With the whole industry being so volatile, and with individual company performance being so varied, it is no surprise that corporate confidence is also very wide-ranging. The latest wave of fieldwork for mediafutures (Summer 2024) looks at how participants in the benchmarking project feel about their own business.
“On a score of 1 to 10, how confident do you feel about the financial success of your own company / division over the next two years, out to 2026?”
The overall average is 7.1 out of 10. Yet, this is spread out across a wide range, from depressingly low 3s through to strong 9s. Yet the centre of gravity (44%) scored a positive 8.
We then zoomed in on how that snapshot fits into a trend.
“How does your current level of confidence about the future compare to how you felt a year ago?”
Although the largest proportion (49%) are feeling more confident than a year ago, there is still a wide range. The net score is +27 (49% feeling “more confident” minus 22% feeling “less confident”).
This score is exactly the same as that recorded in the Q4 2023 survey. So, confidence remains steady and robust, especially considering the volatility of the overall economic and political environment.
Participants were asked to comment on why they gave the scores they did. Here is a selection of quotes:
More confident
- Increasing revenue from all our key channels gives confidence about the product and the market we are operating in.
- Events are 100% back. This has made a material difference and we have transferred some virtual events back into the real world.
- We are beginning to see the results of the hard yards as we have transformed the business over the last few months.
- We have just made some large savings, bringing our break-even down after 2.5 years of losses.
- We are hopeful that the change in government will bring a greater investment in our key markets.
- There seems to be greater macro stability and we’ve given up chasing the “digital dragon” quite so much.
- Consumer confidence seems to be continuing to build after the massive hit during the pandemic.
- Paper prices are better than we were expecting; demand for print services is increasing; commerce revenues are growing.
- The bounce-back year after Covid was a bit misleading and the time since has been less good, but we’re getting over that and feel reasonably optimistic about the future.
- The economy is tentatively positive, as there were some worries a year ago. Events have continued to grow.
Not as confident
- It is harder to see where the new money will come from to replace the decline in our publishing and digital projects.
- Over the last three months, we have felt increased pressures from many sides, as have many of our customers. Over the last 12 months, we have maintained turnover and held or lowered cost. Yet we’ve also seen profitability fall as earnings have shifted away from high margin activity.
- The business is only four years old. We are still finding our feet with print albeit the digital offering is relatively stable.
- The year following Covid did not have the bounce-back we thought it would. Companies continue to be much more cautious in their marketing and promotional spending than pre-pandemic.
- It is a tough market for print subs, where we still have a big presence.
- We are increasingly concerned about Google search and Meta referrals, both of which are damaging our traffic. Market saturation in our own vertical is a real issue. We also have major concerns about the lack of talent to enable us to scale up without destroying profitability.
- We are already starting to see the results of recent investment, which is really positive, although there is still a long way to go. On the downside, competition and macro-economic factors (Brexit, high inflation, incompetent government, etc) continue to make life challenging in all our markets.
Recurring themes
There are a number of threads running through the comments:
- It is clear that each brand within a publisher’s portfolio can have very different dynamics and business models. Managing that variety, whilst trying to apply best-practice and drive scale-economies across the organisation is a real challenge for many companies.
- Each company has a very specific perspective. Often, this is based on the health of the individual verticals they are serving. Yet there are other internal issues at play that include the underlying finances of the company, where the operation is in terms of their own restructuring process (which often is ongoing rather than a one-off step change) and whether they have the tech and staff resources in place to capitalise on the opportunities.
- Generally, B2B companies are feeling slightly more positive than Consumer, although this gap has narrowed since last year. This difference is often driven by the recovery in live events, although how this whole sector is coming back (physical versus online versus hybrid) is very varied from market to market and company to company.
- Expectations of how the company would recover from the pandemic are still shaping budgets even now and affect the general feeling within the company as to what the future holds.
Words of warning
It is all about resilience and self-belief, but these need to be grounded in clear-sighted self-knowledge. Confidence can easily flip into arrogance. Targets can morph into empty PR and spin. And the tools to enable growth remain the same: people and tech.
About mediafutures: mediafutures is an ongoing benchmarking survey of the industry undertaken by Wessenden Marketing in partnership with InPublishing. It maps the key drivers and metrics that are transforming the shape and direction of the whole media business.
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
