🔒 Alec Hogg: Media move to digital a lesson for all

As someone involved in digital media for almost two and a half decades, my front row seat in a transforming sector has been a mixed blessing. Being exposed to the obvious, the market’s uptake seemed excruciatingly slow. Already in the late 1990s logic suggested online would replace inferior options like newspapers and magazines. Habits, however, die hard.

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In the USA, by far the world’s biggest media market, it took until 2012 before digital advertising surpassed that in newspapers. Only in 2015 did online ads overtake print as a whole, and were then still well behind TV (see graph above). But Hemingway’s “gradually….. then suddenly” principle is now in full swing. This year in the US, for the first time, online advertising will exceed all other media combined.

An excellent piece by our partners at The Wall Street Journal drawns on research by Group M, the biggest player globally with responsibility for $63bn in adspend. It reports the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated an already well established trend. The agency predicts another surge for digital next year – and a double digit decline for print advertising. Media is not unique. Everywhere spending is moving rapidly to digital alternatives wherever they are available.
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We should all be alive to this reality. Self-proclaimed Value Investors keep predicting how funds will soon move across to neglected “old economy” stocks that by historic standards are super-cheap. Their thesis, however, presumes the economy’s great transformation to digital is illusory, temporary or overdone. It isn’t. The era where PE ratios and Dividend Yields ruled an investor’s the roost is over. Ask any newspaper proprietor.