Media Myopia of 2014
Serving static content will no longer be enough to thrive in the new media landscape.
More than 50 years ago Theodore Levitt shared a fascinating perspective that still serves as a valuable lesson about business management. In an essay called Marketing Myopia, Levitt argued that if the powerful railroad executives had realized that they were not simply in the business of railroads — but really in the business of moving people — they might have been able to capitalize on the biggest industry of the 20th Century: automobiles. These executives failed to predict that other products (like the car and truck) would strip their customers. Such product nearsightedness is detrimental in any business (to put it kindly) and now—a decade into the 21st Century—we’re seeing a similar, industry-wide myopia where executives are slow to embrace emerging demands of its customers.
But first, another history lesson from Levitt about the near-demise of Hollywood at the advent of television: again executives were focused on a limited product and ignoring a new path to reach customers. Levitt wrote:
As with the railroads, Hollywood defined its business incorrectly. It thought it was in the movie business when it was actually in the entertainment business. “Movies” implied a specific, limited product. This produced a fatuous contentment that from the beginning led producers to view TV as a threat. Hollywood scorned and rejected TV when it should have welcomed it as an opportunity—an opportunity to expand the entertainment business.
I’m reminded of these words as we ring in 2014. Media has moved from the thing you buy off a shelf to the thing you download to now something you simply access and stream. Media is everywhere and ubiqutious. And the new danger for media executives is to assume that’s good enough when consumers are hungry for something beyond access.
Until now, we’ve considered media something we can buy off the shelf. Consider Netflix: we once drove to a store to grab a VHS tape off the shelf and, once back home, we could watch the movie (be kind and rewind). Netflix disrupted this model by shipping DVDs in the mail and then disrupted itself by streaming movies (the digital shelf). Hollywood is getting disrupted. But they saved themselves once before.
As Levitt pointed out in Marketing Myopia in his examination of Hollywood, what saved (and ultimately grew) Hollywood was the fresh crop of young talent afforded by the new field of television. With the internet providing a platform for distribution of everything and the democratization of cheaper tools for everyone, there’s an entire generation of content creators emerging. While Hollywood and television will be smart to hire the more talented YouTubers to extend their audience into YouTube, there’s a more important point to make: there will be more producers entering the game. From products like Netflix to brands like Red Bull, media is about to get a whole lot of competition. Now Netflix gives us their act three where Netflix-itself becomes the producer of media, not just the conduit for delivery. And it’s working if you measure success by growing the customer base (it’s also working if you measure success by content accolades). And so the game changes and you have to figure out how to stand out from the crowd. Your product cannot be something that can simply be plucked from the digital shelf.
Someday another Theodore Levitt-like scholar will look back at our current decade and ponder similar questions about why some media companies succeeded while others failed. There will be large, risk-aversed organizations that will move at a snail’s pace and miss out on the biggest industry of the 21st Century because their management didn’t realize what industry they were in. It’s no longer about producing and serving media. We‘re all in the business of engagement.
Engagement is a loaded word in both media and application product development. This fickle marriage between content and the consumer is being measured in a hundred different ways: click-throughs, time spent, funnels… and now everyone in the tech product scene can’t tweet enough about growth hacking — the idea that you build consumer growth into the DNA of the actual product, that as you engage one person the product-itself funnels the activity of said person to pull in another new user. There’s a range of ways to bake this into a product’s experience — from the basic (this product is better with friends) to the ingenious (unlock features by recruiting a friend) to the nefarious (your actions will discretely spam your social network). Soon the notion of growth hacking will reach the media companies looking to expand their base of consumers (imagine the NY Times allowing you to read past the first paragraph if you tweet a link to the article). But engagement is about much more than simply fueling a piece of content to go viral.
No industry provides engagement quite like games. With games, the-thing-itself is the ultimate two-way street. Consumers play with the media and the experience is all-consuming. Most games designers would argue games aren’t a medium at all; they’re more like a sandbox with a set of rules to be explored without any direct message from the designer to the player. It’s akin to architecture: buildings are meant to be navigated and experienced. Yet the paths that games and architecture pave for their participants certainly offer a kind of behavioral rhetoric (think of how SimCity influenced a generation to consider urban planning). The point here is that there’s a spectrum of content where on the left side the media is completely a one-way affair (watching a television show) and on the right side it’s two-way engagement (playing a game). I believe it’s time for more traditional media that’s stuck on the far left side of this spectrum to push their products toward the right. People want deeper engagement.
Second screen is the phenomenon of consumers multitasking while watching television. They’re frustrated with the flat, one-way offering of broadcast. So they have turned to the likes of Twitter on their smart devices (that sits in their palm) to find conversation with others about the live television show (being viewed on a set that sits across the room). This is a broken experience that’s surely going to evolve. The question is what products will be first to offer the fix. Will the television show industry realize they’re in the business of engagement and not simply about producing shows? Will the cable and satellite industry realize they’re not simply in the industry of distribution? Engagement in the 21st century means a real-time relationship between the media and the consumer.
Of all of the industries reinventing itself for new modes of engagement, perhaps the most fascinating transformation is that of journalism. Here the model is personified through the evolution that runs from the printing press (and the delivery of physical product) to digital, real-time access. Yet by 2013, with the demise of “new” digital news publications like The Daily, it’s clear that going digital isn’t enough for journalism in a broad sense. Sure growth hacks, like upstart UpWorthy with their curiosity-grabbing headlines or BuzzFeed with their lists, have found great traction by taking “click-bait” to another level. But in the grand scheme of reporting, journalism is ripe for new modes that rethink the product from the ground-up. And this notion is gaining momentum.
Take some time to look at the bevy of predictions of what 2014 holds for journalism, courtesy of Nieman Journalism Lab’s annual survey. You’ll find a lot of reoccurring themes related to a shift in the news product and these thoughts are often accompanied by the notion of a Snow Fall moment. This is an ode to the NY Times’ Snow Fall interactive piece that debuted in 2012 about a fatal avalanche. It was a huge win for the company in terms of the number of reader eyeballs it received and the average time-spent a reader engaged with the story. Journalism as a whole took notice. In fact, the NY Times doubled-down on the form in 2013. Now organizations large and small are looking for scalable solutions to deliver news products that accomplish what Snow Fall was able to: deep engagement. Snow Fall offered classic reporting but it was backed by great context. As a reader, if you wanted more information about an aspect of the story it was likely a click away through an incorporated graphic or video. On top of the sleek interaction design, the piece felt alive thanks to beautiful transitions that moved as you read through the “article” (article a leftover term from the days of print). Snow Fall was (and is) the canary in the journalism coal mine that serves as a stark alarm of what consumers of news desire: a form born for digital offering deep context along with great storytelling.
Yet there was one aspect missing from Snow Fall: the two-way street. The old guard of journalism will fight deep into this decade to protect the authority that is news reporting. But social media blurred the line of authority long ago. There will always be experts at news capture but for every AP photographer there are a hundred thousand camera phones taking high resolution images every second. There are digital eyes and ears at every event reporting the sights and sounds in real-time through services like Twitter. News is something you participate with. And this means we need the journalism industry to focus less on news capture and more on quality delivery. This involves curation and presentation: taking a story and distilling into something that articulates what happened, how it happened and why it matters. In a word, we need journalists to enlighten.
But in the same breath, journalism cannot ignore the participatory culture that has emerged. This doesn’t mean offering a comment board under the article or a review of a few random tweets on the matter at hand. Journalism needs to offer 1) personalized information for the individual — understand who the consumer is to (responsively) make the piece more relevant; and 2) allow the proper paths for the consumer to add value to the story for others.
One example is how Medium allows readers to add annotations to a piece — it might be simple commentary or something more. It allows side conversations related to specific idea inside the story to blossom, possibly adding context to all future readers. Take that idea and explode it into the form of adding related images or videos. And then think about how such information can be tailored to the individual, serving the perfect aspect of context to each person. TouchCast, a company in which I’m involved, offers a solution for using video as a storytelling canvas where elements of the web can be placed inside the video and maintain their wonderful, interactive properties. Like TouchCast, Seen is another New York City startup but this service documents events through social media like Instagram pictures and Tweets. These are just a few of the products that will influence the media landscape moving forward and I can’t wait to see what else blossoms in 2014.
Perspective is everything: it’s how you learn from yesterday’s mistakes, set priorities for today and strategize for tomorrow. Myopia is a lack of perspective and it comes in all three flavors: inability to learn from prior mistakes, a lack of focus to appreciate today’s needs and the inability to prepare for tomorrow’s hurdles. The best executives working today are the ones with vision across time. But vision isn’t enough and this is something Levitt failed to address: in the age of stockholders and the quarterly report, there aren’t many rewards dangled in front of corporate risk takers (aside from the banking industry). Internal decision making is stifled by process and any semblance of nimble reorientation of product is hard to find. What the startup world warmly embraces as pivots (drastic changes to the business plan in order to gravitate toward the customers’ desires) the corporate world fears as risk taking — and the byproduct of failure that could possibly result. It’s the sort of thing that could get one fired. Until failure is embraced (and encouraged) all the way through the culture of the organization, the large media Goliath’s won’t likely be the ones who capitalize on the new modes of engagement. But that’s good news for us Davids.
Indeed, the nimble shall inherit the media landscape — the ones who are quick to solve deep engagement paths along with quality content. So remember: media is no longer in the business of moving people but in the business of moving with them.
