With so many enticing sessions to choose from at yesterday’s PPA Festival, it was difficult to know which way to turn, so I decided to plonk myself down at one of the four stages, The Big Picture, and stay there all day. These are some of the things I learned:
- We live in an age of specialisms, which places magazine media at an advantage over more generalist news media. Successful media brands of the future will have found the right combination of content, usefulness and community.
- The Trump Bump will be less pronounced second time around. There is a growing sense of news fatigue around the US president with people getting bored of his shenanigans and a growing realisation that one could probably sit out a couple of days and not miss much.
- Publishers must invest in their journalism. A cornerstone of the New York Times’s highly successful ‘Make something worth paying for’ strategy was hiring more journalists. Their thinking: ‘journalism is our product and we have to invest in it’.
- Tips when employing Gen Z-ers: respect their boundaries (they have a greater sense of work / life separation), they want to be consulted, they want clarity about everything, they are prepared to come into the office but want to know why. Also, don’t roll your eyes when one of them asks for a neurodiverse break. Just think of it as the modern equivalent of yesteryear’s fag break.
- The planet is in deep, deep trouble. We’ve just had the hottest first day of May ever. Publishers have a responsibility to use their platforms to guide their audiences to make more sustainable choices. But, rather than make it preachy, try to make it all about positive outcomes; for instance: by eating less red meat, you help save the planet and reduce your chances of getting cancer.
- By focusing on delivering contextual advertising (ie ads based on the content being served rather than on the identity of the person watching it), publishers can both avoid sanction by the increasingly watchful ICO and still serve ads to those people who opt out of online tracking.
- Young men lack positive role models, so are more likely to fall under the influence of toxic voices online. Professional media aimed at young men needs to celebrate real-life male heroes (ordinary men doing exceptional things), to call out misogyny where they see it and to provide young men with positive alternatives to some of the loud and destructive voices that currently crowd their feeds.
There were, of course, loads more insights and I will be drilling down deeper into some of the sessions in upcoming editions of InPubWeekly.
(Finally, our ‘Subscriber Acquisition Special - Q&A’ webinar is on Thursday 22 May. For more information and to register, please click here.)
You can catch James Evelegh's regular column in the InPubWeekly newsletter, which you can register to receive here.
