Reorganization of Media Groups

During the last decade most Media Groups have organized themselves around their type of media properties, around their channels.  That is, papers, TV, radio…were independent divisions responsible for that channel and its production and sales functions.  Each division being very autonomous they were often located in separate buildings and also competed against each other.

There were numerous reasons for that: different types of expertise and skills were needed in each case, the strong medium was afraid of piggybacking the weaker ones…etc.  Most important, the consideration went, each medium had to follow the internal rules and logic specific to it and being apart was the right thing to do.  In the case of internet the real fear was that the more traditional and not very dynamic culture of newspapers would slow down the new medium.  Indeed, all those considerations were correct and “life apart” has probably helped many online players to develop fast and be successful.

During that last half a dozen years numerous dailies have shown a remarkable ability to reinvent themselves.  In parallel, online projects have shown a great ability to embed all other media and the leading media executives have discovered that the “living apart” solution had to evolve into a “back to living together” but in a radically different way.

The reorganization issue just reflects other strategic topics being debated.  As our societies become richer and more sophisticated and as advertisers and agencies try to reach increasingly differentiated consumers, shouldn´t media groups facilitate their job by offering target groups across all media?  On the content side, how come audiences are discovering multitasking and media groups are not doing anything about it?  Those and many more questions are advising media companies to abandon production considerations in favor of concentrating their efforts on audiences.

Once top management begins to travel this road the way forward is not a simple one and any reference to the solutions other players are using becomes important.  The consulting firm Innovation has either visited or led these experiments around the world and offers some advice on things to do and pitfalls to avoid.  This article by Chris O´Brien and Juan Señor from Innovation sheds some light on how to organize a multimedia group and offers many examples around the world. It´s worth reading!

In my experience, only companies with a certain degree of performance in each of those media should try to move as far as it is mentioned in the article.  For less developed companies, they first should prove themselves as adequate independent operators in each  medium since bringing the online operations next to the offline ones should only happen when the internet people have been able to develop their own culture and rhythm.

Chart copyright Innovation Media Consulting Group