A media owner may put years of work into researching a market gap, but the reader, viewer or listener will only recognise the niche in hindsight. For the audience, if the media owner is lucky, it’ll be a minor epiphany: so this is what I’ve been missing.
A new magazine that speaks to a reader’s sense of himself, one he’s proud to carry under his arm because it defines him; a groundbreaking television show that pushes buttons in the viewer’s own life, gets her wondering whether she would react the same way in a given situation; an original radio genre that cultivates something like a sound bubble, makes the listener want to stay in the car.
This type of audience is the holy grail. If the editor or producer can get there it won’t take a business department stocked with Ivy League MBAs to generate a profit. Neither will it take a boiler room sales force whose modus operandi is to dupe or bully the advertiser.
It’s an obvious enough statement, but a new media brand that awakens its target market to the post-the-fact inevitability of its existence is a media brand that’s going to be around for a while.
Tell that to the fly-by-night magazine publishers. These are the guys who base their sales pitch on some dodgy mailing list, couldn’t give a damn whether readers are actually going to open the thing (as long as they get it), and fleece the printer by liquidating themselves before the 90-day payment terms are up (at which point they’re onto the next title).
It’s the extreme example, but as Andy Davis explains (page 23) there’s more than one way to sully this market.
Our November issue also looks at the relationship between audience and profit in local television and adult contemporary radio. The former (page 13) pitches the economic pragmatism of Franz Marx against the nation-building idealism of Greg Marinovich, and the latter (page 19) asks whether radio’s most lucrative licence has reached its income-generating limit.
The issues can all be boiled down to one key question: if the media brand were to shut down tomorrow, would anybody care?