I recently spoke at the annual conference of the Canadian Media Directors Council in Toronto. It was a good event as these things go, with an impressive speaker lineup (Bill Buxton, Microsoft’s principal researcher, was particularly fascinating), and the only reason I squeaked onto the agenda was that when they asked me if I’d do it, I was the editor of Ad Age – a job I left at the end of 2009 to come here to Breaking Media – and had just written a column on the future of media companies that someone at the CMDC found interesting.
As it turned out, the audience of 700 senior media agency and media owner executives had to listen to the manager of a small, startup digital media company that is still taking its first few tottering steps, telling them how they should prepare their considerably larger businesses for the future. I guess I’m lucky that they were Canadians – too polite to tell the presumptuous little British bloke to pipe down.
The main point I tried to get across (and I think it sort of worked), is that advertising-dependent media companies need to think of themselves as being in the business of providing marketing solutions. Don’t get me wrong. We here at Breaking Media love ads. They help pay our bills and we believe we deliver an effective suite of advertising services to a growing set of clients who love our highly-engaged, loyal and affluent audience. But a problem arises when the end-all and be-all of a company’s revenue stream is ad sales.
