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Who will help the media survive until the first post-war elections?
This week, I spoke at the “United for Trust” forum, organized in Kyiv by the NDI and the SPRAVDI Center for Strategic Communications, in a panel discussion on preparations for the first post-war elections. The moderator asked me: how can the media help the state prepare for this event? I replied that for the media to be able to help the state prepare for the first post-war elections, someone needs to help the media themselves first. Because the Ukrainian media market has reached a bifurcation point. It is facing a whole range of threats simultaneously — and there are almost no factors that could counterbalance these threats.
Every facility or production site whose destruction we hear about today is a potential loss of an advertiser for some media outlet. In difficult times, businesses tend to cut marketing and advertising costs among the first. And this is entirely understandable: if a company cannot produce a product or deliver it to the shelves, spending money on advertising that product becomes unnecessary for it.
One of the most affected categories of advertisers is pharmaceutical businesses, due to the high degree of centralization of their distribution compared with, for example, food products. Another specifically affected segment of the market is international companies, regardless of their product category. In the case of the latter, complex global planning processes are involved: for example, responding to inflationary pressure caused by a sharp increase in fuel prices in their key regions, global businesses are also more likely to cut advertising and marketing spending in markets such as Ukraine, where they do not have sufficient confidence about their revenues in the near future.
And these are far from all the problems. A chain reaction has begun in Ukraine’s economy. Someone’s destroyed production facility means not only a lost advertiser, but also lower-than-expected tax revenues, rising unemployment, and a decline in purchasing power. Funding for the television marathon from the state budget is already being delayed. In such a situation, can the companies that won the “Tyshchovesna” competition be absolutely certain that their funding will not be delayed as well? And they have to start production already. Moreover, the “Tyshchovesna” films intended for theatrical release will not bring them the expected revenues simply because, amid constant shelling of major cities, cinemas will not be able to generate sufficient box-office receipts for them.
If at least some of the major cities become, even temporarily, victims of urbicide, forcing part of the population to leave and some media outlets to relocate, this will also affect such formats of interaction between media and audiences as communities. After all, the ties between such media outlets and their audiences will inevitably be disrupted to some extent.
And alongside all this, another revolution is moving ahead at full speed, one that has nothing to do with the war. Artificial intelligence continues to change the very model of news consumption. Audiences are clicking through to media websites less and less often, getting answers directly from search engines, chatbots, and other AI services. This factor alone is potentially capable of killing off some online media outlets — even if all the other negative factors did not exist.
And now let’s return to the elections themselves. We recently published an interview with Yuliia Mostova, in which she drew attention to such a change. If previously a person who wanted to become a politician and participate in elections would go and pay court to oligarchs and the media they controlled, now such people turn to companies that know how to work with social media algorithms. Continuing this line of thought, one can assume that in the very near future they will also turn to companies that know how to engage in AI content optimization. A whole segment of startups has already emerged around the world working to make content more likely to appear in the answers and recommendations of AI systems.
And this fundamentally changes the context in which we discuss future elections. To a large extent, we still operate on the assumption that the media will be one of the main intermediaries between politicians and voters. But by the time of the first post-war elections, the media themselves may already be completely different — economically, technologically, and structurally.
That is why discussions about the first post-war elections, which have already been going on in expert circles for several years, increasingly resemble the famous metaphor of a spherical horse in a vacuum. To describe how the media should behave during these elections, we have to make so many assumptions — about the end of the war, the security situation, the economy, the advertising market, state funding, technology, audience behavior, and, ultimately, the very existence of the current media system — that at some point our starting point for such an analysis ceases to be realistic.
And the more such assumptions we make, the more elegant our model of the information component of future elections becomes — but also the less it resembles the future in which these elections will actually take place.
