Must-Read: Thomas Baekdal: What Killed The Newspapers? Google Or Facebook? Or…?

Must-Read: Thomas Baekdal: What Killed The Newspapers? Google Or Facebook? Or…?:

Google didn’t actually kill the newspaper advertising market…

Google replaced it with an entirely different market. It’s the same money, but Google isn’t in the same market as the newspapers. It instead created its own market and brands decided that was a better place to be…. Advertising in newspapers, they are almost always based on creating random exposure for people with no specific intent…. In the past, this was pretty much how all advertising was done…. Google Search is instead based on advertising to people when they are specifically looking for something…. It’s based on high-intent exposure. This is an incredibly important distinction to understand. Google isn’t winning because it’s big or that it has so much more scale. It’s winning because it created a way for people to have high-intent moments, which brands can reach with their ads.

We have shifted from having a single advertising market (all based on low-intent exposure), to having two different advertising markets… and the media only fits into one of them. Brands will always prefer to have a high-intent moment than low-intent moment (at least the brands who know what they are doing). And it’s because of this that newspapers are losing the market. You are not losing to Google. You are losing to people’s ‘intent’. This is the reality today…