WARC and the Advertising Association have predicted that UK press advertising spend could fall by £1.6 billion by 2019. This recent forecast is at least realistic and possibly an over optimistic scenario for press. At the Newspaper Society Conference in 2000 I identified a stratum of media communication that was dangerously exposed to competition from the Internet. It’s that layer of product and service based advertising - where to go, where to find it, how to do it - often locally. In short, it was press “small ads”; fractionals, classified ads and directory entries. These areas of press are under attack from three sides:

1. Consumers aren’t using press for news in the way they used to
2. Consumers are finding product information in online search when they need it, not in fractional press ads when media planners think they need it
3. As a consequence of item 2, advertisers are finding far greater product sales efficiencies in areas like online search. Some advertisers are spending £500k per month in search - and that is most likely from the very product sales budget that would have gone to fractional and small ads in press and directories.

I thought I’d add some media forecasts of my own for 2019:

1. The media world will look as different in 2019 as a motorway now looks when compared to a dirt track.
2. Many magazines and newspapers will have gone completely, the established brands will continue to exist online with lower circulation ‘feature and comment’ magazines in print.
3. Most TV will be delivered via Broadband Internet.
4. Viewers will schedule all their own entertainment on an on demand basis; the job of TV scheduler will cease to exist.
5. The boundaries between print and TV will fuse with much cross-media consumption and ownership
6. Consumers will organise their own news and TV programme schedules in a framework that looks like today’s RSS readers.
7. The provider of the new “universal reader” will probably be the new Google but they are unlikely to develop this “universal reader” as most companies only have one huge hit and they’ve had theirs.
8. The use of personal devices like ipods will become all pervasive; and they’ll do far more; you’ll be able to turn your oven on with it.
9. The decline in press ad revenue will be greater than £1.9bn by 2019.