• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, March 5, 2018

If it’s difficult enough to predict how the media landscape will look next year, it’s arguably even harder projecting how things will look five years hence.

A recent MediaPost event — Media Forecast 2018 + 2023 — gathered some of the best industry minds together to share their thoughts about the state of media in 2023. Here are their predictions:

TV Will Always Be Here

There was optimism regarding the robustness of the TV and the advertising business. According to Tom Goodwin, executive vice president/head of Innovation, Zenith, “We tend to think that TV or advertising is dead, but it is here to stay.”

Further, there was a feeling that even old media has the ability to adapt and reinvent for the new digitized environment. “The money keeps shifting to online and digital,” stated Brian Hughes, senior vice president, audience intelligence and strategy, MAGNA. However, he believes that this momentum will slowly flatten as “old-school media reinvents themselves.”

Delight the Consumer — or Else

Since consumers will have greater power to choose the ads they want to see, those companies that engage people in a negative way may experience blowback. Barry Lowenthal, president, The Media Kitchen, said “Facebook will be the big loser’” in the next five years because it fails at some “fundamental human truth” regarding shame about envy.

“Facebook peddles in envy. Most feel bad about themselves after seeing Facebook,” he explained, “and you can't sustain a business on envy.”  He predicted that unless Facebook reinvents itself, it will lose money. “It is better to drive to gratitude,” he concluded.

And unless companies respect consumers by providing them with relevant messaging (without getting creepily intrusive), they may decide to opt out and withhold their data and their attention. “Consumers will be in control of their data. The GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] will precipitate that,” noted Natalie Monbiot, senior vice president, futures, for Samsung, Starcom USA, who added, “There will be a shift to drop data when in doubt. Consumers will have more self-sovereignty.”

Streamlined Processes Through Technology

Some of the issues that will impact how we conduct business in five years: the continuing increase in amounts and types of available data; the introduction of blockchain protocol into the media business; the use of artificial intelligence; and the boundaries of privacy.

Monbiot noted that, “Blockchain could be the one thing that disrupts today,” and has the potential to change the business.

Sam Olstein, global director, innovation, GE Corporation, concluded that the biggest challenge today is the mindset to avoid more risks. Spending money on things that don’t pan out is “never wasted, because it laid the bedrock for the next entrepreneur to benefit from previous mistakes.”