The bottom line: our business loves numbers. We put them on everything. We put them on deals to measure their scale. We put them on accounts to factor their clout. We put them
on the media to quantify their value. And we put them on ads to assess their impact and effectiveness.
But when I saw a number applied recently to — of all things
— consumers, it made me think about what’s really been going on with our business. Now this numeric may be changing everything we know about media. The number was 2.0 and it was used by
Yahoo CMO Cammie Dunaway to describe a new version of consumers evolving as a result of a new generation of media. How we skipped through phases 1.1 through 1.9, I’m not sure. But the term is
quickly becoming the digital age’s equivalent of the clichéd “new-and-improved.”
The truth is we’re always evolving: the media, agencies,
clients, and consumers. What’s different about the current shift is that the latter are becoming the most significant agents of change. In previous generations, consumers reacted and adapted to
the evolution of media. When we placed big, electronic boxes in their living rooms, they evolved into “couch potatoes.” When we spun a web of interconnected online access, they morphed
into users.
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But the changes that have taken place over the past few years have turned the evolutionary table. The natural selection of media is no longer determined by
the industry but by consumers. That’s become apparent with Web 2.0, but it’s actually something that’s been evolving for some time.
The first time I
began thinking about it was over one of my perennial lunches with Ed Martin, a good friend, TV critic, and one of the most prescient people I know on the subject of media. The lunch took place nearly
a decade ago, and Ed wasn’t talking about the Internet per se, but about the changes taking place with a far more primitive medium: television. We were discussing the rapid ascendancy of reality
TV programming — especially the popularity of shows like MTV’s “Real World,” and the CBS shows “Survivor” and “Big Brother.”
These were shows where regular people were the stars. But it was not the first time Americans became enthralled by video voyeurism. The landmark 1970s public-TV series “An
American Family” and “The Police Tapes” established that there was a huge appetite and interest in watching what other people do. Fox seized on the second of these formats early on,
spawning one of the first — and longest-running — commercial reality-TV shows, “Cops.” It took the other major networks decades to discover the power of prime-time reality TV.
But it was what Ed said about some recent developments in online media that really got me thinking about the future. We were also discussing the growing popularity of
online chat, discussion boards, and especially eBay. Ed rightfully understood these trends were interconnected, and he said something I will never forget: “The future of television will be
people watching other people.”
Why Ed and I didn’t bolt out of our seats at Centro restaurant in Fairfield, CT, immediately race to our banks and withdraw
our savings to begin developing a plan for a personal video-sharing service I don’t know. But ten years later we’re writing about YouTube and the viral videos and the Web 2.0 marketplace
that Ed predicted back then.
So the truth is that people don’t really change all that much. It’s just that media has evolved in a way to tap what
they’ve always been interested in, but maybe could not act on in the past. We are social creatures, so social media platforms are enabling us to behave that way more readily. We’re hunters
and gatherers, and search engines fulfill that need. We like to spend our free time the way we want to, and digital time-shifting and place-shifting devices are enabling us to do that, too.