• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, September 12, 2024

Image above: Evan Shapiro presents his Media Ecosystem 2024 map at the EGTA CEO summit.

I’ve been working in new media and digital advertising for more than 30 years, starting with early versions of online newspapers in the early 1990s. Throughout that time, leaders at publishing and media companies have always said, “It’s all about the content.”

I continue to disagree with that point. It’s not all about the content. It never was.

The business of media is the provisioning of consumer contact.  In media’s analog era, where distribution was scarce (printing presses, broadcast stations, cable & satellite systems), audience attention was quite plentiful. Media companies typically created and published the cheapest content they could to attract, entertain and retain the audiences that their monopoly distribution basically guaranteed them.

Consumers had little choice but to pay and watch, listen or read. They had few choices. And advertisers had few choices (one local newspaper, several top radio stations, a limited number of TV networks) if they wanted to reach those audiences at scale with their ads.

Certainly, content was and is important, and it should be celebrated. Celebrating content (like at the Emmys or with Pulitzers) is a great way to keep the content engines working and help generate rationales for premium pricing. But folks should not delude themselves that it is “all about the content.”

If it was, how come media companies that make content today have revenues, profits and stock prices that are down so much?

Historically, the most valuable media companies were those that controlled scarce, fixed distribution: broadcast companies, cable companies, satellite companies.

Today, with media firmly in the digital era, distribution is now plentiful, but audience attention has become scarce. No more can just putting up content garner scaled audiences that will both pay money and attract lots of advertising revenue. Media companies need something more.

What is that “more”? Clearly, today, it is about technology and data.

Five of the seven most valuable companies in the world -- Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google, Amazon and Meta -- drive their profits significantly or primarily from advertising. And, after its announcement to start putting preroll video ads in front of its fast-growing GForce consumer cloud-based gaming service, Nvidia (which also operates in the ether of most valuable companies in the world) is getting into the ad game, too.

Companies that make content are nowhere near the top of the list of the most valuable companies in the world anymore. And, with the explosive growth of AI, it’s clear that the number of companies and people that can make great content fast and efficiently is only growing. There are billions of creators out there now, no longer dozens.

So, to the content-creating media companies of yore, I ask, “What is your technology and data strategy?”

Why haven’t you created or bought companies like The Trade Desk, Roku, MediaMath, TransUnion, or Experian? If you’re serious about surviving and thriving in the world of media in this digital era, you will need to.

For those who say content is king, I say that distribution is King Kong, and the path to dominant distribution is now though technology and data.

This post was previously published in an earlier edition of Media Insider.