By-product of Marcom build up
Vodafone has joined in the online media gold rush by what it describes as “launching its own news website.”
The New Zealand subsidiary of the British mobiles telco in recent times has swelled its marketing communications force with television, business, and IT sector journalists.
The company’s “news” website meanwhile resembles an online version of the once familiar IT sector marketing support instrument, the house magazine.
The company’s news site hardly surprisingly features Vodafone in its community role.
Notably with emphasis on its participation in the post–earthquake Christchurch reconstruction participation.
Also its ability to deploy helpful rapid support services in Oceania.
The marcom by-product news site at this stage does represent though a potential challenge to the IT trade press.
This is dominated in New Zealand by International Data, a US publishing, survey, and events operator which publishes under licence here with such titles as Computerworld, CIO, and PC World.
According to Vodafone its “Vodafone News will feature behind the scenes video of important developments, offer advice and readable features across a range of topics for consumers as well as insights from leaders in a range of diverse fields.”
A heavily promoted video-voice-words convergence over hand-helds poses a medium to longer term threat to the media at large.
This is because by definition it targets the younger market, the one which increasingly relies exclusively on palm tops of various descriptions as access to news that it can use.
Since the heyday of IT recruitment advertising, as significant in its era as property advertising is now, the print proprietors have pretty much given up on targeted IT news, absorbing it into their general business sections.
Vodafone is not the first retail telco provider to move into the wider news sector.
Telecom was first off the mark with an authentic diversified aggregated news site for its Xtra users. This was then subsumed into Yahoo which expanded the already comprehensive localised curated coverage.
For reasons that remain unexplained this long established open site remains un-ballyhooed.
In this reticence may lie the gap that Vodafone has identified.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' | 19 March 2017 ||
