THE PR SHOP

WITH DAVE BULLARD, CFEE

IS IT TIME TO TAKE NEW ROADS

In a recent IFEA Marketing & PR Affinity Group Zoom chat, one member said the media landscape was changing very quickly, requiring significant changes in the way she dealt with and budgeted for marketing. Let’s talk about some of those changes and maybe offer a few ideas for coping with rapid change.

Traditional media is fading towards irrelevance:

Many radio stations are unmanned for most of the day in all but the larger media markets. They used to be the home of a morning show, hourly newscasts and strong community presence. Now, an entire radio station can be reduced to the size of a computer and the hosts can sit in their home offices 1,500 miles away to record and file their talk snippets via the internet. They are as local as they can be for people finding little nuggets in the hometown paper, which isn’t much at all. Some don’t even try. And even those stations with live and local staff have cut their community outreach.

As for your local TV station, big companies are recouping the millions they paid for stations by cutting costs. Fewer reporters, videographers often eliminated entirely, salaries chopped. Many markets that used to have veteran anchors and reports now subsist on young people straight out of college who know very little about their communities and make so little money that when their contract is up in two years, they leave. Ratings are a fraction of what they used to be. Community investment is disappearing.

Newspapers are being hollowed out one by one. The Gannett Co., publisher of USA Today and the largest newspaper chain in the nation, has many newspapers with no local news staff. One reporter may write stories for several zombie papers in a region. Others are giving up on hard news, walking away from government, courthouse and arts beats in favor of pop culture coverage that draws readers to their websites. In 2024, 130 newspapers closed. Many others stopped publishing daily and some stopped entirely, moving all content to their website. Circulation continues to drop.

In our Zoom chat, the member noted that she used to get a media sponsorship for free, which included not just commercials but also news coverage of her event. Now, she has to pay for the ads and the coverage isn’t a given.

I spent the first 40 years of my career in traditional media, so it pains me to say this: It’s time to think about walking away from traditional media.

Here’s a thinking exercise: If you were to redirect the money you normally spend on traditional media ads, what would you do with it? You could, for instance, invest more in digital media ads. You could spend more time and some money to create your own higher-quality content for your social channels. Or you could hire a part-time marketing writer to make your newsletter shine and drive more ticket sales. You could pay for space at other events to market your event and sell tickets. You could buy an expensive item to raffle off as a fundraiser. You could hire another sponsorship sales person. After all, the goal is to make money come in, whether it’s from ticket sales or sponsorships. Lots of roads to choose!

I get it: Change is scary and there is comfort in doing the things that worked before. Thinking about change uses time we think we don’t have. I’ve been there. When I ran PR and marketing for the Great New York State Fair in Syracuse, I stopped printing 1.1 million magazine-style guides and stopped paying to insert them in Sunday papers across the state. Wasn’t this going to hurt us, I was asked over and over again? After all, we’d been doing it for years. There was no effect, and the money was successfully rerouted. A few years later, I stopped all daily newspaper advertising. Again, it had no impact on our business.

The decision-making consultant and former high-stakes poker pro Annie Duke recently offered a framework for making a hard decision in a column in the Washington Post. It boils down to this: Examine the four outcomes: You do something different or stay the same; you like the outcome or you don’t. What’s the probability of each outcome and what are the pros and cons?

Use it to make your decision.

No matter what you decide, the situation is clear: The companies that once linked us fairly efficiently to our customers and had strong community-minded investment are all but gone. These are now strictly commercial transactions and you can expect no more of them than you can expect from Facebook. You’re not at a crossroads with two paths from which to choose. Instead, you’re circling on a roundabout with a dozen potential offramps. It may be time to take a new road.

Dave Bullard, CFEE is owner of FanFirst Events and Influence, consulting on production, public relations and marketing for events and festivals. He served for 10 years as PR and Marketing Manager of the Great New York State Fair, directing a $1 million marketing budget for the 1.3 million-attendance festival. Dave is available anytime to IFEA members to kick around ideas and brainstorm solutions. He also moderates the IFEA PR & Marketing Affinity Group. He’s at debullard@gmail.com and 315-575-6320.