Commentary

Seeing the Forest Through the Trees

Seeing the Forest Through the Trees

The death of media and the rise of the medium 

This shouldn't come as a surprise - traditional media is just plain obsolete. Consider the printing press. According to numbers run by Business Insider, printing The New York Times for a year costs twice as much as just sending every subscriber a Kindle. And that was when the Kindle was $349 (now it's $139). How about radio? Can a radio DJ really compete with personalized radio stations like Pandora, last.fm or Spotify streaming to a phone in the car?

Which leaves TV - an embarrassingly outdated medium. The signs of TV's age first showed with the demand for and success of DVRs. And today the DVR user experience pales in comparison to video streaming. It will take some time for the transition, but already an HD streaming set-top box can be picked up for $59, and Netflix, Hulu and HBO are making inroads into shaking up the licensing and monetization issues that result from the rise of streaming.

So, fine - sometime in the future all content will exist in a single medium. How is that relevant to business today? I'll answer that in a moment, but first, a segue.

Ever heard of confirmation bias? It's a psychological principle that's fairly important to the conversation at hand and our industry as a whole (especially considering it is one of the primary forces behind why advertising works).

Confirmation bias is the mind's tendency to notice information that supports existing beliefs and ignore information that challenges them. Why the segue? Because if we accept the notion of confirmation bias, the corollary is that the more out-of-touch we are, the more out-of-touch we will continue to get. This works both ways, which is at the crux of the problem. Traditional-media mavens often dramatically underestimate the culture shift to new media, and new-media wizards frequently underestimate traditional media's reach and staying power. The ideal is a holistic approach to media, but unfortunately we're victims of circumstance - we're woefully behind the curve.

On the other hand, consumers are hip to the unification of media. Consider the success of and demand for the iPad. It brought absolutely nothing "new" to the table. There's nothing that the device offers that other devices in an iPad owner's home can't do. The entire selling point of the iPad is that it is a single device that brings all those separate media together and sets them right there on your lap. Watch TV, read a book, listen to music, play a game, check email, surf the Web. The iPad is optimized for all content on a single medium. The fact that the device was so wildly successful is a reflection of consumers' comfort with hyperconnectedness and cross-media content.

But our industry? We're just not set up that way. Our industry is failing to adapt at all three possible levels: the vendor, the agency and the client.

The Vendor

The industry lacks the tools to capitalize on a hyperconnected consumer. Vendors just haven't stepped up to the plate. But it's understandable - the marketplace is moving at a very dangerous speed. By the time a vendor builds out a solution for a hot new trend, there's a decent chance that vendor will have built into obsolescence. This is especially true for pure advertising vendors, as they depend, to an extent, on the success of other services.

When I attend mobile conventions, half the vendors in the audience still seem to be pushing various texting services. Those weren't really an attractive proposition years ago when they were the only mobile option, and now they're even less attractive. Still, what else are those vendors going to do? They're saddled with an obsolete service and don't have the income to build out something new.

There are companies out there that "get it." Both Facebook and Google show an incredible understanding of the market and where to invest their development dollars. Unfortunately, while their core product-development teams have this insight, their advertising and marketing product development seem to lag far behind their core products. And based on past conversations with the vendors, it seems like the two teams aren't really synced up on what's in each other's pipeline.

The Agency

Our system is broken: we've partitioned off agency responsibilities into so many pieces it's staggering.

Consider a typical large account. There might be a creative agency from one holding company for traditional media, a media buying agency from another holding company for traditional, an independent digital creative agency, a digital media buying agency, a specialty shop that develops the brand Web site and perhaps another agency that handles direct mail and CRM. It's like an exercise in schizophrenia.

It should be little surprise that many award-winning executions today are either coming from full-service agencies or are one-off, self-contained creations (in several cases coming directly from the brand). It's a challenge to develop cross-media campaigns; it's nearly impossible to do so when responsibilities for various media (and creative) are kept separate. Despite the huge importance of cross-media consistency to engaging with today's consumers, it's often easier just to stay within our prescribed cubicles than to organize integration.

The Client

There's a joke that the priorities of a brand (i.e., new customer acquisition, customer retention, etc.) reflect the criteria for the CMO's bonus. While I think more goes into a brand's marketing objectives than just that, it does reflect a significant truth: in business, change happens from the top down.

Some brands show a deep understanding of the market and are investing in new-media infrastructure. Starbucks' social media build-out was a great example. Others are still struggling to get a grasp on how the market is shifting. Still others doubt that the shifts yet apply to them.

Remember confirmation bias? Here's where it hits hardest. Every brand I've talked to recognizes that massive change is underway. But nearly every brand also struggles with getting an accurate, unbiased representation of the market and understanding how that translates into business decisions. Even the ones that understand what to do are having trouble getting things done, because either agencies or vendors aren't set up to support integrated media. Some have ended up building out their internal teams to handle many of these responsibilities.

The Solution

There is no easy solution. Our industry is in a tight spot. But, as they say, with the hardest difficulties come the greatest opportunities.

The first step will be to place a more dramatic focus on cross-media consistency. Remember how I said Google was one of the smartest companies out there? They're completely redesigning each of their offerings to create a seamless aesthetic and experience across PC, mobile and tablets. They're onto something.

We'll still have various media for a few years. But it's about time we started treating all media as pieces of a single medium. If we start today, we'll be in a good place when they sound the cry "Media is dead, long live the Medium!"

2 comments about "Seeing the Forest Through the Trees".
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  1. Doug Garnett from Protonik, LLC, September 12, 2011 at 3:53 p.m.

    The most common confirmation bias I find results in the blind belief that anything new and technologically based is best. Because the contrarian ideas that isn't heard by the digerati are the truly, fundamentally human realities of consumers.

    Even a brilliant writer like Farhad Manjoo in his excellent book True Enough (about confirmation bias) falls prey himself to this bias when discussing new media.

    Things will change. But this article, especially discussing TV, is a better example OF confirmation bias than it is revealing of what we are missing. Because those who listen to true market feedback (sales at the retail store) learn that the hype of the digerati doesn't ring the cash register like traditional media's do.

    Change will always come. But not in the way ANY of us expect.

  2. Joe Buhler from buhlerworks, September 12, 2011 at 4:32 p.m.

    The confirmation bias is reinforced by most industry practitioners who keep pushing only their particular discipline as the most effective rather than taking a more holistic approach.

    If more of us would truly put the customer at the center of our marketing efforts - as we, of course, always claim to do! - things might change.

    The fact that the social web is fast becoming absorbed into the mainstream is not due to technology in itself but because more and more technology tools introduced today, enable what people have been doing forever, e.g. communicate, interact, socialize etc. in often totally new ways. The iPad is a poster child for that. Adoption comes not when technology is forced on people but when it is adopted by them without even realizing it.

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