news
Now here’s a thought!
Browsing the blogs while nibbling on my Ryvita and Kipper pate this lunchtime, I came across Rory Sutherland’s missive More kittens: Or how Sir Martin Sorrell can end the recession overnight, in which he is bemused why the mighty power of media buyers isn’t twisting the arms of the newspapers to write at least more balanced, if not more positive news.
‘Because, at the moment, it doesn’t really matter whether you are paying £20,000 or £10,000 for a full page in a British newspaper. What matters is that 50% of your £10,000 is being spent on paying journalists to write doom-laden articles discouraging consumers from doing anything except to cower inside their homes waiting for redundancy and repossession.
In short we are currently using our clients’ money to pay newspapers to destroy our clients’ businesses.’
He suggests: ‘Group M and the other large media buying houses should simply withhold all advertising money from British media until they learn to cheer the f*** up. And, correspondingly, we should lavish advertising money on feel-good media.
Imagine the phone calls. “Hello, Daily Telegraph, we were going to give you £100K to run a series of ads for IBM, but unfortunately you ran an article on repossessions yesterday. So instead we’re going to put all the money towards sponsoring “Dogs do the Funniest Things on ITV3 and a gatefold pull-out in Hello! Now, don’t do it again, right.” ‘
I think Rory has a point. We might be heading into the biggest downturn anyone under 65 will have seen in their lifetime, but there are still good news stories to be broadcast. There are companies who are still growing and doing well, brands that bucking the apparent downward trend, small businesses that have never been so busy, not to mention millions of people doing interesting things worth talking about. And if the papers run out of good news stories, they can always resort to fluffy kittens, but I suspect by the time they do we’ll be out the other side of this and denationalising all the banks we now suddenly own.
There is a more sinister side to the media’s obsession with bad news, which is of concern, and that is the psychological effect the gloomy news has on us all. This recession hasn’t suddenly come upon us in the last year, it has been creeping up on us for several years and yet a year ago we were still thinking we were a booming economy and spending as such. The only difference in what was really going on in the economy then to now is that no-one told us we weren’t booming anymore.
Perhaps we would all be better off if the media just balanced their news-telling, so for every doom and gloom story they hunt down, they also sniffed out a good news one. Then perhaps we could all feel a little more balanced and our media spend would be supporting our thriving client’s businesses instead of contributing to killing them.
In the meantime, perhaps we really should put our money where our clients’ mouths would like to be - in media that attempts to support and reverse an ailing economy rather than media that just adds to it.