5 central facets of media and PR in China
Last month I gave the keynote at Ketchum’s Global Media Network meeting in New York on The Future of Global Media. Immediately after my keynote I participated in a panel on media in the BRIC countries. The other panellists were Ketchum executives from Brazil, Russia, and India. Since their China team were kept at home with client commitments I stood in to talk about China, given my background in the region. Details on the keynote and panel are here.
Here are notes I made to prepare for the panel session, where we were asked to share 5 key issues about the media landscape in our country.
0. Asia and China encompass very diverse media markets.
Across Asia media markets take very different shapes. The largest market by revenue is Japan, which is very different from Western developed economies, notably in the size and resilience of the newspaper market, and the depth of penetration of mobile internet. Hong Kong and Taiwan have very distinct markets from mainland China, both being more similar structurally and in terms of media relations to Western countries. The massive mainland China market itself has significantly different characteristics at the national, metropolitan, regional and local levels.
The following points relate to the mainland China (P.R.C.) media market.
1. Newspaper and broadcast markets are growing rapidly.
As many more people shift to higher socio-economic brackets and literacy increases, newspaper readership and broadcast TV audiences are rapidly developing. China is already the largest newspaper market in the world, and TV and radio advertising revenue is growing at a double-digit pace. There is still substantial scope for sustained growth in these traditional media markets.
2. Internet and social media are very active and increasing at an explosive pace.
China now has more internet users than any other country in the world, however they use it in a different way to in many Western countries. The most prominent social network, QQ, is primarily an IM/ chat-based platform, with a wide variety of forums attracting intense participation. RenRen is prominent.
3. Censorship and controls are fundamentals of the landscape.
The ‘Great Firewall of China’ blocks access to a wide variety of international websites and specific content, some politically-driven (e.g. regarding Tibet) and others sites where discussion cannot be controlled (e.g. Facebook, Twitter). The dominant internet companies in particular are highly co-operative in censorship, including in filtering out sensitive words from their forums. All of these blocks and filters can be fairly easily circumvented, but few have the skills or make the effort to do so.
4. Commercial interests trump everything.
Chinese contemporary culture is intensely money-focused, shaping both what companies charge for, and what people expect to pay for. Corporate profiles on most social networks are paid. It is commonplace for companies to pay people to ‘seed’ forums with positive comments. Editorial independence is often not seen as relevant or a priority, and no-one sees a problem printing press releases as they are if they read well.
5. Journalist relationships require investment.
As in many other aspects of Chinese society, relationships are critical in being able to access and influence journalists. The payment of ‘transportation fees’ to journalists for them to attend press briefings or do interviews is seen as standard. Journalists are not well-paid, and are mainly young, some of them recent graduates.
