderful tool. It has made my daughter’s research easier and provides so much useful information on anything you could want. Its best feature may also be its Achilles heel.

I use it as a tool to search for information on my needs. I am then confronted with a dazzling array of choices. Let’s try a search on ‘savings products with highest interest rate in South Africa’ on Google. I get 161 000 results. And..The first result is a waste of my time since it’s for Investec in the UK. The second option is ABSA. When I click through I get 118 results based on my search term. With choice three, I get really excited. It’s called Bank Monitor. I see the words ‘Product Comparison’ which gets me thinking that I am going to get a very clear idea of where the best savings interest rates are in South Africa. Sadly, the information can only be as good as what’s provided by the participants. This means there will always be a couple of blank columns.

The reality is that even though I am in the market for a high interest yielding savings account, after 20 minutes of looking I am better informed, but still uncertain. Part of the reason for how the results have stacked up is based on the words that I used to search.
Also, websites in South Africa are still being optimised for search and the disciplines of SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing) are not being uniformly applied across all businesses with an online presence.

Here’s my biggest challenge with the web - it’s vast and filled with so many choices that I often find that I don’t have the time to wade through mounds of information to get what I want. The metasearch search engine called ‘dogpile’ is an apt metaphor for my dilemma.

Choice is a new way of life for most of us. The more of it that we have, the more complex our lives become, so we default to a couple of modes of behaviour. Let’s use retail behaviour as an example:

a) Buy the cheapest.
b) Stick with what we know.
c) Take a chance on something new provided that there is limited downside.

The raison d’etre for traditional advertising was to let people know that something existed so that it was in your mental radar when you went searching. By that definition, traditional media’s role is not under threat. It remains the most efficient medium to get a message out and it’s not going to lose its audiences anytime soon.

By the way, I’m more confident about electronic media, than I am about printed media. My reasons for this are quite simplistic and open to challenge. I would like to venture that media owners made a strategic error when they made all their intellectual property available online in the first place and then allowed Google to crawl through it? Never in the history of a platform type have so many media owners run so fast to provide their content to a new platform with no commercial agreement in place. Belatedly there have been attempts to claw back some of the advantage by media owners who have forced ‘You Tube’ to remove their proprietary content and new video sharing sites like Hulu, have emerged. This site is owned by the content owners who are now dictating the terms of engagement and monetising their intellectual property.

Returning to my point about advertising and the internet though, I think that advertisers who try to use the internet in the way that they use traditional mass media or at the exclusion of other media, will find media consultant, Mark Ramsey’s words useful.
Mark refers to the myth that says “If you do something great [in digital media], people will find it.” He goes on to say, “Quite simply, that never was true. Until you can drive traffic to your social media effort, you've got a tree falling in the forest, heard only by those standing nearby. A great number of tools can drive traffic, including StumbleUpon, Digg, and Twitter, but nothing works better than word of mouse—one friend telling another, "Hey look at this!"

“And what, other than sheer viral momentum, creates the word-of-mouth spark in the first place? Could it be....Radio? That old-fashioned medium that does nothing better than reach lots of people at the same time with one clear message?”

Omar Essack
Omar Essack is Kagiso Media’s Executive Director: Broadcasting which owns East Coast Radio and Jacaranda 94.2 and has an interest in Heart 104.9 fm, Ofm, iGagasi 99.5, Kaya FM and Radmark. He is also on the Board of Kagiso Media.