Online adspend points the way for PR

As part of my duties to the International group of the CIPR it was off to the House of Commons last night to hear a talk by Baroness Buscombe, the new DG of the Advertising Association. Not immediately relevant to media research but what she said was of great interest to the PR industry.

While she is keen to maintain standards it was also very apparent that content has to be king and if this means pushing the boundaries, then so be it. With advertising revenues from traditional media falling like stones, so cutbacks in all areas of content are occurring. If magazines are unable to sell as many ads they are not going to make up the short-fall with more editorial content. Instead the two will be mirrored, in effect leading to less traditional media sources with which PR can engage.

During this meeting I had the sense that there was an elephant in the room – metaphorically that is…. and it goes by the name of Google, which sucks up a quarter of all online adspend, bypassing whole ad agency machine.

I really wanted to hear about the ways the ad agencies can deal themselves back into the online adspending and more importantly what PR needs to learn from this situation.