WORD FROM THE WISE <
performing at the moment, and believe there is media and into digital media to come’
media to come. In the UK, roughly 15pc of advertising expenditure is digital. I think that’s just heading north all the time. We see a great deal of growth.”
Other ways to montenise He also points to new and interesting sponsorship opportunities. One example from
Guardian.co.uk, is the Eyewitness app for the iPad, which each day showcases a new full-colour centre-spread photo, chosen for its beauty and/or interest. The free app is sponsored by Canon. “That’s a brilliant opportunity for them because it’s so com- pletely apposite to what they’re trying to do. That’s paid for the app, given us a profit and given Canon a massive audience on the iPad. So there are interesting new ways of monetising our activity and obvi- ously charging for apps is one of those.” More than 30,000 people have so far downloaded the Canon app, with most of them outside the UK, he says. “And it’s yet another way in which by using that particular platform we’ve been able to reach people with our brand and our way of looking at the world. “We don’t have some kind of dogmatic view that it should be free or it should be paid for. We look at each opportunity as it emerges on its own merits and judge whether we’d be better off having some- thing free and advertising-supported or paid for with a smaller audi- ence but with each person paying individually.” Brooks notes that users of The Guardian’s paid-for iPhone app are
more similar to newspaper readers than to web browsers in the way they consume media. “The majority of people who buy it use it regu- larly, by which I mean at least once a week. And they spend quite a long time with it.
“When we surveyed those people who’ve bought the iPhone app, quite a large number of them were not Guardian readers, but they like the app, they like the functionality and they think it works well, so we’ve converted them to being Guardian readers, even though they don’t buy the paper.” Incidentally, following our interview Guardian News & Media reveals it is updating its iPhone app and moving from a single payment to a six-monthly or annual subscription model. The plethora of operating systems for devices like the iPhone, Nokia, Blackerry and Android, for example, and their requirements is a challenge, he says. “Each platform has a different spec and every- thing has to be re-tailored. In that sense, it consumes resources. On the other hand what’s brilliant about the market is that the manufac-
turers are in this fantastic race to add functionality and user experi- ence to their products so that what we get to play with is an increas- ingly splendid train set of products which can do fantastic things for our output. And the iPad is the best example of that. It has com- pletely changed the landscape I think.” An increasingly engaged readership has also fundamentally changed the media landscape, he says. The
Guardian.co.uk site cur- rently gets an average of 10 comments every minute. “We believe that by opening up the work that we do to the outside world, it ben- efits our work. People are more interested in things that they can interact with. They can interact with us by leaving comments. That means that they are more engaged with us and they’re more likely to come back.
“Digital media by definition is two-way – there’s no going back to the ‘us to them’ model that is true of print and of broadcast media, where we simply tell people stuff. It’s always going to be two-way in the future and organisations have to come to terms with that.”
Decline of print Brooks is not optimistic about the future of print. “The print market is in decline. It’s been in decline in the UK since the Second World War. That’s quite a long stretch! And that trend is not reversible, so it’s no good trying to comfort yourself with imagining that the print market is suddenly going to snap out of a 60-year declining trend. “Most of the value in our business is still in newspapers, as is true of all our competitors in print. The trick is managing the fact that fewer people over time are going to be buying newspapers.” Older readers of the newspaper remain loyal and tend to be a desirable audience to advertisers, he maintains. “They love the paper, so we want to keep selling them the paper. But at the same time we have to be real about the fact that increasingly people, particularly younger people, are getting their news through digital channels and if we’re not in those channels we become irrelevant to those people. “So everybody in the kind of business we’re in is managing the transition from completely print-dominated to print and digital. And eventually to digital only. And we’ll all be judged on how elegantly we manage our phase of that transition. “We’ll still be publishing newspapers in 10 years time,” concludes
Brooks, “but I wouldn’t want to lay a bet that we’ll still be publishing newspapers in 25 years time.”
Volume 4 Issue 4 2010 Marketing Age 21
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