Media & Marketing:New year, new opportunities to get everything completely wrong. It's going to be just like 2012, only with more awkward apologies, more value-for-money clarifications and more glorious conspiracies. You'll notice the words "more money" didn't appear in that sentence, but some of us do still live in hope.
Here are my 13 rock-solid predictions for 2013:
1 RTÉ’s blueprint for the future won’t go far enough for its rivals and enemies.
RTÉ is “on track” to shortly deliver its five-year strategy as part of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s funding review. Of course, it won’t go far enough for rivals who lobby for their best chance of survival. RTÉ’s enemies, an overlapping but separate category against the concept of public service media, won’t be happy unless Montrose is flattened.
2 The cyberbullying committee will be drowned out by the backlash to the social media backlash.
Over Christmas, it was announced that an Oireachtas committee chaired by Fine Gael TD Tom Hayes will hold hearings on the issue of anonymous abuse delivered via social media. Anyone suggesting China-like clampdowns on freedom of speech can expect heaps of non-anonymous abuse.
3 Digital and print will merge further.
Again, I'm playing safe here, as this is less a prediction and more an outline of my own near future. Irishtimes.comis getting a new content management system soon. The existing one is a decade old and doesn't "talk" to the print-publishing platform. For business journalists, this lack of systems harmony has manifested as the curious online disappearance of ampersands. 2013 will be the year we get our ampersands back. Oh yes, and there will be a brand new redesigned website.
4 Evening newspapers will come under big pressure.
Even if Thomas Crosbie Holdings and Independent News Media weren’t in cost-cutting mode, the rationale for running stand-alone newsdesks at their respective evening titles, the Evening Echo and the Evening Herald, is unclear in the mobile era.
5 Convergence on the “first” screen, and,
6 more imaginative use of the “second”.
UPC will launch its Horizon box in Ireland, allowing viewers to synchronise their TV sets with their smartphones and tablets – the Dutch version includes a selection of apps from news providers. “Second screens” are not just for moaning about TV’s minor imperfections, meanwhile. Advertisers will build on greater ambitions, from Shazam-prompted click-to-buy offers to gaming-style interactivity. Don’t just watch that car advertisement, use the steering wheel on your iPad to drive along those open roads.
7 A merciful end to first-person advertising.
“I am the new Nikon One. I know I look like a camera, but I’m different” and all personification of inanimate objects in marketing must end. Wishful thinking, this one.
8 Pining for “maxi- quadrennial” events.
The three “maxi-quadrennial” events of 2012 – the European Championship, the Olympics and the US election – were a commercial letdown, according to WPP, the world’s largest advertising group, but they still underpinned global advertising revenue growth of 2.5-3 per cent last year. This year, the calendar looks bare. There aren’t even any “mini-quadrennials” (US mid-terms or winter Olympics).
9 RTÉ’s radio audience will be cannibalised by its morning TV news show.
This makes sense to me but then I’m still eating breakfast at 9am, rather than engaging in more radio-friendly activities such as “doing stuff about the house” or “sitting in a traffic-induced rage”. The last set of listenership figures showed slight falls for the RTÉ Radio 1 weekday morning schedule, and it will be interesting to see if this is compounded by the imminent launch of the 9-11am news programme on RTÉ One, to be fronted by Keelin Shanley.
10 Bills, bills, bills
The bill that counts is the Consumer and Competition Bill, which has been lost in the troika-clogged legislative in-tray. As part of a wider reform of company law, it will update rules on media mergers in a manner that will somehow manage to have no immediate consequences for anyone with “media tycoon” lurking in the subtext of their business card.
11 Long-running reality TV franchises will go through to the next round.
Ignore reports of an X Factor “crisis summit”. There’s no sign of any of these flagship shows going anywhere. Alan Sugar is contracted to do the Apprentice until 2014, another Irish remake will debut in the shape of TV3’s The Great Irish Bake-Off and, after I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! will pack out winter slots once more.
12 Google versus Germany goes nowhere fast.
“Angela Merkel thinks Google should pay for links” isn’t as catchy a slogan as “Angela Merkel thinks we’re at work”, but it’s no more or less true. Her government has so far sided with publishers in a bid to force online aggregators to pay for links and content excerpts in a copyright battle born of publishers’ envy of Google’s advertising dollars. A German parliamentary hearing may reveal the extent to which anti-Google efforts elsewhere in Europe are doomed.
13 Paywall city.
The previous 12 predictions have been made in the full confidence that as long as No 13 is right, few people will be able to check back and see exactly how mistaken the others were. Once the practicalities are sorted out, it’s paywall time for the Irish newspapers left standing. Expect the New York Times’s preferred term, “pay gate”, to be deployed.
