Niche Advertising in Traditional Media
Old Ad Outlets Will Continue to Target Special Buyers for Decades
May 24, 2009 Carroll Trosclair
Advertisers will be lured by lower Internet cost and ad measurability in the coming decade. However, many buyers will still prefer the comfort level of their traditional news and entertainment media, preserving solid niche outlets for some products.
Digital marketers sometimes sound as if they invented niche marketing, but the old media has been offering ad targeting for years. Samples:
- Special sections in newspapers, such as those devoted exclusively to sports, business and women’s interest, as well as seasonal packages such as back to school pages. Even general interest newspapers could be considered niche media for their geographic communities.
- Television programs featuring food, sports, business and, more recently channels devoted exclusively to shopping.
- Most magazines have been devoted to readers interested in specific subjects. Even general interest publications like TIME and Newsweek have been targeted to audiences in special income and/or educational segments of the population.
- Radio long ago gave up general interest programming to target kids or other segments of the population, including politically definable audiences.
Better Ad Tracking
What has changed in recent years is that digital media has given advertisers even better defined markets and, more importantly, better measurements and opportunities to invest in advertising with less money. Advertisers are also focusing more on special interest niches rather than geographical groups, although search engines such as Google now offer special interest groups within geographical areas.
Traditional media also has failed to develop the niche measurements that digital media has, focusing primarily on the effectiveness of the total newspaper or station instead of the individual sections of the media.
Strength of Content Creativity
But even as digital media grows, traditional media will be able to retain at least niche status on the strength of its content creativity and consumer comfort.
In an early 2009 interview with blogger and author Sramana Mitra, Mitch Berman, CEO of Zillion TV said the media battle was "still TV versus PC." He concluded that "the TV screen is the screen of choice" with advertisers, content providers and consumers. "The remote control is the input device" of choice, he added. "There is no computer screen or keyboard in the equation."
In Berman’s view, television will be not a niche medium, but a dominant one, although probably a different TV from the one we now know.
More Comfortable Reading Newspaper
As for print journalism, millions of consumers still feel more comfortable reading a newspaper or magazine than staring at a computer screen. Most of them are probably over 30. They are perhaps less affluent than the general population and less tech-oriented, or less tech-inclined in their leisure time after working at a computer all day. They may well be a sizable niche audience for decades to come.
Print and online advertising still show a lot of potential for working together.
Radio Music Lovers
Radio is likely to continue to attract its share of music lovers, political junkies, talk show addicts and people who listen to baseball broadcasts, preserving still more niche audiences for advertisers willing to look beyond the Internet.
They might also want to remember that a 2008 Yankelovich study indicated that traditional media ads are "much more likely" to make a positive impression on consumers than digital media ads, another indication that it might be too early to dismiss the old media.
The Dominant Ad Media of the Future
Newspaper Living Section Targets Women Readers
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