MEDIA CHANNELS: TODAY AND TOMORROW

I had the good fortune to hear a talk by Dr. Jeff Cole, Director of the Center for the Digital Future at the Annenberg School of Communications, at USC in California. Jeff heads up the World Internet Project, a research program on people’s media habits, covering 30 countries, which has now collected 10 years of data. He delivered his talk before the board of trustees of the Institute for Public Relations, the leading research and education organization in our industry. Here are some of the points (referencing U.S. data) Dr. Cole made:

• All traditional media will survive, but will survive as smaller players.

• In 1946 movies sold 90 million tickets a week. Today movies sell 20 million a week, and our population has doubled since ’46.

• For many, many years a #1 song sold 15 million copies. In ’09 the #1 song sold 3.1 million copies

• There are only 40 daily newspapers left in the U.S.

• Magazines will be gone in 5 years. The only exception will be women’s magazines and the Sunday New York Times

• Rather than shrinking, television will grow dramatically in importance. It will be in your pocket, on your computer, in your car and on more and more larger home screens. The average American watches 34 hours of TV per week, and it will become 50 hours.

-For a long time we refused to pay for digital content until iTunes came along. Payment for digital content will continue to grow.

• How many $ per month do we spend on media that did not exist 10 years ago? $250-$300.

• The number of Facebook users is larger than the U.S. population. And the heaviest users are over the age of 60.

• Advertising will be one of the most important delivery channels for digital content.

• 55% of the members of social networking communities believe their online community is as important as their offline community.

• Because of all of the above, public relations will become more critical because of the range of techniques it employs than ever before.

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