Why media businesses need to understand how shopping is going digital

If traditional content publishing is a cathedral, shopping is something close to being its high priest. Journalists won’t like to admit it, but as well as playing a crucial role in informing the public and campaigning on vital issues (as this week’s events have demonstrated) the media’s other key role is to tell people on what to buy.

Now, as that buying is happening increasingly away from traditional channels, the old model of 30-second slots, display ads and circulation revenue looks even more threatened.

Why shopping matters

As journalist and one-time superinjunction fan Andrew Marr puts it in his book My Trade in 2003 (extract here), shopping is perhaps the biggest segment of mainstream news, in which the lines between advertising and editorial are increasingly blurred. If anything, this is even more true today, where the faintest whiff of a rumour about a new Apple product produces hundreds of online and print articles from professional and non-professional writers and Christmas shopping trends make mainstream headlines daily.

Mass market titles’ ability to influence consumer behaviour is the main part of a Faustian pact that sees ad agencies spend so heavily on TV spots and newspaper pages. To put this umbilical relationship in context, retailers spent about £100 million on ads in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday in 2010, about one third of the Mail titles’ display ad income. About half of that total spend came from supermarkets, which crucially also sell a huge number of copies Daily Mails every day (as TheMediaBriefing’s columnist Peter Kirwan pointed out at the time, via DMGT internal presentations).

But this model assumes that the retailer has no other way of reaching the consumer than through a mass market press. Given that social, long-term relationships between buyer and seller can be created very easily, that is no longer true. Also, given that shoppers can now recommend products themselves and talk to each other, it’s no longer true that they need a journalist’s recommendation to make their mind up on a purchase.

Mobile ecommerce boom

Shopping isn’t just going digital, it’s going mobile. Professor Joshua Bamfield of the Centre for Retail Research tells Guardian.co.uk (via Naomi Weiser at Amdocs) up to £1.6 billion was spent on mobiles this Christmas, rising from close to zero last Christmas, from a total festive online shopping spree of £13.4 billion. He predicts that a quarter of all online purchases in the UK will be made via mobile in 2015.

So in response, Debenhams, Argos, Asos, Tesco, Waitrose etc all have their own iPhone apps to sell direct to customers.

But there's no reason publishers themselves shouldn't be using mobile technology to continue their role as arbiters of taste and consumer guides: Elle magazine's iPhone app is GPS enabled and provides information on which shops are hot for 10 cities (currently US only). 

Advertising hopes?

It seem odd to be warning about losing ground in the ecommerce war when there’s a boom in online advertising going on, with display advertising predicted to grow into a $40 billion industry by 2014, helped in no small part by the advent of real-time bidding, ad exchanges, targeting and video ads.

But 58 percent of that display growth is destined for the emergent BRIC nations between now and 2014. And what we would call premium, professional publishers are not guaranteed to receive the lion’s share of it.

Besides, newspapers and mags lost out when Google disrupted the classified ad model - who's to say the same won't happen for display? As I wrote recently, content publishers should do what they can to take advantage of the ecommerce boom before Google does.

See also: How Autotrader proves the location-based business model works

Services opportunity

If you can't sell advertising, why not sell services? And if brands want to market straight to consumers, why not accept that and help them do it through a suite of client marketing services?

Trinity Mirror this week announced the acquisition of online, mobile marketing services startup Communicator Corp for £8 million in cash - continuing the strategy started by its purchase of online marketer Rippleffect in 2008.

As Trinity CEO Sly Bailey puts it: "Increasingly we're seeing that, in addition to print and website advertising, clients want help in areas such as website design, search engine optimisation, e-mail marketing, social media and web analytics."

B2B companies such as UBM have been successfully providing client marketing services for years (as I wrote here last year) and with Trinity and companies like Conde Nast catching up, it's a positive trend for 2012.

There are lots of new ways to help people choose what to buy - it's up to media executive to figure out what they are.

Picture from Epsos.de on flickr via a Creative Commons licence.