Welcome to the mediaquake newsletter #6 — the January edition
Welcome to the mediaquake !
Newsletter edition #6 — Jan 17, 2016
Its tremors are never ending and shift the media tectonic plates on a daily basis.
In our hyperconnected world cadenced with notifications, auto-refreshing newsfeeds, FOMO sets in and we can get antsy.
This past Spring, prodded by my good friend Sacha Declomesnil I started this infrequent newsletter (sign up here) to share links related to the mediaquake, a term I started using in 2009 and the theme of the first bi-continental TEDx event.
Here’s the sixth edition, kicking off 2016: selfless curators pick out some choice links for your enjoyment, here’s a selection, covering topics from silent reading to the Cuban Internet to self-driving cars to other newsletters:
1. Peak content: The collapse of the attention economy: “For every editorial innovation, I’d invest in two on the commercial side. Seriously. We reach more people than we ever have with our content, but we have not found a way to sustainably monetise that attention. That’s the nut to crack.
As media leaders, you, no doubt, feel inundated with constant calls to invest in mobile, VR, immersive storytelling, podcasts and your new chat app strategy. In the coming post-Peak Content shakeout, the focus on monetisation will seize primacy from the blind rush for any form of audience attention and scale. In any market bubble, valuations become uncoupled from actual performance and focused simply on the belief that size is the only thing that matters.
But huge audiences don’t matter in the absence of a business model.”
2. In New Era of TV Ad Deals, Agencies Are No Longer Gatekeepers: “Pepsi’s three-episode story arc in this season of Fox’s “Empire” has been lauded for elevating traditional product placement beyond quick on-screen glimpses or strained dialogue. But the “meta” integration, which culminated with a real commercial starring fictional character Jamal Lyon and directed by series co-creator Lee Daniels, also represents a new reality in how ad deals are being fashioned between media sellers and marketers. The Pepsi storyline was born out of direct conversations between executives at the beverage giant; Casey Wasserman of Wasserman Media Group, who consults with Pepsi on entertainment innovation; “Empire” producer Brian Grazer; and Fox Networks Group Chairman and CEO Peter Rice. Missing from these initial conversations was Pepsi’s media agency.
“We went straight to the senior guys to make things happen,” said Simon Lowden, president of global snacks group and global insights at PepsiCo. “From the outset, it was a creative partnership versus a media deal.”
3. How Self-Driving Cars Could Make Streaming TV the Next Radio: “It could revolutionize the auto market — but also provide huge new opportunities for entertainment companies, especially those that excel at making content available on-the-go. How quickly entertainment companies can seize a new captive audience isn’t a question of technological advancement. It’s a matter of regulation. “We’re not going to flip the switch. Very slowly over time, little bits and pieces of autonomous driving are going to be installed,” said Mark C. Boyadjis, senior analyst at researcher IHS Automotive. “But that opens up opportunities for entertainment companies…to get more eyeballs in the vehicle.”
4. The Game Theorist Wonders If Facebook And YouTube Are Actually Competitors:
“The point behind Patrick’s comparison is that Facebook and YouTube aren’t necessary competitors; they serve separate cultures, or, as Patrick puts it, “two different generations.” “Just because both are websites that allow you to upload, comment on, and share videos doesn’t make them exactly the same,” he later adds. “You go to them for completely different reasons.”
Patrick could have ended his video there, but instead he chooses to take his meta-theory a step further. He suggests that, while YouTube Rewind epitomizes the site’s culture, it could soon become out-of-date. He notes a few factors, including YouTube’s increased emphasis on watch time, its compartmentalization of its top categories, and its desire to stream Hollywood movies and TV shows, that taken together forecast a shift away from YouTube’s current focus and toward a more commercial one. “Comparing the Rewinds was meant to show what makes YouTube unique and different when compared to other video platforms…but as you segregate gamers from beauty gurus or try to bring in a bunch of TV shows, step by step you slowly risk losing what makes YouTube YouTube.”
5. Cuba’s Internet is fcking insane and the ways Cubans use it are genius: “The answer was given to me by all four of my friends at once, through unanimous smiles. El Paquete Semana. The weekly packet. A one-terabyte hard-drive loaded with a week’s worth of American movies, shows, music, magazines, and even smartphone apps. The original source of this smorgasbord of media is something of a mystery, but dealers pace the streets of Havana, selling full versions of El Paquete for around $8, or a smaller version with partial content for a few bucks. It’s passed around the Cuban population by street dealers for a cost, or by friends out of charity, like borrowing a Netflix password. My particular amigos were already looking forward to seeing the Latin Grammys and the Victoria Secret Fashion show in the upcoming months, both of which would make rounds on El Paquete about a week after airing on US television.
And yes, my friends assure me, “El Paquete and chill” is definitely a thing.”
6. The Deep Space of Digital Reading- Why we shouldn’t worry about leaving print behind:
“In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.: the advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes,”the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader’s thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.”
My latest Mediaquake posts:
Top 6 reasons a pragmatic pessimist (me) remains an optimistic realist for 2016–2017
Post CES: Beyond the VR gaming hype, the real business impacts
4 other newsletters to discover:
The Overprint from the Alpine Review+Make Ready
PBS’ Mediashift
Benedict Evans from Andreessen Horowitz
Frédéric Filloux/JL Gassée’s Monday Note
