Times Square sold its soul to advertisers long ago. Would the media be doing the same thing if it put ads in emails sent by reporters?
Last week, Andy Boyle, a journalist who is a friend of mine, put out a tweet that caught my attention:
An e-mail from a guy at a newspaper just contained an advertisement at the bottom. So. Can e-mail ads save journalism?
The Pew Research Center estimated back in September 2009 that about 58 percent of all American adults send or read an email on an average day. This compares with just 17 percent of people who say a print national newspaper is part of their daily news diet (slide 16). But we already knew print is dying, right?
[side note - it would be inaccurate of me not to report that the same Pew survey says that 50 percent of people view a local print paper on a typical day. That makes me wonder what all exactly qualifies as a local print paper.]
So, there is no question that placing advertisements in a journalist’s email would help advertisers reach a wider audience than if they advertised in a printed paper. If a reporter is not out in the field, than he or she is likely sending out emails to sources and subjects. On top of that, it would be fairly easy to identify the demographics of certain audiences—for example, a sports reporter will probably be emailing men in the coveted 18-49 age group. A local advertiser could team with the local beat reporter, and so on.
We already know the technology is available—see the ads at the top of your Gmail messages based on the content of your emails as exhibit A. Journalism, though, has a much stricter set of ethical guidelines than most professions.
So, would selling ad space in reporters’ emails be ethical?
I can’t pretend to know. Ethical issues are rarely black and white, and history is rife with examples of how media outlets use advertisements in ways that violate unspoken (and sometimes spoken) ethical rules. Obviously, the reporter and editors should play no role in the arranging and selection of these ads—let the business people take care of that. Local TV news has been using product placement since at least 2008 during its broadcasts—is that really different from letting ads run at the bottom of emails containing a non-endorsement disclaimer?
Out of this ethical debate, there is one certainty—print outlets need to find a new advertising model, and they needed to find it yesterday. It’s through outside-the-box ideas such as this that will give birth to the new business model.