The rise of digital media
1 DIGITAL MAGAZINES AND SOCIAL MEDIA
6 BLOGS AND E-COMMERCE
11 THE INTERNET, POLITICS AND NEWSPAPERS
14 PRINT AND DIGITAL MEDIA
18 CORONAVIRUS
22 SURVEY
ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to demonstrate how there has been a rise in digital media in recent years. This study explores the social, political and environmental factors of the rise of digital media, and how the coronavirus pandemic was a catalyst for digitalisation. This study examines the transition from print to digital media, understanding new consumer habits and engagement with modern social media marketing and digital technology.
DIGITAL MAGAZINES AND SOCIAL MEDIA
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igital magazines are progressively capturing the attention of the media industry due to their capability to interest readers through interactive content, without involving elevated costs in production and distributing traditional magazines. The shift from print to digital magazines continues to rise due to technology and globalisation, driving changes in the way we live. Shifting consumer expectations are fuelling this trend, as immediate access to information is expected from younger demographics. Mobile technology has disturbed every dynamic of the formerly direct consumer-business relationship, which has now impacted heavily on existing print magazines. Calvin Klein boasts a long record of using elaborate print ads as part of its marketing strategy, but the American fashion house is not going against tradition, announcing early this week that it is exiting print advertising starting in February (McDonald, 2018). From February 2019, Calvin Klein will focus on their digital-first media strategy, as they will be increasingly using micro-influencers to drive engagement on their social platforms such as Instagram. “Further, we will focus on driving a digital-first approach to the brand. Importantly, marketing is one of the faster levers that we can address. For holiday 2018, we are shifting more of our media spend from halo marketing to more commercial, digital and social media advertising,” says Emanuel Chirico, chairman and chief executive officer of PVH Corp (Lockwood, 2018). Calvin Klein's shift from print to digital
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and social media is an effort to reach Millennials and Generation Z. They are devoted users of social platforms and are more likely to engage with influencers and are less likely to read print editions. The use of technology has developed digital marketing as it is always changing, evolving and innovating. As consumers are more connected nowadays, companies must keep up with the fast-paced digital society to engage with a generation who grew up online. The digital sphere is changing the consumer experience as different trends in the digital world emerge. Many business’ and organisations now use social media marketing, as the rise in the last few years has moved brands to establish a digital presence to attract an expanding, highly influential consumer market, Generation Z and Millennials. “Our vision for Calvin Klein is to employ a truly digital-first, socially powered marketing experience for consumers. In 2018, we announced the creation of our Consumer Marketing Organization, which reimagines our marketing function by bringing together all facets of the consumer marketing experience, from consumer engagement to data capabilities to the shopping experience. We believe that this enhanced marketing approach will better meet our consumers’ needs, as we adapt to their rapidly changing demands. We will focus going forward on creative consistency and continue consumer-centric marketing to drive sales, while also building personalized relationships and tailoring the overall consumer experience through highly specialized teams” (PVH, 2020). In February 2019, Calvin Klein unveiled it’s latest #MyCalvins campaign, using celebrity-heavy imagery of the brands as campaigns which centred on celebrities which
Figure 1
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would appeal to the next generation of consumers. According to the brand, the narrative, which is the latest instalment of the #MyCalvins initiative, is centred around “the coming-of-age concept evokes universal truths of curiosity, companionship, sexual exploration, and the spirit of rebellion” (Tallarico, 2019). After releasing disappointing third-quarter results in late November, Calvin Klein said it would take a more digital-first approach, starting in February. In December, the company sent a correspondence to publishers, saying going forward it would pursue a “consumer-centric” marketing strategy and the brand would shift to a digital-first, socially amplified model with video the preferred format. It also said it would exit pure print advertising, effective in February. The correspondence further stated that all future partnerships would be led by digital content and they would only consider print pages as a complement to these programs (Lockwood, WWD, 2019).
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Figure 2
BLOGS AND ECOMMERCE
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s consumers are now becoming more particular with what they want to purchase, in today’s competitive retail market, brands must create and maintain a robust online presence. To communicate its identity to the target audience successfully, a brand has to follow the media usage habits of its target audience. Fashion brands have primarily adopted social media; this profiles celebrities and influencers which advocate their products. This emerging generation obtains its information from resources online, indicating a vast opportunity for marketers in the digital world. Burberry is a British luxury brand which was founded in 1986 by Thomas Burberry (Burberry, 2020). The digitalisation of the brand developed in 2006, when Angela Ahrendts took the helm of Burberry, the company’s top-line growth was significantly growing at around 12 to 13 percent a year, Burberrys growth was only 1 to 2 percent. The company was not keeping pace with the rapid development in the luxury good market, neither in terms of innovation nor in terms of products and services. This last strategic choice proved critical to Burberry’s digi-
tal journey. The company decided to target its marketing spending on millennial consumers, those in their twenties. They chose to focus on emerging economies, where the average high-net-worth customer is typically fifteen years younger than in traditional markets. To engage and communicate effectively with this population, Burberry had to use millennials mother tongue: digital. That’s when the digital vision became reality and the digital transformation started for Burberry (Caroll, 2014). Furthermore, Burberry continues to engage and interact with their consumers digitally. As a result, the company is pursuing more intelligent social media campaigns, working on creating digital-first platform collaborations, and looking at tailoring communications to better engage with customers. “Our brand energy is built on creative content such as capsules, projects, and collaborations. In the digital age, consumers engage visually and often. They expect, so we deliver, continuous innovative content,” said Burberry CMO Sarah Manley (Roy, 2019). Digital technologies have been expanding and rapidly developed transforming businesses, brands and societies for over two decades. The British company have tapped [7]
Figure 3
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into digital marketing and have created a campaign with Google, which makes an emotional connection between the brand and the millennial consumer. By creating this interactive experience, the digitally advanced brand explores technology to embrace a younger demographic group enticing them with a vibrant campaign which enables you to send a kiss which is then brought to life using 3d animation and using Google Earth. In 1999, “Blogger” was started by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan at Pyra Labs. Blogger is largely responsible for bringing blogging into the mainstream. The early 2000s were a period of growth for blogs. In 1999, according to a list compiled by Jesse James Garrett, there were 23 blogs on the internet (Staff, 2011). Blogging is a collection of skills that one needs to run and supervise a blog. This entails equipping a web page with tools to make the process of writing, posting, linking, and sharing content easier on the internet (Skrba, 2020). Blogging has developed over the years and has had a huge influence on people’s interactions, work, buying and life habits. Blogs have provided us with instant communication enabling us to tap into the expanding market, which
companies are introducing methods of connecting with, and marketing to potential clients. Within the touch of a button, publishing and changing content has never been easier. Blogs can be created within minutes, and they can now power entire websites. Whereas, years ago, blogs were just a series of short personal dispatches and links. Blogging allows you to develop a strong sense of community, whereas social media provides you with a sense of community. Blogs allow you to share your knowledge, refine your writing skills and build your professional networking. “I discovered street style blogs relatively late in the game, right as they were transitioning from online cult status to fashion world ubiquity. I needed some way to continue the work from the auspices of my office at Drexel University in Philadelphia, half away from my field site. So, I did what any minimally technology savvy social scientist would do in my position in this day and age: I turned to the internet. There were hundreds of fashion blogs in Indonesia alone by 2010, peddling their cosmopolitan daydreams of a borderless fashion world. These blogs attract tens of thousands of readers daily” (Jenss, 2016).
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ocial media is changing the nature of political communication because they are tools that can be used to inform mobilize users in new ways. Users can connect directly to politicians and campaign managers and engage in political activities in new ways. “As political campaigns are becoming increasingly more expensive and the need to reach out to constituencies is becoming more vital, social media will undoubtedly play a more important role in determining electoral outcomes as it gives young politicians a platform”. Beyond communicating their policy views, new candidates can humanize themselves through their social media accounts, and that helps voters feel more connected to them (University of Pennsylvania, 2020). Since he revealed he was running for presidency in 2015, Donald Trump has used social media, Twitter in particular, to connect with voters and to improve his status of himself like no previous U.S politician. True to his past as a controversial reality-TV star, Trump regularly posted highly controversial and proactive messages on Twitter, agitating against immigrants, denigrating opponents, and taunting the media. This meant breaking pro[10]
tocol with established campaigning styles and contradicting expectations of appropriate behaviour for presidential candidates. But publicly visible interactions with tweets in the form of retweets, likes, or mentions allowed the campaigns an onlooker to assess the relative popularity of the claims. Reportedly, this made Trumps tweets a weather gauge for the campaign to assess the fit of the messages for their intended audience. Journalists read these publicly visible metrics as signs for Trump being in touch with Americans. Let us for the moment ignore whether social media metrics indeed offer a true reflection of public opinion; in 2015 their use as such helped transform a reality-TV personality into the Republican presidential candidate and ultimately into the US President (Jungherr, 2020). The evolution of social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, from platforms facilitating networks among friends to powerful political tools has been an especially momentous development. The political role of social media in American politics was established during the 2008 presidential election. Since then, social media’s political function in campaigns, government, and political movements, as well as their role in the news media ecosystem, has rapidly broadened in reach, consequence, and complexity. Still, there are indications that elite political actors have increasingly at-
THE INTERNET, POLITICS AND NEWSPAPERS
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tempted to shape, even restrict, the public’s digital influence in the political sphere. Since 2008, parties and campaign organizations have sought to hyper-manage voters’ digital engagement in elections by channelling their involvement through official Web sites and social-media platforms (Owen, 2020). An impact on the Internet and newspapers has been the explosion in the availability of news online. This has been involved by the promise of increased interactivity between readers and journalists. The likelihood for readers to contribute to news stories by posting a comment and writing blogs, alongside journalists’ and user-generated content. Online editions of newspapers have the potential to create new formats as those pages are available at the click of a mouse rather than a flick of thumb and finger. The emergence of the Internet in a rapidly changing academic world is resulting in lower profits for traditional newspaper publishing. The gap between the share of Americans who get news online and those who do so on television is narrowing. As of August, 43% of Americans report often getting news online, just 7 percentage points lower than the 50% who often get the news on television according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in August. This [12]
gap between the two news platforms was 19 points in early 2016, more than twice as large (Shearer, 2017). With so much content on the internet now, it’s questionable to why people still buy printed newspapers. The portability of a newspaper is the same as carrying a mobile device; it can be read anywhere. However, some people may argue that reading a newspaper is more of a habit, therefore would instead continue reading a physical paper rather than a digital one. Readers might also read physical newspapers to look for community or regional news, and obituaries.
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PRINT AND DIGITAL MEDIA
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rinted books are almost a thing of the past, and the rise of eBooks is another reason why the world is slowly transitioning from printed books to eBooks. An eBook is a text presented in a format which allows it to be read on a computer or handheld device. Many titles which are available in printed versions can be read as eBooks, including bestselling fiction, classics and reference texts (Yates, 2001). “Print will exist, but it will be in a different realm and will appeal to a very limited audience, like poetry does today” (Nuwer, 2016). The rapid adoption of technology and eBooks can enable an easier, cheaper and more sustainable future. “I think the future of print magazine is unfortunately not looking great. During this time, people are wanting their entertainment or source of reading digitally. No one is able to browse a magazine stand or check out an article whilst waiting in line at the story anymore. However, I think magazine publications are thriving with digital subscriptions! During this time, people want entertainment to take them away from the reality and subscribing to Vogue, Nylon etc digitally does that (Otte A. , The rise
of digital media , 2020). Human society is progressively influencing the world and its environmental systems. The present ecological issues demonstrate that production and consumption ideas are not sustainable. As the world is slowly shifting digital, this can potentially be a positive impact on the environment due to sustainability. Within the current report that print journalism is a declining field, there are advantages of the digital shift. Printed magazines result in producing vast amounts of paper which require large amounts of carbon dioxide encouraging negative impacts on the environment. Print is reinventing itself to be more vibrant than ever, an energetic force in a multichannel communications world. Years of turmoil have forced printers to refine their systems, minimise waste and maximise process automation and efficiency. Streamlined process management and being based on a renewable resource make print a highly sustainable, as well as effective, medium. Rising environmental awareness is encouraging environmentally smart media buyers to refocus on print (Team, 2016). In 2018, Elle Magazine published its magazine using recycled paper for the first time, dedicating its September issue to sustainability. Elle has switched its text pages from its usual UPM Star 75gsm to a 70gsm UltraSky grade from [15]
Leipa Paper for the special edition. Leipa uses wastepaper as the main raw material at its two mills in Germany, and UltraSky is made from 100% post-consumer waste (Francis, 2018). Not only did the magazine provide retailers with a fresh marketing opportunity, but they also took a step in the right direction encouraging a commitment to doing their bit for the environment in a way that reaches a broad audience. By starting the conversation and furthering the knowledge on sustainable matters, Elle has dedicated their whole September issue, which is accessible, and it can manipulate its marketing into a sustainable mould. The British edition of the fashion title Glamour is to implement a digital-first strategy under which it will print a magazine twice a year and merge its editorial and commercial operations, it has announced (Rawlinson, 2017). Now the magazine is online, it’s easy to access and it’s convenient for the reader, as this can be done at home or in the office. Another importance of the digital magazine is that it reduces a lot of paper waste, therefore encourages sustainability. The shift to digital also meant that there were some challenges for Glamour, such as being aware of the language used online, re[16]
ceiving feedback and scoring into the traffic game.
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CORONAVIRUS
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C
oronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus (World Health Organisation, 2020). A novel strain of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in China’s Hubei province with a population of 11 million, after an outbreak of pneumonia without an obvious cause. The virus has now spread to over 200 countries and territories across the globe and was characterised as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020 (Pharmaceutical, 2020). The world had changed overnight, and internet behaviour is demonstrating how quickly users are adapting the call to stay at home. Consumers crave normality but have new priorities; however, health and affordability will dominate beyond COVID-19. With social distancing keeping the majority of people at the residence, we see significant changes in behavioural trends. Consumers are seeking escapism and entertainment and are spending more time on social media in a pre-5g world. Some of these behaviour changes may be more temporary. In contrast, some
of them are permanent, as health and safety concerns are urging more customers regarding contactless payment systems such as using mobile devices to pay without touching the surface. The world is shifting at an unprecedented pace and trends that WGSN predicted for the next decade have accelerated to become part of our lives in a matter of weeks. From above-the-keyboard dressing to the home hub, we’re now incorporating new ways of living and working at speed. At WGSN, we’re used to seeing our long-term forecasts come to life quickly, but never this fast. The coronavirus pandemic is shaping up to be the biggest global driver of change seen in most people’s lifetime, and it is already forging new consumer attitudes. Entire industries are having to adapt to a new reality that demands flexibility, resilience and, above all, creativity (Bell, 2020). In recent years, digitalisation has made immense progress. Due to the Covid-19 global pandemic, this has directed an unavoidable surge in digital technologies because of nationwide lockdowns and social distancing. The pandemic has shifted education and work institutions online, like schools, offices, airports, restaurants all had to close throughout England. The global pandemic resulted in the majority of people interacting through the internet, as that was the only way they could [19]
Figure 6
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communicate with each other, whether it was work, school or entertainment purposes. I think digital was already overtaking before the pandemic, but it did, of course, drive everyone to social media way more than usual. Brands have had to adapt and focus on their social. But as mentioned above, we have started to see a comeback of print magazines - could this be because people are a bit fed up with only communicating or getting their entertainment via a screen? Maybe they want to have something real to hold on to and remember (Finlay, The rise of digital media , 2020).
dia spend; Google and Facebook are seeing changes, some negative, to their business already. Marketers will need to adopt an investor mindset to aggressively adjust marketing spend and continually track performance in order to reallocate it quickly. With stores shut or shutting, a shift to online is inevitable, and companies will need to be both committed and creative about how to use digital channels (Julien Boudet, 2020).
There is a handful of challenging influences such as social, environmental, political, technological and economical that are engaging companies to adjust to challenging and fluctuating contexts. With more consumers at home, media consumption is changing, too. However, with these consumption habits, it is recognised that some contrasts arise with the transformation and change in society. We are seeing growth in at-home media consumption, with live news and movies or shows topping the list. But the increase in time spent on media is not necessarily driving higher ROI for digital me[21]
SURVEY
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T
he last part of this study involved in an online survey to explore the topic of the rise of digital media, receiving 15 responses. The first question was “Do you purchase fashion magazines?”, 40% answered yes, and 60% answered no. The second question asked, “Do you use fashion magazines as a source of inspiration?” 60% answered yes, and 40% answered no. The third question asked, “Do you use Instagram as a source of inspiration?” 93.33% answered yes, and 6.67% answered no. The final question asked, “Are you more likely to purchase something advertised in magazines or online?”. 100% answered, yes. This analysis produced findings which supported my research, understanding the aspects of the apparent shift from print to digital media.
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IMAGE REFERENCES Front cover: https://www.instagram.com/p/B_XcLblDxYv/ Figure 1 and 2: https://www.racked.com/2015/10/15/9534325/calvin-klein-mycalvins-justin-bieber-kendall-jenner Figure 3: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/burberry-partners-google-digital-kisses-campaign/1185876 Figure 4: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/donald-trump-red-button-forordering-coke Figure 5: https://snobette.com/2020/04/vogue-italia-all-white-cover-april-2020/ Figure 6: https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/nicole-kidman-glamour-cover-interview-2020
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LAUREN BARNES 1819758 AD6603