How a spat between a minnow publisher and computing giant showcases the existential threat faced by the trade press
Welcome to a Tuesday update from Unmade. Today: What an outspoken publisher’s angry post about Dell says about the state of Australia’s trade press sector.
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A Dell of an article: ‘If the industry doesn’t support its trade media, then you don’t get trade media’
A few days ago, technology journalist Nick Ross burned some bridges with PR, marketing and media agency executives, sharing an extraordinary post declaring war on computing brand Dell.
His article is a primal scream from the trade press. Although an extreme example, it captures the creaking four-way relationship between brands, PR, media agencies and journalists. As is so often the case, the catalyst and only winner in this sad story is Google.
I’d lost track of Ross when he left the ABC acrimoniously after an unhappy time on the highly politicised NBN beat. It turns out that amongst other projects, he started a review website called High Performance Laptops.
His lengthy post about the breakdown of his relationship with Dell is hard to summarise without getting lost in the weeds, but I’ll try.
One of Ross’s central frustrations is shared by many a publisher - that within the ecosystem, the marketers, PRs and media agency people fare better than those actually creating the content.
What triggered Ross’s battle was his perception that after his site began to build traction, Dell began bidding against the search advertising phrase “high performance laptops”, and started sending consumers to their own landing page with the same title. That was perfectly legal - it’s a generic term, and Ross had not trademarked it.
However, Ross saw it as free riding on the work he had done to build an audience around the phrase, which would undermine his site. He was giving Dell and others helpful coverage; why would Dell grab his keywords, just because they could?
A problem for Ross and publishers like him is that Dell’s media agency EssenceMediacom is incentivised to buy media as cheaply as possible. And that often means brands bidding against search terms in order to send traffic to their own sites, rather than display advertising on independent sites such as Ross’s.
He struggled to move past this. Indeed, his post makes clear that he spiralled. It’s a hard read, in part due to the mental health difficulties he discloses.
“Whatever excuses people might want to make for Dell, this has all caused me an existential crisis which has led to me being unable to work properly for several months owing to severe stress, anxiety and depression,” he writes.
“At one point, I was so distracted, I almost ran over my young daughter with my car. Another time, a lump developed in my throat and my thoughts were literally, ‘Hopefully, it’s cancer so I won’t have to feel like this anymore.’ “
To be clear, I don’t accept that individual executives at Dell and their media agency EssenceMediacom are the direct cause of Ross’s mental health crisis; everyone involved in this story is working within a broken ecosystem.
He eventually had a call with a couple of Dell’s local marketing and PR executives. Although he doesn’t address it in his piece, it appears that he recorded the call; he published a detailed transcript. He does not disclose whether the executives believed their call was off the record.
The story is a depressing snapshot of the decline of the trade press business model. Every small publisher struggles to get the attention or support of media agencies.
As a publisher myself, I understand his frustrations at brands benefitting from his coverage, while doing little to support his site in return.
However, it’s one thing to be frustrated, and another to break the traditions of church and state that say commercial considerations should not affect editorial coverage.
Earlier in that call, Ross expresses those frustrations, telling those Dell execs: “If you’ve got money to push the term, ‘high performance laptops’ then hey, I know a site that’s great fit for you guys. But, I get nothing. If the industry doesn’t support its trade media, then you don’t get trade media.
“I’ve dealt with media buying agencies for 20 years. They do not deal with trade media, they don’t care about editorial they give money to their mates and to Zuckerberg and to Google because it’s easier and that’s what they do.”
Those are angry words, but I suspect that most in media agencies would admit they are at least partly true. Media agencies often do play a relationship game that preferences their larger trading partners. And globally, Google and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta have found plenty of ways, transparently and otherwise, of incentivising the global holding companies to steer revenue towards them, to the detriment of the traditional media.
During that call Ross asks for money outright. “What I’m asking for is, a fraction of a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of like one per cent of the budget that is just being dumped on Google, for the same aim that I would deliver myself.”
The argument to brands (and the media agencies who work for them) is that if they do not support trade press titles, they won’t be around as a vehicle to publicise them in the future. However, while that may be true, there’s also a more immediate truth: agencies and marketers are not incentivised to support the industry’s long term interests; they work to short term targets.
The Dell exec explains to Ross on the call: “When we put the plans together, we have certain KPIs we’re trying to meet. Search is an important function. It is the number one thing everyone will prioritise because it does deliver. It is a vehicle that delivers awareness, demand, conversion, you know, and we’re not getting away from that. We invest in Google because it it does work.”
Short term performance marketing has won. And brand building has lost.
Then comes another admission: “At this point in time, we’re not investing in any trade publication. So it’s not as if we’re singling anybody out and, I think what you’re saying is, well, invest in me, but then where does that leave the strategy then?” Where indeed?
Says Ross in his post: “I think it’s fair to say that these marketing types don’t see any problem with undermining trade media partners, publishers and journalists. Furthermore, they’re psychopathic enough not to care about our wellbeing over the opportunity to make lazily make a tiny amount of profit at our expense.”
That’s somewhat over the top. The platforms are sometimes accused of sociopathic behaviour with the incidental damage their algorithms have caused to youth mental health, public discourse and the business model of news, but psychopathic is a bit much.
Ross adds: “It’s my belief that both Dell Australia and the media buying agencies need to stop ignoring and taking their trade media for granted. Right now, they don’t see any downside doing so. It will be my mission to change that and make the actions of Dell Australia’s [individual names removed by Unmade], along with EssenceMediaCom, regarded as a case study.”
He then goes further: “Consequently, my ineffective position of acquiescence and being nice will transpose into one of retaliation. I will be personally boycotting any promotion of Dell (and Alienware) products and invite anyone reading this to do so, too.”
That crosses a line. A problem for the trade press in 2024 is that those who pursue the traditional church-and-state separation of editorial and commercial are disadvantaged against those who do not.
By going to war with Dell, Ross is no longer a neutral arbiter serving the best content to his audience. That’s not all that different to those who sell their coverage.
He’s not alone in blurring the lines. I’ve noticed it increasingly as a factor in the media and marketing trade press. Not all trade marketers necessarily make their choices based simply on where they will find an engaged audience at a fair price. Some try to buy editorial. And unfortunately there are some willing sellers.
One aspect of the Campaign Brief saga was the attention to its ‘pay-to-play’ policy when it comes to publishing agency press releases.
I know of another publication whose executive editor is known to make calls to PRs telling them “I’ve given your client enough free coverage; now it’s time for them to support me”.
Infamously, the grapevine has it that another editor of a media trade title lost their job earlier this year after calls from a couple of PRs to the publisher pointing out that unhelpful editorial coverage was damaging the advertising relationship with the publication.
If that’s how the game is played now, then it is what it is. However, if everybody does that, then it leads to bland, undifferentiated mastheads. What’s the point of advertising somewhere that’s too boring and full of press releases masquerading as editorial to be readable? In the short term those PRs get credit for placing that unearned coverage, but what is the point if nobody actually reads it?
However, like Clay Shirky said 15 years ago: You’ll miss us when we’re gone is not a business model.
The argument I used to make as an owner of Mumbrella and now with Unmade is that the most valuable long-term position for your masthead is to try to be the one that is seen as doing its best to tell it like it is. That wasn’t because of high minded ideals, it was about long term investment in our own brand.
Depressingly, there are major media brands who do not advertise with Unmade because we do not guarantee editorial coverage. I’ve seen emails from trade marketers saying they will only advertise if there are editorial benefits.
It’s their job to ask, and used to be the editor’s job to say no. Now though, some have to say yes, or potentially lose their job.
One media company stopped advertising the day after Unmade accurately reported their poor performance on the ASX, and is yet to return. Hypocritically this company has newsrooms, and complains about the damage to society that agencies mindlessly pursuing ‘brand safety’ do.
In Joe Aston’s book The Chairman’s Lounge, he talked about how Fairfax Media CEO Greg Hywood stood up to Qantas boss Alan Joyce when the airline threatened to pull advertising. “I explained to Alan that when you have bad results, you get bad stories and when you have good results, you get good stories, and that’s just the way it goes.”
Nowadays, some media companies are as likely to be the ones pulling their ads from the trade because they don’t like what is being said about them as they are to be championing journalism.
Not that anybody is entitled to somebody’s business, or indeed to a business model. Unmade gets by not just on advertising (grateful as we are to those who do support us with no strings attached) but also through our event program and our paying membership tier. That’s what allows us to say what we think.
For those who rely only on advertising, publishing is a hard business. Ross reveals in his post: “I earned $22K last year – a pitiful amount that’s just a little less than the previous year which had also been dominated by huge, start-up expenses. That’s much less than an entry-level PR professional. I typically work (or at least try to work) seven days a week, often finishing very late at night, trying to build my business.”
The question for those better-paid PR professionals: If people like Nick Ross are all driven off the beat, what happens to your job?