Often times, it’s not the attention grabbing lines that are the most useful from Ofcom data and 2025’s Media Nations report is no exception.
I’ll talk about the findings around YouTube that got most attention shortly, but for me the most useful single table was the monthly reach of online and offline selected media activities.
It’s useful because it paints a broad picture of what content people are consuming on average across the UK.
This is it. I recommend you study it and save it.
What media we consume in the UK in 2025
In short, the most popular content consumed by all ages across the nation is watching video on demand. That’s telly that we can catch-up with. That includes iPlayer, Channel 4, ITV Disney+ as well as a whole list of other fringe platforms regulated by Ofcom. That’s things like Dave, BFI Player as well as less August platforms like the Adult Channel.
Overall, 85 per cent are watching video on demand. That’s considerably higher than the 67 per cent who watch live TV.
The data shows the need to recalibrate comms teams
Social media is the second most consumed data in the UK with 84 per cent having used it at least once in the previous month. This is more than three times the number reading print newspapers or reaching what Ofcom call online news brands. That’s everything from a local Reach plc title to the BBC online.
When I consider how often a team can be pointed resolutely at traditional media this data shows how outdated this concept is. Traditional media still has a role absolutely. The crisis posed by the car driving into the Liverpool FC trophy parade shows this. Responsible reporting of police announcement dampened down the potential for a flashpoint. But so many days of the year people are not moved to head to a news site as a destination over scrolling.
I’ve been making this observation for more than a decade and I’m not alone in this. It’s refreshing when this adjustment is made but all too many don’t. Planning, creating and posting effective social media should be a core skill in 2025.
Radio is the perennial Cinderella platform
Yet again, radio makes an appearance high in the chart with 68 per cent listening on a radio set and 38 per cent listening to live radio online. Strong numbers.
However, so much live radio is not something that public sector comms teams can easily tap into. Regional BBC radio and maybe community radio are where conversations can be had but elsewhere in the report shows around 15 per cent of the population are listening to regional stations.
The kind of audio younger people are consuming is online music enjoyed by almost two thirds of the wider population streaming YouTube, Spotify or another music streaming service. For younger people this rises to 90 per cent.
What this may flag up to the eagle eyed is the advertising value of reaching younger people through Spotify ads.
Podcasting
Keep an eye on podcasting but not too much of one. This is a national pastime rather than local with 35 per cent listening. Elsewhere in the report, under 34s are most likely to be listening to entertainment podcasts and over 35s are most drawn to news. If you have a nationally significant piece of news or some niche content this could work for you but this is not a well-trodden path. I’d love to see more.
Your TV and YouTube
Someone wise once said that things get really interesting when they get a bit boring when it comes to technology. YouTube is just that. It’s not new an exciting is it? But it is pulling in strong numbers.
Much attention in the Ofcom press release was paid to the report’s revelation that YouTube is making inroads in people’s TV sets. Smart TVs connect to the web and can be watched easily. The overall figure has risen by 47 per cent from 14 minutes a day on average per UK adult to 21 minutes.
Overall, we are watching more TV with the figure now standing at 39 minutes, a rise of 13 per cent year-on-year.
Again, there’s an opportunity here for some YouTube ads via Google.
The strength and danger of broad figures
There’s something to be gained from broad brush figures which this blog features. There are elements of breaking it down for different age groups in the document and I’d encourage you to drill into the report of you need more.
There are versions for Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland too. I’ll blog about them seperately.
An elderly couple going shopping may be one of the greatest social videos I’ve ever seen.
The pair go with their son and use the JustPark app as a way to locate and pay for a parking space.
The video is shot POV by someone close to the family so the couple Michael & Teresa behave naturally for them.
The couple look in their late 60s and get into the car. There’s a minor squabble about the number of times Teresa took her driving test. She says two. Her husband Michael says four.
They drive along and Teresa struggles with the idea of using a stranger’s drive to park.
“That’s tresspass isn’t it?” she worriedly asks.
They park. It’s fine. She’s converted.
You can see it here:
It’s a beautiful film filled with warmth and humanity.
You can’t fail to like them both.
It’s also a fast edit that also has a voiceover intro from what is possibly Michael & Teresa’s son.
It’s human, it’s not AI generated and is filled with the rough edges of people’s relationships. There’s a feeling Teresa’s driving test has been discussed before. You are entering priviliged space.
So, could this be replicated?
Well, maybe Michael and Teresa can’t come to your [Insert service here] but what it does open the field up to is for people to capture an experience.
So, what does the family make of the trip to the leisure centre? Open with the excitement of getting into the car, the drive, the heading into the baths, the post-swim drink, the children’s feedback in the car on the way home, maybe.
All this needs the consent of participants, of course.
But spent a couple of minutes on options and there’s a whole vista of experiences.
A shopping trip to the town centre, testing a smoke alarm, putting out the recycling, or whatever.
I love that this captures the lived experience rather than the corporate message or the slick marketing that in comparison falls down flat.
Change can be radical and the incoming Labour administration shows no signs of letting the grass grow.
In a few days time the Kings Speech will set out the new Government’s plans for the next Parliament and there’s plenty for public sector comms to think about.
For me, the most significant of the 30 bills expected to be listed is the long awaited Hillsborough law. In short, this puts an expectation of candour on public officials and bodies at a public enquiry. In other words, to be honest and transparent when things go wrong.
This recommendation was first made seven years ago by the Government report into the 97 deaths into the football stadium disaster of almost four decades ago. It is high time it was enacted.
Why is this significant?
In very simple terms, a lack of transparency from some public bodies has led to justice delayed. South Yorkshire Police for decades blamed Liverpool fans for the Hillsborough disaster rather than reflected on their own actions.
There’s a catalogue of errors that reputation management has had a hand in.
What’s wrong with reputation management?
In itself, there’s nothing wrong with the comms team looking after the best interests of the organisation. Reputation management is presenting the best side of the organisation to the public.
The problem is reputation management can label everyone who isn’t happy as the enemy.
In the NHS, the Francis report highlighted reputation management as one of the problems with the running of Mid Staffs Hospital in Stafford. Findings highlighted: “An institutional culture which ascribed more weight to positive information about the service than to information capable of implying cause for concern.”
The report into problems with East Kent’s maternity department highlighted reputation management singled out “denial, deflection, concealment and aggressive responses to challenge.”
The Lucy Letby murders also highlighted reputation management as one of the issues in the case.
Then there’s the Post Office sub-post master prosectutions.
Every organisation makes three types of decision
Let’s be honest. Any organisation makes three types of decision.
First are good decisions.
Second are good decisions poorly explained.
Then there are bad decisions. They make no sense, they’re unpopular and lead to flak.
The role of comms in decision making
Of course, the ideal is to be at the top table helping the decision makers and flagging up problems. But the world isn’t like that. So, the role of comms is to play back the online feedback to the decision makers. If there’s a 20 comments in rapid order calling the decision out do you need to better explain the decision? Or is this something for the organisation to reflect on?
The answer to this is often above our pay grade but we comms can help give information that will help shape their answers.
A more healthy approach to reputation management the Hillsborough Law introduces can only save lives.
It doesn’t need a disaster for you to start doing it.
‘A new dawn has broken, has it not,’ Tony Blair famously said as he addressed supporters at Royal Festival Hall in London as its new Prime Minister.
The Labour operation had deliberately waited until the first golden rays of the morning sun had reached over the Thames to brighten the shot that framed the 1997 Labour landslide.
Their approaches of message discipline and news management became the textbook of how to communicate.
Yet, everything changes, as Take That once pointed out. In 2007, The Sun sold 3.1 million copies and the News of the World shifted 3.5 million. Today, one doesn’t exist and the other no longer publishes circulation figures.
In 2024, The Sun’s intervention to support Labour with a lame football-themed frontpage that called for a new manager was met with general indifference and a shrug. It was a bulletin from another era.
Eighty per cent of the UK population has a social media account where we will graze our entertainment and news will come and find you if its important enough. The very idea of cycling to the paper shop to find out what’s happened belongs in the 20th century.
My General Election from a different perspective
In 2024, free of being politically restricted I volunteered to work on Labour’s campaign in Halesowen. It was professionally eye opening.
My first General Election was that Blair Labour triumph of 1997 where I covered it as a reporter for the Halesowen News. Labour fought and won that Black Country seat that fringes the Worcestershire countryside.
As a reporter, the phone would be ringing with calls from candidates most days in the six months beforehand. In the last six weeks, we would have a theme and invite the candidates to tell us what they’d do to handle crime, the NHS, jobs and other perennials. One week, we even got each candidate to submit an example of handwriting with their permission to a retired company director who was the UK head of a graphoanalyst society.
In 2024, The Halesowen News, is no longer based in the town, featured the Labour candidate a handful of times. Print media was an after thought to the campaign.
This was the meme election
But if it wasn’t local media driving the debate what was? I think I’ve got a meme that can tackle that.
Memes are sharable pieces of content that can make an observation, crack a joke or make a point. Agree? Hit like. Disagree? Fall into the trap and start an argument that will boost the original post with the algorithm.
Both Labour and Conservatives used memes as the sharp spear point of their election message. Activists were signed-up to spread local-themed and national messages across their networks.
Politics has long moved on from 19th century beer-laced election festivals to hustings to newspapers to the mobile phone that you scroll through. Had Blair, Churchill or Attlee being campaigning today they would be all across the meme.
The Conservatives had an app while Labour had a website with downloadable imagery.
But for all the officially-shaped content there was also a blizzard of combative unofficial content that would never have got past the approval process. Reform have a downloadable profile picture that’s all about spreading the branding.
The Sun boasted in 1992 that ‘it was The Sun wot won it.’ In 2024, if there was one thing more important than another maybe it was the meme election.
But…
This was also the anti-meme meme election
Need a message? Here, have one. Then move onto the next thread. To counter that there’s the anti-meme meme. You’re making this point? Here’s a meme that pricks your balloon.
There was plenty of this in the meme wars that raged across the internet and in particular in community Facebook groups and Nextdoor.
As the campaign went on, it was clear that even more subtle ways to get past the admin gatekeepers was needed. In particular I was impressed at the Stourbridge resident who offered the olive branch that this really was all about love and used the highly incendiary shot of Matt Hancock kissing an aide during COVID in breach of COVID regulations.
Nextdoor were particularly adept at throttling the algorithm on content that may have mentioned elections.
This was the AI election (sort of)
In 1924, the Daily Mail printed the Zinoviev letter. This quoted an emissary from the newly-formed Soviet Union that spoke in support of the Labour Party which was knocking on the gates of Downing Street. It alarmed Middle England. It was a fake. But the public didn’t know this until after the election.
A century later, there was no AI-generated equivalent that pointed an accusing finger at a Labour Leader poised to take power in then last few days. This doesn’t mean that there wasn’t AI if you went looking for it.
The big warning that AI was going to flood our timelines with misinformation and disinformation didn’t land this time.
What we did see was a lot of ‘patriotic’ right wing AI art of Reform’s Nigel Farage and more racist content that was also called out. It was clearly artificial. But both Conservative and Labour also created memes that showed opposition figures in unreal scenarios. Labour using Rees-Mogg’s face to show what it would look like to wake up next to him if there was five more years of a Conservative government.
Was the Rees-Mogg image made with AI or just PhotoShop? I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. But that’s just it. It’s supposed to be hard to tell. It was definitely not real.
There was also the fake TikTok videos of leading politicians playing and commentating on Minecraft. To be really effective in their manipulation they have to carry a grain of truth. This couldn’t have pulled the wool over anyone. So, harmless then? Yes, largely. But it does nothing for building up politics as a worthwhile and noble profession.
More worryingly, The Guardian pointed to one example of AI tools being used to manipulate audio recorded on a Ring camera. This footage was shot which captured Labour supporters calling to deliver a leaflet. The candidate who posted it alleged a racial slur. An analysis of the recording showed anomalies.
Aside from that, the parties themselves were active creating content specifically for TikTok that looked and felt unlike video from other places.
This was the podcast approach election
I heard an episode of Radio 4’s ‘The Westminster Hour’ during the campaign. It was dreadful. Set piece lines to take deployed against each other by rival MPs not yet famous enough to have won their spurs.
The only Leaders’ debates that looked anything other than painful was Sky News in front of an audience whose laughter stripped past the lacquer of pre-prepared interviews. I cannot think that the set piece interview as it stands has any life left. It has been sanitised to death buried with a green pharmacy cross on its grave.
Yet, the informal podcast approach taken by programmes such as Electoral Dysfunction with Beth Rigby, Tory Ruth Davidson and Labour MP Jess Phillips or the genre-defining The Rest is Politics with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart are far more engaging.
It was the clipped-up news election
So, if print media is largely irrelevant does this mean that journalism is dead? Of course it doesn’t. It just means that the news will find people in clips that are seen online by far more who watched the original.
Keir Starmer’s stumble on Bangladeshi immigration cost his Party a big chunk of the Bangladeshi population across Britain, for example. Even the local journalism turned into sharable content.
And finally
If you think all this is just political communication and it won’t affect you as a communicator think again. Political campaigns, as I’ve said many times, are a petri dish for innovation.
The memes played a role but so did other factors. I can focus on the digital element but the door knocking, data gathering and get the vote out operation was all part of it.
Several of these approaches with a degree of imagination I can see working across the public sector. History shows that new tools which are at the bow wave in an election often become firmly part of the toolkit.
A while back I wrote a blog post on how to write a comms plan and the icebergs for you to navigate past.
It’s a subject that keeps coming up so I thought I’d take a fresh look at it and simplify things.
Yes, comms planning and evaluation is still important but its so often the thing that gets squeezed out.
Do it well and it saves you time in the medium and long term. It also demonstrates your worth.
Who should be involved in comms planning?
You should be and you should be holding the pen, too. You should be involving the service area and maybe two or three others too. The service area bring the data and you bring your expertise.
What can go wrong?
The comms plan is shaped by one person. This is a collaboration between you and other people. If it goes wrong it’s the fault of whoever drafted it.
They’ve got no data. If they’ve got no data you’re stuffed. You need to understand where you are now and where you’re going. You’ve got 100 volunteers. You need 120. So, that’s 20 recruits. That’s a different shaped campaign compared to one that needs 200 recruits or 2,000.
They’ve already made their mind up. It’s posters we want, choppety chop. This is not a comms plan. This is the text of an email to Prontaprint. You need to sit down to work through this plan.
They’ve left it too late. At this point you are managing expectations.
Here’s what an effective comms plan template looks like
Here are the questions for you to ask.
Where are you now?
2. Where do you want to go and why? (5 minutes)
3. You’ve done these two before the meeting, so there’s no need to spend too long on this. This points out on the map where you are.
4. Who do you want to talk to and why?
5. What’s the one thing you want them to do and why?
6. How much work time and money do you have to help you reach them? (15 minutes)
7. How long have you got?
8. When and how are you going to evaluate?
9. Who are you going to tell that you are doing this so you can tell them how it has gone?
10. Whats the timeline of tactics for it all?
Do this in advance and you’d got more chance of making the thing work.
The template can be found as a downloadable Google doc here.
It’s an obscenity that even as libraries close and care is cut that there is a £67.85 million back-door subsidy paid by local government to newspapers.
A what? And how much?
This is the true cost of councils being forced by law to pay over-the-odds for public notices tucked away in the back of printed newspapers being read by fewer and fewer people.
It is a throwback, a misguided sweetener to the newspaper industry and comes from the days when the local paper was the only show in town.
What are public notices? They’re announcements of where double yellow lines are to be painted, who has applied for a taxi licence and an application from a pub licensee for a late night opening licence. It is the bread and butter of a community.
Should they be communicated and publicised? Absolutely.
Can it be done without swingeing annual charges? Yes.
Being forced over a barrel to pay to communicate through local newspapers is the last throwback to a world before the internet.
It is wrong.
It flies in the face of government policy.
It is print-by-default in a digital-by-default world.
It must stop.
This is why and here is how we can do it.
The Government department in charge of local government has asked for ‘councils, newspapers and others’ to take a new look at how public notices are distributed. Any solution is dead in the water unless councils are stopped being made to pay for expensive print notices – or even pay for digital ones.
Really? Councils have to communicate like this?
Yes. Bonkers, isn’t it? There is a raft of legislation that mean that councils must take out newspaper ads before they take certain decisions. The aim is to publicise and encourage people to come forward with comment and opinion. Getting people involved is absolutely a good thing. The more people are informed and take part in the decision making process the better.
Her Majesty’s Government’s Ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher has written eloquently about this being the digital century. I’d agree with that. In the digital century people find out about what is happening through networks and the web. Not through small ads. Ask yourself this question: when was the last time you bought a local newspaper? When was the last public notice you read? And can you remember what it was about?
What is the state of local government?
In short, perilous. Every penny counts and in Town Halls up and down the land small sums of money and budget decisions are being argued about. The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicts 1.1 million job losses by 2019 across the public sector. Birmingham City Council Leader Albert Bore has talked of the ‘end of local government as we know it.’ Government funding cuts to local government are touching 40 per cent and spending power is falling by 25 per cent according to a critical National Audit Office report which observes that the Department for Communities and Local Government doesn’t understand the impact of cuts.
In other words, cuts are being made and every penny counts. Which is why being forced to spend on newspaper ads is wrong.
But how much do the public notices cost?
Think tank Local Government Information Unit – LGiU – calculated that in 2012 public notices in newspapers were costing £67.85 million. Public Notices: The Case for Radical Reform: Part One’ shows that this is on average £181,000 per authority. In some cases, the report says, public notices incurred a rate three times as expensive as normal display ads and reaching over £20 per column centimetre in some publications.
“This is a lot of money, especially when councils are trying desperately to !nd savings. It is also an outdated system that has been left behind by technological advances. The current system provides no feedback to councils and ignores the fact that the audience is moving away from printed newspapers, to a varied digital media landscape.
“LGiU believes change is necessary in the following areas: councils should be free to decide where is best to place public notices, more work needs to be done to de-jargon and standardise the content of public notices, councils who do publish notices online should o”er users an email subscription service, allowing users to opt-in to receive public notices, hyperlocal, neighbourhood websites, as well as traditional local media news sites, should be encouraged to carry feeds of council notices the government should look into the possibility of supporting the development of a central online portal for publishing public notices.
Public Notices: The Case for Radical Reform: Part One. LGiU.
But who reads newspapers these days?
Some people do. Ofcom in their annual Communications Market Report says that adults in the UK spend 15 minutes a day reading newspapers or looking at newspaper sites. For some people, they keep them informed. But these figures are dropping.
In comparison, adults spend 36 minutes on websites or apps and 26 minutes on social media. The breakdown is here.
In Walsall, where I worked in local government communications, the local paper the Express & Star in 2013 sold around 10,000 copies of the Walsall edition in a borough of more than 269,323 people. The newspaper industry says that between two and five people read each paid-for copy. For the sake of argument, if that was three people per copy that means 11 per cent of Walsall get to see the public notice. That’s if everyone reads the paper from cover-to-cover. That’s not a reason for paid-for public notices in print.
The figures are replicated across the country according to database JICREG with 67,759 copies of the Birmingham Mail on a Friday in a city of 2,440,986. In Greater Manchester, this is 126,293 on their busiest day for the Manchester Evening News in a population of 2,685,400. In Glasgow, the Evening Times reaches 33,397 in a population 2,850,000. The online readership of these three newspapers will be far higher but figures are difficult to obtain. None of these newspapers show public notices when you enter the search term in their websites.
I’ve heard the anachronistic argument that somehow only newspapers can be trusted to publish public notice content. Somehow the act of handing over 200 words and paying through the nose for it to appear in the back of newspapers that few people in a borough read afford some undefined magic propertiies. This is, of course, balderdash.
The days when newspapers are the only means of communicating have ended. They are one of a number of channels. The requirement to take out public notice ads with them should end. Sometimes, they’ll be the best way of communicating. But that decision should be de-centralised down to the local authority.
Four ways public notices breach Government advice
It wouldn’t be so bad if the current millstone doesn’t go against Government advice. But it does.
“In just over 2 decades the internet has become a huge part of our everyday lives. Today 82 per cent of adults in the UK are online. Completing transactions online has become second nature, with more and more of us going online for shopping, banking, information and entertainment. Why? Because online services tend to be quicker, more convenient and cheaper to use.
“But until now government services have stood out by their failure to keep up with the digital age. While many sectors now deliver their services online as a matter of course, our use of digital public services lags far behind that of the private sector.
“Government has got to do better. This Digital Efficiency Report suggests that transactions online can already be 20 times cheaper than by phone, 30 times cheaper than postal and as much as 50 times cheaper than face-to-face .
“By going digital by default, the government could save between £1.7 and £1.8 billion each year. But this isn’t just about saving money – the public increasingly expects to access services quickly and conveniently, at times and in ways that suit them. We will not leave anyone behind but we will use digital technology to drive better services and lower costs.”
Frances Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office
This is all excellent stuff. It articulates exactly why local government should be digital by default and not be held back by the anachronism of print public notices.
And bloggers too…?
Bloggers are able to attend public meetings and video, blog and post realtime updates. This is a good thing and opens up the whole often very dull decision making process to public scrutiny. This is an excellent step from DCLG. They hailed it as: ‘a boost for local democracy and the independent free press, councils in England were brought into the 21st century.’
That freedom should be opened up for bloggers too. How can they carry data from public notices alongside the mainstream Press?
So what would all this look like?
Information can be communicated effectively using the web. It could be added to a council page. An RSS feed or a widget could allow others – newspapers, broadcasters or bloggers – provided free-of-charge to carry the feed on their own pages.
Of course, if there was a pressing business case for print advertising this could happen too. But that’s the thing. Rather than being a print-by-default position it should be one of several channels.
This already happens in two places. Firstly, the TellmeScotland website aggregates and distributes public notice alerts through text and email.
Secondly, in ice and snow a more geurilla approach sees gritting updates aggregated and distributed in the West Midlands. On Twiitter, the hashtag #wmgrit is used by authorities in the region. A coveritLive widget here can be re-used on websites.
So what next?
There are bright people in local government who can produce the answer. Some of them are in the localgovdigital group although relying on a handful of volunteers in the sector is not the answer.
Maybe this is for larger bodies to support with time and resources. Communications teams should take the lead and work with web to come up with solutions. Maybe, that’s SOCITM, LGComms, the LGA and others coming together with local government officers.
Whatever the future. in 2015, the current situation which sees an enforced subsidy through paid-for ads to wealthy newspaper groups should not form part of the answer.
