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embarrassingly outdated medium.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!"