• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, 10 hours ago

 Which comes first: the chicken or the egg?  This question gets asked all the time, and the answer is actually quite simple: the farm.

The farm is where the chickens are roosting.  It’s where the feed is, that gets those chickens plumped up.  It’s where the eggs are laid.  The farm is the environment where the chickens thrive and the eggs are made.  

Without a farm, there’s nowhere for the chickens and the eggs to survive.  They won’t survive out in the wild on their own.  The foxes will steal the eggs, and the wolves will eat the chickens. The farm is what fosters the chickens and the eggs; it protects them to some extent.  The farm is what we point to as the place where the eggs are raised for our morning breakfasts.

What does this have to do with media?

Surprisingly, a lot.  The chicken-and-egg question applies to ad agencies, to adtech and martech.  It applies to the consumers who view our ads and engage with our content, videos and more.  It applies to everything that makes this industry such a dynamic place to have a career. 

The ads are eggs.  The chickens are people.  The industry succeeds because of the environment where these elements interact.  In this analogy, the farm is the content and the time spent within that content.  The publishers are still the backbone of the web, but they are in a desperate position at this time. And as an industry, we should be a little more worried than we let on.

There are two trends starting to emerge.  First, too many publishers are spewing content that is divisive and separationist.   They are focused on the fringes and content that is not always verified.  This content is feeding the AI and the algorithms, and is being used to create more separation.   

Secondly, the middle road is fading, and people are being forced to choose sides. If you don’t align with one side or the other, it can be difficult to find content that helps you.  All the content is so weighted toward one side or the other that the middle feels alienated, a problem that can end one of two ways: It can either radicalize people and push them to one side or the other, or, worn out by everything, they simply shut down, not wanting to be engaged with either side.

Our farm needs some tending to, or it will stop being a good environment for our chickens and eggs.  We are fostering an environment that revolves around the fringes, and the middle road is being lost.  How do we get that back?

We have to support content that is balanced, well-meaning and doesn’t cater to the fringes.  We need that content to be seen, and it needs to still be published even if it is solely to feed the AI that will eventually take the place of search and will provide digestible versions of content for all of us to read.  

The people who make that content have to know they have an audience who supports them, and they need to be given a voice.  The web simply cannot thrive on the backs of polarized and unverified content. As with every point of view, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  It is rarely, if ever, so weighted to one side or the other.

The analogy was used to get your attention, and if you read this far, then it worked.  You may truly believe the chicken or the egg came first, and that’s OK.  I’m actually not trying to convince you one way or the other.  I simply want you to understand that the farm where these chickens and eggs are put to work may be more important than you think. The farm is what we should be paying attention to, and we should be happy we have chickens and eggs to sustain us at all. 

I hope you have a great day after you read this. Now please go support someone whose content is not intended to polarize the people around you.  Thanks for reading.