Did You Know 4.0 - updated in partnership with The Economist, v4.0 includes new facts and figures focusing on the changing media landscape, convergence and technology. [via MrTruffle]
Every year we lie to you and every year you come back for more. You don’t need an upfront. You need therapy. We completely lie to you, and then you pass those lies onto your clients.
– Jimmy Kimmel to an audience of media buyers at ABC’s upfront [via]
I have a lot of these tales. It tells me kids are content junkies. They crave it from whatever source they can get it. They want it to be quality. They want it shareable. And mostly they want it to be immediate and uninterrupted.
The Wall Street Journal highlights some new economic research into the age-old question: is too much TV bad for childhood development? Not to spoil the surprise, but like all good economic questions in search of an unattainable, universal truth, the research only conclusively proves that “it depends”. In short: the positive/negative effect of television, and all entertainment media for that matter, really “depends on what other kinds of activity [it] is substituting for.”
Of course, it’s tough to find a pure sample for this sort of research — unless you travel to the island of Java, where the volcanic topography divides two very distinct populations: those that receive all seven available channels, and those in the shadows of the mountains who can only receive a few.
Surveys Mr. Olken conducted in more than 600 villages in East and Central Java showed that for each additional channel a village received, people would watch, on average, an additional seven minutes of television per day. He found that there were fewer social organizations in villages with better television reception, and that the people in those villages reported lower participation rates in social organizations.
The article also notes many benefits that TV lends to women’s rights, the developing world and children learning English as a second language. In the end, the only universal truth seems to be that media is neither the problem nor the solution to anything; but it does give us all (and economists especially) an easy target to point to.
I always love those scenes in movies where a tertiary government “expert” stands before a Patton-esque backdrop and projects the spread of a catastrophic threat. Last week, Andrew Chen examined the growth of YouTube vs. Webkinz using state-level search volume from Google Insights… and I was inspired. Combine the first 6 months of YouTube with, say, Clint Howard (Donald Sutherland passed) and we have our scene: a nationwide outbreak.
Taking a page from Outbreak (1995), you can just imagine the media conglomerates behind closed doors, tracking the spread of a virus they cannot (or do not care to) understand. Just for fun, let’s cast Viacom’s Sumner Redstone in the role of “Colonel Sam Daniels” (Dustin Hoffman)… and Clint Howard to co-star as his closest legal advisor:
Major Casey Schuler: I hate this bug. Colonel Sam Daniels: Oh, come on, Casey. You have to admire its simplicity. It’s one billionth our size and it’s beating us. Major Casey Schuler: So, what do you want to do, take it to dinner? Colonel Sam Daniels: No. Major Casey Schuler: What, then? Colonel Sam Daniels:Kill it. Sue it for one billion dollars!
(While I await my WGA card, please enjoy the trailer for Outbreak… on YouTube)
Update: TechCruch notes that “insights only come out from actually playing with data”, as each query is represented separately (“techcrunch” vs. “techcrunch.com”).
More debate on the difference between Hollywood and Silicon Valley in this rant by Kieth Boesky, who articulates the critical difference in each’s perspective of “community”:
Hollywood views engagement as watching a video and community as the people who watch the show coming out at the other end of a pipe, or group of pipes – one to many. They only hear from them when a small percentage decides to write letters, or start an on-line petition.
The Valley views engagement as interaction with the audience via web based tools and forums and community as a network built by its members – many to many community members not only see the content, but interact with it, share it with a friend, impact it and through a social network, build a distribution channel around the content. Their interaction establishes the distribution channel, or “value.”
Boesky further notes that Hollywood is errantly insisting upon “viewing the online world through the lens of traditional media” and becoming fixed on porting linear concepts to smaller screens, without recognizing and addressing the unique opportunities of web/mobile as a medium for storytelling.
Move over CNN, Twitter is quickly becoming the go-to destination for breaking news. Following a 5.4 magnitude (USGS) earthquake which rocked Los Angeles into a brief moment of characteristic hysteria, the world of always-on technophiles quickly turned to the 140-character wunderkind for second-by-second updates on the situation. It’s events like these in which Twitter truly shines as a platform: instantaneous, hyper-connected, and personally relevant in a way that traditional media simply cannot match.
For all of its struggles against the infamous “FAIL Whale”, you have to hand it to Twitter for empowering people with such a simple and versatile innovation.
Andrew Chen lays a solid foundation of the challenges facing traditional media conglomerates in the digital world — namely, that the core competencies they have mastered over the last century break down in the face of nimble, web-powered distribution. I could argue either side (as I often like to do), but it’s well worth reading by studios, startups and audiences alike.
In what might be my favorite irony of 2008 thus far, Variety points out that “if [TV Networks] were a person, they wouldn’t even be a part of TV’s target demo anymore.” A recent survey by Magna Global pegged the broadcast networks’ median age for live viewership at 50, a year past TV’s traditional 18-49 demographic. Don’t blame the baby boomers for getting old, though — it’s younger audiences that are not picking up the slack.
CSM’s Horizons Blog attributes the demographic shift primarily to the myriad of interactive alternatives which are making the web the “first screen” of a new generation:
This is one of the clearest signs that the Internet is a competitor to television. While cable TV is certainly another major player, idle surfing, social networking, YouTube viewing, news reading, MP3 downloading, and email drafting has pulled Americans away from the small screen and toward a smaller one.
As audiences continue to fragment across MANY “smaller screens”, media spending has been slow to follow consumer behavior. In fact, event programming continues to increase its premium, despite delivering less for advertisers. In many cases, it would seem that many marketers are holding out hope for the emergence of the next :30-spot.
Don’t hold your breath. Audiences are not simply shifting from one mass medium to another — and even where such mass can be rediscovered, the dynamics, economics and strategies learned from decades of mass marketing no longer apply.
Lehman Brothers cut its ratings on a number of top entertainment companies yesterday, also lowering its industry rating to “negative”, citing concerns over the economics of media within the ongoing fragmentation of audiences and distribution.
“To be clear, our fear is that the damage that digital distribution inflicted on the music industry will replicate itself in the movie industry, and our fears are too great to justify keeping neutral or positive ratings on the creators and distributors of movie and TV content,” analyst Anthony DiClemente wrote in a research note.
“In reality, while there are many obvious differences between music/audio and movie/video media forms, the core properties of video distribution and consumption are not different enough from music content to continue to justify why movie/TV content will be spared fragmentation.”
The crux of Lehman’s analysis lies in forecasting that the decline of DVD revenues (Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has previously speculated the format could peak as early as 2013) will outpace the growth of new models. Read another way, more focu$ is being given to sustain the life of the familiar than in accelerating the growth of new alternatives.
Translation: the industry must innovate with real conviction, and endeavor to catalyze change rather than react to it with the unwilling trepidation that so quickly brought the music business to its knees. Hollywood does NOT have to cede its future to disruptive technology… rather, it should build itself upon it, become better and more relevant because of it, and lean into the wave rather than bracing for impact.
Lehman’s assumption that movies will follow the erosion of the music industry because they have similar “properties of distribution and consumption” also assumes that Hollywood has learned nothing from recent history. Let’s hope prove they’re wrong.
Newspapers appear to be in a race to the pits of irrelevancy and insolvency lately, but I didn’t expect The Orange County Register — my former hometown source — to so willfully take the lead. “In a time of rapid change at newspapers, we are exploring many ways to work efficiently while maintaining quality and improving local coverage,” said John Fabris, the paper’s deputy editor. R.I.P. guys. [via Ethan Kaplan]
The real value in this equation is not content and information — both of which are now quickly commodified — but links, which are the new currency of media. Content is becoming a cost burden, what you have to have to get the links, but in and of itself, content can’t draw value without an audience, without links.
– Jeff Jarvis on the Associated Press vs. the “Link Economy” of the web
Vanity Fair’s Blogopticon charts the “most influential or amusing blogs about politics, gossip, Hollywood, media, and miscellany” along two continuums: tone and content (The white space represents all of the important blogs they forgot to mention).
CommonCraft offers (in its characteristically uncommon style) a simple explanation of social media, and its transformative power for nearly every facet of personal communication and business. I like this model [see the video below] because it doesn’t sensationalize or portend the death of “Big Ice Cream” necessarily, but rather speaks to the diversity of consumer preference and the newfound empowerment of people as creators and collaborators toward satisfying that demand.
That psychological and structural shift denotes social media as much more than just another fleeting trend for technophiles. Social media is a young, precocious movementenabled by the web, but not wholly defined by it. That is, the internet has been an empowering catalyst for a new way to view, interact and affect our individual (and collective) world, but the social movement will extend far beyond the boundaries of a browser.
Where this movement leads is firmly (and appropriately) in the hands of the community. Industries — whether ice cream, entertainment or anything in between — will find both promise and peril ahead, largely as a result of their response. “Big ______” may not be dead, as is often touted, but it will be forced to change, and those that recognize and adapt accordingly will stand to benefit.
So though you could argue that media is more plural than ever, I’d say it’s really reaching its natural state as a singular. Now the story is what matters, not the medium in which it is told… substance over style.
