In some corners of the tech marketing universe, there remains a stubborn insistence that client coverage and content published in traditional media outlets is the holy grail of PR, providing vastly superior marketing value than content that’s published by the vendors themselves via their own websites and social media channels.

Sure, the validation and endorsements conferred upon tech vendors by independent, third-party editor/blogger/influencer coverage is indeed effective at swaying customers’ purchasing decisions. What’s more, traditional media/blog outlets typically enjoy a much wider audience reach than that of your average humble tech start-up. So it makes sense to pour 100% of our PR efforts/budgets into pitching and influencing journalists, right?

Not quite.

The hard reality can’t be ignored: there are fewer and fewer journalists covering ever-widening beats, and their time/attention is stretched impossibly thin. And this media contraction does not appear to be stopping or even slowing down. Media newsrooms everywhere continue to shrink beyond recognition – squeezed of their advertising revenue – and this is lamentable for a host of reasons (many of which have nothing to do with PR/marketing).

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The old media model sustained itself for over a century by cultivating an audience hungry for content and news and selling access to this audience to advertisers. Fast forward to today, and it’s estimated that 90 cents of every dollar spent on online advertising goes to Google and Facebook. These tech and commerce powerhouses have successfully exploited traditional media to effectively emerge as the world’s most powerful publishers, in part by aggregating and serving up free content paired with highly targeted advertisements – among other offerings.

What does this sudden drop-off in ad spending mean for modern news media going forward? The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism recently collaborated with Oxford University to survey the 2021 journalism and media landscape – among their findings: “Driving digital subscriptions was rated an important or very important revenue focus for 76% of our [respondents], ahead of both display and native advertising. The reverse was true when we last asked the question in 2018.”

As ad spending continues to evaporate across the media landscape, high-quality media content is likely to be increasingly gated behind paywalls for paid subscribers going forward. This is good news to the extent that quality journalism can perhaps survive – and hopefully thrive – under this model. It’s bad news to anyone seeking free and wide access to high-quality content previously supported by advertising revenue. Many of us simply won’t pay for this content, particularly if we might only have a passing interest in the subject matter.

Against this backdrop of a shrinking mass media and increasing paywall-gated content, who can technology customers/prospects turn to for sound guidance when researching purchasing options online? Who fills this void?

CONTENT DEMOCRATIZATION

High-quality content can come from anywhere or anyone with the brains and skill to produce it. The key is that it needs to be insightful, as unbiased as possible, and largely free of the self-serving promotional material that customers/prospects hate wading through in search of meaningful data to inform their purchasing decisions. Vendor-produced content that’s credible, informative and free to access can draw audiences just as readily as the media newsrooms of old – if it’s done right.

To be 100% clear, PR functions best as a complement to the media, and we endeavor to provide value that makes journalists’ lives easier. We believe that a thriving media is critical to a thriving society, and this fundamental truth certainly applies in the technology ecosystem as well. We’ll continue to advocate on behalf of our clients to ensure that their stories rise above the noise to resonate with relevant journalists in an impactful, sustained fashion.

But the media landscape is changing for better or worse, and self-published vendor content that’s both high-quality and freely accessible to all will play an increasingly valuable role going forward as a means to inform, educate and entice our target audiences.
In Part II of this series, I’ll cover some of the many ways that self-published vendor content works to our advantage. Until then, some food for thought…

“Today, just about anyone with an internet connection and a social media account has the capacity to publish news and views to the world. This is new in human history… Almost any large organization can, if it chooses, use the worldwide web to be a media outlet – though whether the output classes as journalism or public relations is another matter.” - Margaret Simons, The Guardian