advertisers are significantly concerned about the value of digital advertising and that concern is leading them to question whether and the extent to which digital advertising will remain in the marketing and advertising mix of their companies.
3 factors are central to the discontent: suspicions about the effectiveness of digital advertising, large amounts of fake traffic, and concerns about the returns on advertising investments. Media companies, platforms, and others providing digital advertising must address these issues if digital advertising is to remain viable.
Much of the concern about poor effectiveness of digital advertising is due to poor ad formats, lack of audience attention to ads, and high rates of ad blocking—currently about 40% in U.S. on computers and tablets.
Such concerns have forced digital advertising prices downward for the past decade because those factors have reduced demand and because there has been a dramatic increase in advertising inventory that is making individual ad slots less valuable. Today the CPM for Facebook is about $10 and the costs per click average about $2.30 on Google Ad Words and $1.70 on Facebook.
The serious problem of fake traffic continues to inflate audience figures and make advertisers wary of the data given them by those providing advertising space. It is estimated that advertisers lose $6-10 billion annually because of bots increasing visitor, viewing and click data. Although digital firms recognize the issue, no effective remedy has yet been introduced.
Because of the first two factors advertisers are not seeing the return on investments they desire. ROI is a measure of additional turnover generated by the advertising expenditure. When diminishing returns are seen, advertisers reconsider where they are investing advertising expenditures, how much they are investing, and whether stop additional investments. Digital advertising ROI is concerning because some advertisers are finding it is only about 1/3 that of their ROI for television ad expenditures. ROI issues led Procter & Gamble Co. to cut digital advertising spend in 2017 by $200 million after data showed it was not effectively reaching its target audiences, causing its ROI to decline.
Those providing digital spaces must work together to improve the acceptance and effectiveness of digital advertising or they will never be able to improve prices they can charge and the revenues they receive from advertising sales.
When is it time to deny media access and coverage?
Journalists and news organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere are increasingly wrestling with how to deal with alternative facts, untruths, and lies spread by political figures, government officials, and their supporters. These are not merely moral issues for journalists, but also will influence the sustainability of news organizations.
Neither accurately reporting false statements, nor reporting and challenging them, are adequate responses to continual misuse of the media and deliberate efforts to use the media to mislead the public. This, of courses, raises the thorny question of when to deny media access and coverage to individuals noted for engaging in those acts.
How they are handled depends upon their position. Elected officials should be treated differently than their advisors, aides, and supportive commentators and apologists. This occurs because elected officials and party leaders are accountable to the public through the ballot box, whereas others are not.
When elected officials or party leaders are untruthful they should be continually challenged and their lies exposed. When others are involved, journalists should not merely challenge and expose their lies, however. Journalists and their news organizations must not allow themselves to become pawns in manipulation and propagandistic efforts and should stop inviting those who would do so onto public affairs shows, not interview them for news stories, and not cover their public appearances.
These practices are designed to halt influence from those who are consistent purveyors of untruths and continually spread falsehoods. Their lack of intention to engage in open discussion and honest debate makes them unsuitable for exposure in serious journalistic forums. There are others with similar views who can fulfil those requirements.
Journalists have obligations to their readers, listeners, and viewers and society to pursue truth and facilitate healthy and truthful debate that presents differing perspectives. But they also have obligations to ensure that serial liars, wanton propagandists, and inflammatory speakers who deliberately distort and do not engage in honest debate are not provided platforms.
This is important because research shows that original claims are better remembered and given more credibility than media challenges and corrections, especially those coming 24-48 hours later.
Choices to deny access or coverage should be made only to determine how issues, ideas, and policies are discussed and presented in media and by whom, not to stop their discussion or examination. Decisions of who will speak should be based on the past behavior of individuals. Denials of access and coverage should occur to individuals who are likely to deceive or deliberately confuse, thus harming the public and their understanding of public issues.
These are challenging times for democracy and for journalists. Great care in how ideas, policies, and claims are presented is necessary to ensure that citizens are effectively served by journalism. If journalism cannot rise to the occasion in difficult periods, there is little reason for it to exist. If news organizations and journalists do not act, they risk their sustainability. Lack of relevance, loss of credibility, and diminished trust will do more to promote the demise of firms than any changes to its technologies and business model.
The quixotic pursuit of media independence
National and international media development and aid programs often embrace the objective of developing independent media as a means of promoting democratic development. They do so in hopes of reducing political power over media, but fail to acknowledge that all media and communication infrastructures are systemically influenced by economic and social, as well as political power. And they often seem to ignore the reality that the history and cultures of nation states affect how that power is exercised. Media systems and their content, and the degree of freedom of expression and freedom of the press, are reflections of the alignment of the dominant cultural elements in society.
Even in the West, most notably within European Union and Council of Europe governing institutions, efforts to promote media independence are gaining significant support—particularly when applied to media in Central and Eastern Europe.
The term media independence is often used naively and imprecisely, consequently those pursuing it often appear to be pursuing something that exists nowhere and is an impossible dream. Independence is really evidenced by its opposite; it is indicated by degrees of dependence or interdependence and their consequences, because full independence is impossible. Very often the term is used as an objective without even specifying independence from what and for what.
Independence is affected by factors internal to media, such as ownership, decision-making control, and dependence on resources and revenue sources. It is also affected by external factors such as influence through persuasion and criticism, cooption through financial and other material support, and coercion through threats and retaliatory exercise of power.
One needs to be wary of the assumption that ownership determines independence of media. Many assume that state media are dependent and non-state media are independent. In reality, public service, privately owned commercial media, and foundation-supported media may or MAY NOT be independent. In Saudi Arabia, for example, state media are owned and operated by the monarchy and private media are owned by princes and persons close to the crown. There is little difference between them with issues of politics, economics, and social lives are addressed. The press is relatively separate from government and politics in Germany but not in Hungary, yet it still represents an elite perspective. Public service broadcasting is reasonably independent of government in Sweden, but not so in Serbia.
The state, the government, social elites and powerful individuals, funders such as sponsors, advertisers, and foundations, and media consumers all influence the amount of independence. The more those influences align, the greater independence is diminished.
Programs aiding democratic development usually promote private, commercial media. Few efforts to support not-for-profit media outlets exist, however. Not-for-profits are emerging in response to independence challenges in private commercial media and public service broadcasting. Not-for-profits tend to be the most independent of media firms, but they can be dependent on sponsors and funders (parties, unions, churches, NGOs, foundations) and many face sustainability issues.
To create greater independence all media must ensure levels of dependence on any single source of funding are relatively low and that there are multiple sources of income (sponsors, foundations, consumers, members, advertisers, events) to spread dependence risks. A good rule of thumb is that if more than one-third of income is from one source, a media firm becomes vulnerable to influence and may become unsustainable if it is rapidly reduced.
Media independence is a lovely ideal, but can only be partly achieved in practice.
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