Media owners vs marketers
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In this week’s , its “digital issue”, former PRWeek media editor Matthew Creamer takes on the debate over the Internet’s value as an ad medium. Creamer makes the point that marketers are now media owners, and their competitive base includes media companies as well as their traditional sector competitors.
As Matt Freeman, CEO of Tribal DDB, points out in the piece, “I think today you have much more of a triangulation where marketers can invest directly in going to consumers, obviating the need for media owners. They are not necessarily the client of owners and, in some cases, they are their competitors.”
“In other words,” Creamer writes, “marketers can build websites that do cool, useful stuff”. He cites Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter as an example of a marketer providing rich wells of information to new parents, in direct competition with consumer titles that have long written the same kind of articles for their readers.
For media brands, it is not enough to differentiate yourself from marketer media by harping on the value of independent journalism and the credibility of third-party, earned editorial coverage. Information will be judged not so much by its source, as by its authenticity and relevance.
