As Ira Gershwin noted, things have come to a pretty pass. My technologically backward friend Jim who would not tweet if his life were dependent on his being able to say “Help!” in less than 140 characters now has a blog.
Actually, it’s a sort of a blog. It’s blogesque, a demiblog. It may just be other people doing his blogging for him, if Jim’s first post is any indication. It’s a call for all his friends to submit their thoughts on the future of media.
In the words of Texas-swing fiddler Johnny Gimble, “Well, wind me up.” I haven’t written out much on the future of media, though it’s a subject that’s dear to my heart – and wallet. I used to make my living through the media and would like again to make my living through the media, in one form or another. I even have a plan in mind of how this might occur, which I am not sharing with anyone who is not willing to pay me for it, and the chances of that are less than the chances of me dressing up like Prince and playing a guitar shaped like an Egyptian fertility symbol. In church.
This is a synopsis of what I wrote for Jim (which I haven’t written yet, but not for lack of want-to), spun towards marketing. Because while marketing is not media – a fact of which I must be continuously reminded – marketing cannot exist without media providing the conduits of information from seller to buyer (and, don’t forget, buyer to seller).
When considering the future of media, remember that media don’t die. True, the telegraph is dead, and there’s not a lot of traffic in jungle drums and smoke signals. But those media channels were highly content-poor and technologically backward, and there are modern channels that do what they do better. Text messaging, for instance.
So, in other words, in five years we will still have the opportunity to consume every form of media we currently consume. All the talk of media going away is hoohah. That’s not the way we behave. When it comes to communication we’re a civilization of ragpickers. We take what we like from here and there and build a sort of media lean-to that serves as our communication structure. I just bought a new turntable so I can record my vinyl onto a CD, which I send via USB to my phone, where I can share it via Facebook – though I may then turn around and write about the experience for a magazine.
What media could go away?
Not the magazine. The magazine will survive. An iPad app may offer more interactivity, but a printed magazine is a more engaging sensory experience. I read The Complete New Yorker on my computer, but I also check out the back issues from the library. The completeness of the DVDs is a plus, but the computer is unable to duplicate the experience of reading an actual 80-year-old magazine.
The newspaper will survive, but not all newspapers will survive. Most current newspapers sell a sort of immediacy, with a lack of interactivity, eye appeal, reporting depth, and writing skill as a tradeoff. That’s not good enough. For a newspaper to survive in print it’ll have to be better-looking and better-written than its online competition – more like a highly local magazine, in other words.
Television will survive as one of many screens. I ascribe to the theory that visual content will become more and more standardized and only the size of the screen will change. The distribution channels are working their kinks out, but how could you not bet on Apple, Amazon, and Google/YouTube being the winners, with Facebook coming up hard on the rail?
Media savants NRBQ are fond of reminding us that there ain’t no free, and we are bound to learn that all over again in the next five years. iTunes showed the way for iTV, and with a little help from Amazon and Microsoft the market has been established. Songs cost 99 cents. TV shows cost 99 cents. Books are $10 and the book reader is $100 and falling. It won’t be long before long-form journalism articles from content providers like nytimes.com are 99 cents, and a full magazine for the iPad stabilizes at around $3. Cats riding skateboards may still be free, but enjoy free concert footage, movie clips, and TV shows while you can. They’re not long for this world.
But what about the savior of us all, the game-changer of the epoch, user-generated content?
User-generated content is hardly a new thing. And not only that, but the readership numbers for old-school user-generated content are hardly worse than the numbers for new-school content. Blogs, tweets, texts, uploads, and postings are the new letters, sent to slightly more people with slightly less personalization, and with the middleman – the post office -- cut out. Bad time to be a mailman, business as usual for everyone else.
With blogs on the periphery and 90 percent of consumed content coming through controlled (and metered) channels, the crackpots are reduced to the status of crank letters, which is about where they are now, only we don’t see them that way because we’re so consumed by the newness of form that we miss the oldness of content. As the channels consolidate the need diminishes for search as we know it. Each channel will have its own dedicated search, and if it’s not coming through one of those tubes you probably don’t want it.
Advertising has a place because there will always be some organization wanting to own a piece of one or another channel and disinclined to believe it’s a total waste of money.
That leaves marketing. Marketing uses advertising as one of many tool groups, with each group made up of specific tools. Think of advertising as, oh, the chisels. What kinds of chisels – I mean, advertising – do I like? Pre-roll ads. Mobile ads. Crawls and banners on TV shows. Interstitials in e-books. Outdoor. In-hand. (Basically, anything you can hold in your hand.)
Then there’s public relations. There’s an article in today’s New York Times that public relations is more important than ever. I don’t doubt it. It ought to be.
Then there are the wide range of materials aimed at augmenting face-to-face meetings. More important than ever. As people consume more media and are increasingly bombarded with marketing messages as a result, the face-to-face meeting gains importance as an oasis of interpersonal interaction.
If my crystal ball shows the media model returning to a conventional form where a few big players control the most important channels, it does not show that it’s Turn Back The Clock Night all over the media firmament. Things have changed. Marketing through media has changed. But the advantage to the savvy marketer is in understanding how it’s changed.
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