Trends and Analysis

Submitted by Claire Burston on 01/03/2011

The thorny issue of giving media exclusives has been around nearly as long as the publications which demand them. But a new trend has emerged which is giving our industry a migraine.

Online is where it's at. There are reams of research to back this up. And the publishing industry is far from immune.

Press Gazette reported online news readership has surged by 300% over the past 3 years. It is also the ninth most prevalent online activity behind the likes of social networking, emailing and playing games. And the likes of The Times are betting the house on it.

Never one to miss a trick, the financial services trade media has jumped squarely onto the bandwagon. But I believe there is a clear case of trend-bucking when it comes to the intermediary market.

Every time a release goes out, there is a mad scramble to be first to get it online, more often than not without pausing to ask any questions. Job done. And that is where the story often languishes, failing to get into the hard copy of the publication.

There is still enormous value in the printed word in the trade arena. There has been no categorical evidence to suggest that the intermediary market en masse is either technologically savvy or interested enough to receive its news online. While I concede that the population as a whole may have gone online crazy, the target audience for the trades is old school. They are used to getting information from their favourite rags. That’s the way they like it. And you can’t teach an old dog etc.

Even if an intermediary reads their email alerts – which is a huge assumption given the number of emails flooding into people’s inboxes on a daily basis – many are still likely to want to read more detail in hard copy format which is likely to give them better insight. After all, that must be the raison d’etre for continuing to publish each week or month (apart from the fact that adverts look better in print than online of course!).

So we PRs are left in a quandary. Put out a story – a new product launch for example - and you are pretty likely to get it online. But we don’t believe online is where it’s at for a large proportion of the IFA market. We need to ensure our story makes it into print and the only sure fire way to do this, we are told, is to give an exclusive. But this excludes readers of other publications from getting the news. That is a failing all round.

The key question is... aren’t our trade publications written predominantly for the purpose of informing their readers, at the end of the day helping them give ‘best advice’ to their clients?

So curious was I to get to the bottom of this that I asked some of the editors of these publications what their ‘mission statements’ were.

Interestingly, none had an official definition of the aims and objectives of their business (after all, publishing is as much a business as any other). But their unofficial aims are certainly laudable:

“a commitment to bringing our readers the most comprehensive, informed and up-to-date news affecting the sector” – Financial Adviser.

“to inform, educate and sometimes indulge our readers and do our best to stick up for their interests and those of their clients (we believe the two are intrinsically linked) – Money Marketing.

So how then, I ask, can the perpetuation of the ‘exclusive’ culture meet these aims to ‘inform’ and ‘educate’, unless of course you are the lucky recipient of that exclusive?

I can hear the response now. If an intermediary reads the piece of news in one publication, the argument is that then they don’t need to read it again in a competing title. And herein lies the problem. Journalists write on the basis that IFAs read every publication. Their advertising departments, in contrast, tell us the readership varies from title to title. And even if the same audience gets all trade publications, how do we really know which one or two they read consistently.

My argument would be that the only course of action is to err on the side of caution and assume your readers are unique to your title.

We help clients navigate this minefield by engaging with the media, putting meat on the bone to encourage longer, print articles and, wherever possible, avoiding key-fact releases which can so easily make their way straight online but rarely make the grade for print.

Publications are forever telling financial institutions to put the customer first. It is time to start listening to their own advice.