Gabriel Miró Quesada: “We are no longer information distribution media, but content generators”

The chairman of the board of The Trade GroupGabriel Miró Quesada, participated this Thursday the 10th in the first debate within the series of seminars organized by the Social Council of the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) in Spain and dedicated to analyzing the challenges that lie ahead for media.

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Carlos Núñez, executive president of the Spanish media conglomerate Prisa Media, also participated in the event, which was moderated by the economist and strategic consultant Andrés Cardó and the former director of the newspaper “El País” Javier Moreno.

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During the virtual event, which had more than 500 connected users, the panel devoted itself to analyzing the changes that traditional media have undergone -especially print newspapers- during the last two decades, in addition to detailing the strategies with which they plan to face the challenges ahead.

In this sense, Núñez and Miró Quesada agreed that in both the Spanish and Peruvian markets, readers have migrated to the digital format, leaving aside the traditional print edition.

“The digital environment has changed the business paradigm. Before, a newspaper controlled its entire value chain; this has changed in the digital channel, where we have the ability to access millions of readers and listeners that we want to serve”, emphasized Nunez.

“Although the trends are more delayed, in the Peruvian case the situation is not unrelated. Internet access is different, the number of people who need to read you in print is still holding up significantly, but the trend is exactly the same. We have also understood that our role in the industry has changed, we should not see ourselves as an information distributor, but as a content generator.”, remarked Miró Quesada for his part.

Both panelists also stressed that the COVID-19 pandemic was decisive in the conversion to the digital world of both conglomerates.

“We saw market trends coming in other countries. That allowed us to get ready, but the preparation fell short. The pandemic greatly accelerated these changes and allowed us to adapt more quickly to the new market conditions. We started the process since 2014, more or less, when the focus was on improving the web pages (of our newspapers), but maintaining the priority towards the written medium, while the digital one accompanied it. However, we gradually realized that we could not stay there. Today we define ourselves as an organization oriented to ‘digital first’, where the printed medium accompanies the digital. The challenge is to monetize it”, Miró Quesada explained.

DIGITAL ADVERTISING: THE GREAT CHALLENGE

Andrés Cardó highlighted during the talk the changes that advertising budgets have undergone in recent years, clearly highlighting how the digital channel went from representing a quarter of the total in the main Ibero-American markets to exceeding 50% or, in cases such as Chile approach this number.

The main reason, according to the expert, lies in the ability of digital platforms to segment the audience, allowing brands to have a more effective impact on their target audiences.

“That is our great challenge as media, to see how we focus our portfolio to provide efficiency in terms closer to the platforms.”, Nunez pointed out.

“In the end, there are two income lines for a medium: payments for content and advertising. In the case of El Comercio, 2021 has been the first year in which digital advertising has represented 50% of revenue compared to print. This has happened because one grew a lot and the other fell a lot. I estimate that in the next two or three years, digital advertising will be the biggest revenue there is. In the digital world, to the extent that one has quality content, with a brand that has been behind it for 183 years, the user will have the certainty that they are reading content with all the characteristics to be trusted: serious, balanced, with collated sources. For a few months we have been part of the Trust Project. These are, in the end, measures with which one tries to distinguish oneself in the digital medium to provide a differentiated service. That translates into a greater number of subscribers, attractive to the advertiser. Brands will not stop investing in the big platforms, but advertising also needs to know clearly and in detail who, how and why it is reaching. The big platforms give you volume but hardly the detail of who your content is aimed at”, remarked the director of El Comercio.

Núñez also emphasized the need for the media not to depend entirely on economic income from advertising. “We want to have the largest number of paying subscribers in Spain with El País in order to have a stable line of income and to correlate us with the evolution of advertising. A communication medium that depends only on advertising has the challenge of having less income because it is cyclical. Digital subscribers are key to business stability. And that depends on two things: the product, we must offer added value; the other is the market, in Spain the market is skimming and our readers have to get used to this“, he pointed.

Miró Quesada, for his part, explained how different the path to the digital world was for the media, depending on the type of information they provide.

“We manage eight brands, 7 on paper and one digital, which are highly segmented. Each brand has different challenges. In our case, the digital model for the sports brand has been a tremendous success. Whoever consumes sports needs the result at that moment, the digital medium allows the brand to offer that information to the reader. That is why in 2021, Depor broke all national and international barriers. We are one of the two main brands in Mexico, one of the three main ones in Colombia and the main one in Peru. However, in the world of politics it is very difficult for the brand to leave the purely political sphere, what we must do is give that added value to the consumer in a different way with more content, more opinion, more reflection, more situation before the immediacy of a data. The goal remains the same, to give those readers the product they need. And not necessarily the product you have is what they demand, some changes will have to be made and we will have to adapt to each audience”, he explained.

NEW FORMATS

Based on the example of the American consumer, the panel also analyzed which formats are currently most consumed by audiences. In that sense, they highlighted how during 2021 80% of Internet traffic globally was through streaming. In addition, they highlighted the appearance of more than 300 platforms dedicated to streaming.

Both Núñez and Miró Quesada recognized that the US market had an advantage of two or three years over the rest of the planet, which made it possible to foresee future trends and try to be prepared for when they reach their respective markets.

“The market is not yet mature enough to market podcasts. It will come from the hand of technology, to know how you download the ads; and the appetite of advertisers in that format. Our position is to develop that format, we have to be yes or yes because in the end the demand goes there. Regarding the audiovisual part, the content is consumed in 360 degrees. The audiovisual part is more advanced than the audio-only part, there are platforms with more audience than some television stations, so they become just another player. You identify the advertiser’s appetite. So it is another medium in which we must be yes or yes. We must be prepared to serve our content in all formats”, pointed out the head of Prisa Media.

“The Peruvian consumer today is not used to consuming audio content. The opposite happens with video, today they want to consume more video than ever. in our case at least we know that we should watch the audio, to know when to put a lot of work into it and try to make sure no one beats us; however, in video I think we are behind. The demand far exceeds our supply. Among all the products that we bring out, the market still demands more than we can produce. We have something pending to give”, acknowledged Miró Quesada for his part.

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Source: Elcomercio

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