Blogging about social media » End of advertising on french national TV

French President Sarkozy handled a big press conference yesterday in Paris with more than 600 journalists from 40 countries around the world. He made several announcement regarding his politic and precisely one regarding advertising: he wants to see the end of advertising on french national public TV.

If this really happens, and we'll see that in the next weeks, this will bring a big change in the TV advertising space and in the way brands communicate. From a PR perspective, this is a good news as this will certainly lead to a focus on content driven communication rather than on a messaging driven one. But without preaching for one or another church, in the life of every brand, there is time for both advertising and for PR depending of the moment in the life time cycle, so I am not going to focus on this side of the question.

Rather, I'd like to make the point on the change this wil bring to advertising and the new challenge for brands. I am not addressing neither the issue of "how will broadcast be able to produce valuable content now, who is going to pay for the production etc...".

First point and the easiest of course, there will be less space for message, so the space is going to be more difficult to get, more expensive, the fight is going to be hard to get the slot you want. This will give more power to TF1 and M6, the 2 biggest channel/broadcast in the French private sector, that's evidence. Without consideration for the cost of the time on air, the selection of the appropriate message to be distributed via the appropriate channel will be also increased as there will be less space to say as much things as before.

The good news is for alternative channels/broadcast (the digital TV channels ...) and for the digital world, say the Web. This will certainly kick off the interest for alternative media and probably also accelerate the evolution of brands to become their own media. If you don't have enough space to reach your audience via the old mass media, let's focus on the long tail and address people depending of the place they are used to go to get their news. Podcast, web TV, social networks, gaming, customized desktop, widgets, RSS readers, the social media world is wide open for brands to start experiencing new communications, more often based on content then basic messaging I have to say, but there is a huge potential.

This means also entering a world led by active consumers rather than one led by passive consumers. I also see there a big potential for an acceleration of "contentainement" based campaign. Although I can easily understand that not everyone is going to be happy by this change in the advertising landscape, once again, a lot of habits and old rules are going to be broken, it remains a very interesting change, as sooon as it really comes to reality, and that is what we'll see probably soon.

So some more deep thoughts on the topic certainly soon here.