Mike Hughes Is Wrong

Maybe it’s not the brightest idea to take on the man who created the GEICO Gecko, but Mike Hughes’ viewpoint that advertising agencies must save newspapers “for the common good” is just plain wrong.

Hughes, the president and creative director of The Martin Agency, writes in Ad Age:

For our own selfish reasons, we need a medium that targets the well-informed. We need a medium that lets us tell our whole story—and not just the 30-second version.

Telling the “whole story” for an advertiser does, indeed, require more than a 30-second commercial. It requires a variety of mediums with a variety of approaches within that medium. A brand identity is the real estate a product occupies in the mind of a consumer. It is important that your relationship with consumers addresses this reality. Just as you never would (realistically) ask someone to marry you on a first date, our responsibility as advertisers is to develop the bond between product and consumer.

Print advertising is but one part of the storytelling machinery. And targeting the “well-informed” requires us to use more than newsprint to reach them. As the cable television landscape flattens, with more people seeing little difference between the Big Four and the cable tier, there are more robust ways to reach the audience. I would just as well place a national buy on Bravo or Biography as I would Wine Spectator—they reach the same audience—and I’d argue that there are well-informed as a group.

My client might even benefit from cost-per-impression as the Biography Channel reaches more homes than Wine Spectator. [Disclosure: I've subscribed to Wine Spectator and enjoy Bio.]

But here is where Hughes’ fails me.

We need more media that let writers, art directors, photographers and illustrators practice their crafts.

Hughes comes from newsprint. I come from television. Admittedly, we see the world through different lenses, but there is beautiful writing, art, and illustration being done digitally today too. Are we in the business of creating artwork, or building market share for our clients? Ours, after all, is a business.

The shift in media planning from “TV and print” 25 years ago to “TV and digital” today reflects changing consumer habits as well as demographics. It is no news flash that today’s college students aren’t reading newspapers. They aren’t riding a horse and buggy to class either. It would be ridiculous, then, to lament the loss of livery service because of the artistic value they represent to society.

Finally, we come to the self-righteousness and pompousness inherent to the newspaper industry.

We need a medium with the immediacy and importance of newspapers.

In the era of Twitter, printed news is not immediate. When the Joliet Fire Department responded to an extra alarm fire at the Empress Casino last week, I learned of the story on Facebook. On Twitter, the conversation quickly turned to the financial impact the closing would have on Joliet’s city budget. Yes, the Joliet Herald News reported these angles and offered extensive coverage the next morning. But by then, Joliet’s biggest story of the year was old news.

The pompousness comes from newsroom navel-gazing. “What a thorough job we did,” they might say. “How grand our coverage of the events of the day,” another might add. But why should I subscribe for something I receive for free through conversations with others (or your newspaper company publishes online without subscription)? When newspapers offer something consumers cannot obtain anywhere else, they will subscribe; and I can then justify the budgetary cost to my client.

From an advertiser’s perspective, how can agencies justify increased spending on a product with inefficient reach? How can agencies allocate a client’s budget on a product that refuses to address its core problem in declining readership?

I agree with Hughes that newspapers aren’t about to die anytime soon. They must go through consolidation, much like television and radio in the 1980s or banks in the next few years. Their product must improve to attract new audiences, otherwise they will become what the symphony orchestra has become to the world of music: a quaint relic enjoyed and supported by a small minority of patrons.

Here are other articles I have written on this topic:

• New Campaign for Will County Health Department
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 6: Reporters’ Notebook
• New Television Spot for Appellate Court Judge Mary Schostok
• Joe Birkett Endorses Dan Cronin
• New Television Campaign for Appellate Court Judge Mary Schostok
• Two New Commercials for Dan Cronin
• Back In the Studio
• Catholics Come Home to Chicago, Joliet and Rockford
• New Television Commercial for Dan Cronin
• Shooting and Editing This Week