Asymmetrical Communications.

[This is a re-envisioning of a two year old post, entitled: Paris Hilton and the Attention Arms Race.]

Attention used to be about volume.  If you were one of the chosen few with a voice loud enough, you would garner the segment of the population that cared about what you had to say.  Loud voices included, on a society-wide level, newspapers, radio stations, television networks, and heads of state.  On the lower rung, you would have community leaders, local religious leaders, executives, etc.  On the lowest rung, the cool kids, parents, older siblings, pretty girls, etc.

As the broadcast paradigm has collapsed, the fight for attention has gotten depressing.

[Aside: When I say broadcast paradigm, I’m more or less talking about the entire history of media, post-oral histories, and pre-internet.  The second writing was invented, it was a matter of a chosen few publishing, and others reading and not responding.  While desktop publishing could be argued as flipping this paradigm, nothing physical produced at home had the same reach that made an authoritative published work powerful.]

Two important things happened: Firstly, More.  As in, more channels, more original programming, more new, more hours, more competition for attention.  All of it targeted at the same mass audiences, or (recently) the mass niches, the audiences which are targeted in such a crude way that they are still mass generalizations.  Examples of this are BET, Oxygen, etc.  Targeting an entire race, or an entire gender, is not targeting.  The second thing that happened was the internet, or more accurately, Democratization.  Now everyone can create at the same (potential) volume.

End result: Signal is Noise.

Even ignoring the incoherent, the spam, the juvenile and the offensive, the sheer amount of content being created is such that volume isn’t enough to guarantee impact.  Relevance isn’t enough, nor it quality.  Much as scale forces the logical mind to accept that there is probably life elsewhere in the universe, scale forces me to accept that there is a staggering amount of content that is interesting, insightful, original, and totally up my alley, that I will never see.

I am not arrogant enough to think that this applies only to me, because I’m not that special.

Another two things.  One: Assuming signal is noise, decorum, tact, and self-censorship evaporate.  Challenging the boundaries of the acceptable is an effective way of gathering attention in a time of unprecedented competition.  As evidence, I don’t present a link to Two Girls, One Cup (DO NOT GOOGLE THIS.)  Two: While the creation of content is still of value, distribution, as well as building and maintaining an audience, necessarily have to opt out of the volume model.  Getting louder doesn’t work, but getting connected (socially, organizationally, even politically) does.

It’s a question of an Arms Race (hat tip to the Rebel Sell, which introduced me to the concept of the collective action problem) versus a Ground War.  Oddly enough, this started happening in media at the same time it started happening in international relations.

The massive media industrial complex was getting hurt, badly, by the asymmetrical blogging, pirating and podcasting cells.

The exciting thing, is that corporations are starting to understand how to play a ground war.  It’s against their DNA, in a lot of cases, so it’s starting slow.  We’ve got companies like Comcast going one on one when it comes to customer service via twitter, Nissan enlisting people to blog/create to win their latest car, Macallan hosting Twitter Tastings.

The media-industrial complex is starting to fight a ground war, but only once they realized that an arms race has no winners.

Reminder re: ‘Death’ of Newsmedia

If journalism was even the majority of content making up traditional newsmedia, we’d be in a very different situation.

We’re not talking about the viability of journalism as a product, because the product hasn’t really been journalism for a very, very long time.

Too Slow To Sell.

We’re reaching the point where traditional media is too slow to function as a marketing / communications channel for some creative products.

The mechanics of new media, and new modes of distribution, don’t sync with old media production schedules.  A notable portion of the entertainment value, and therefore monetary value, of old media products, is in their function as a mechanism of review and cultural arbitration.

But the production cycle for new creative products is rapidly outpacing the traditional production cycle of media.

This is already becoming a problem for Advertising and PR.  Consumers know about products, and desire them, long before the legal release date.  As such, business is lost to leaks, pirated versions, etc.  Part of what forces the early release of information is the old media production cycle - everything needs to be planned far enough in advance that magazines, TV specials, media buys, and other reviews can be placed.  The end result is an informed customer with unfulfilled desires.

Don’t be worried about people not wanting to buy newspapers, or magazines, or watch TV via traditional cable.  Worry about when Advertising, PR, and Marketing realize old media is ruining their ability to satisfy customers, and plan a mass exodus for media with a shorter production cycle.

Working strictly through blogs, podcast, online advertising and traditional short lead publication, the idea of waiting six months to buy something you know you want seems archaic.

Consumers are already voting for speed, and near-instant gratification with their attention and their media purchases.  Once the promotional engine follows them, and takes the sponsorship, content, and interest with them, the real trouble starts.

Culture is faster than old media, now.  It’s just a matter of people getting comfortable enough with the idea to let the realities of the new attention cycle dictate where they try to build buzz.

Demographic Targeting and ‘Zoomer’.

In today’s Toronto Star, there’s an excellent article by Cathal Kelly called Moses Znaimer’s Second Act.  Znaimer, the man who made City TV a force in Canadian media, is currently building a new empire focused at his own age group, that he has labelled ‘Zoomers’.

I will admit that if anyone could make the idea work, it’s Znaimer.  He has a Steve Jobs-ian charisma and influence, something that Canada could definitely use more of.  Znaimer has the mixture of vision and refusal to be led astray from that vision, that lets him accomplish unorthodox things.  At the same time, I have to question the logic in basing an entire conglomerate on the idea that baby boomers are all a single market.  Demographics are great when you’re judging how many people will be reaching the age to buy cars, or homes, or caskets.  Demographic information is substantially less useful when building an entertainment / lifestyle brand, because an age isn’t a set of interests.

The battle-cry highlighted in the article linked above is that older people aren’t dead, they still go out, purchase, live, love, matter.  Hopefully, no one is really debating that.  But unlike brands that target a certain segment of a demographic (such as stores that cater to ‘indie’ teens, versus those that cater to ‘preppy’ teens), age seems to come first and foremost in the Zoomer brand.  Being 45 and older does not make one inherently similar to anyone else 45 and older.

At 17, I was convinced to read Boom Bust & Echo, a great book about the predictive power of demographics.  Looking at the current landscape, when so much information is available about what people are interested in, rather than just how many people fit into each box, focusing on demographics only makes sense if you deeply believe in the accuracy of stereotyping.

What I am, what you are, is substantially less important, from a branding and marketing standpoint, than WHO we are.  Targeting based on demographics is inherently a matter of what.

People react poorly to being treated as a what, not a who.

Print Media and Online Content.

Newspapers are in trouble, in part, because they have devalued their own content.

If you sell short snippets of text, explaining the real world, putting that online seems like a no-brainer.  Especially if the hardcopy offers a greater experience.  But the issue is this: the experience isn’t so blatantly superior that the reader doesn’t think “you know, this is free online.”

At the same time, you need to put something online, or you deny the value of print journalism, which is to add authority to conversation.  As I mentioned to someone today, you don’t just read the Economist to be informed.  You read it to be able to speak with authority in conversation with others.  Conversations are now online, so authoritative sources (journalism) needs to be as well.

The problem is in offering the same damn thing, for free, that you are selling to survive.  The problem is in the assumption that people are looking for an excuse to pay, rather than an excuse not to pay.

Your online content should expand the world of your product, but not replace it.  If you sell a comprehensive, varied print news source, you should load your website with research, background, audio, video, etc.  If you see value in duplicating your print product, leave that value for the paying customer - let a physical purchase allow access to optimized versions of the print product, searchable, remix and sharing friendly.  For those who just want to see what you have on offer, show them what ADDS to the value of what you sell, rather than offering them the same thing, for free.