What kind of media mix should you shoot for?
You only have so much time, energy and staff. It's hard to know where you should be focusing your efforts in public relations, especially when you're talking about earned media rather than paid.
I can make a case for TV and newspapers being essential.
You can make just as strong of a case for social media, blogs and radio being the best place to invest your time and resources.
It's hard to find good numbers and hard data to back up either of these strategies.
You'd have to compare newspaper circulation vs. TV viewership, then track down Internet numbers -- and find a way to figure out whether people respond more to something they read in the paper or see on TV.
It'd be a nightmare just tracking down all those raw numbers. I don't know how you'd come up with a formula to analyze them.
However, we do have a source for an effective media mix.
Advertising spending is tracked quite carefully, and advertisers can correlate ad campaigns with actual sales.
A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers pegged global advertising spending at an estimated $421 billion in 2009, with spending expected to reach $467 billion in 2013.
Here's how that report broke down spending:
$149 billion on TV
$92.6 billion on newspapers
$58.7 billion on the Internet
$29.8 billion on consumer magazines
$29.1 billion on directories / yellow pages
$28.6 billion on radio
$26.8 billion on outdoor / billboards
$16.2 billion on trade magazines
$1.5 billion on video games
These numbers tell us interesting and useful things.
- The power of the web is definitely growing. It's not a pile of anecdotes, hype and trend stories, not when advertisers are now spending more on Internet ads than on radio and magazines.
- Television and newspapers are still sitting on top of the media mountain, and TV is the undisputed king.
- Magazines are a sleeper medium that deserves more attention. Advertisers aren't stupid. They're spending a combined $46 billion on magazine ads.