FUTURE TECHNOLOGY IN MEDIA
“He who controls the media controls the minds of the public” – Noam Chomsky
Media is a dance—the interplay between content, culture, conversations and Commerce.
We capitalised ‘Commerce’ because, at the end of the day, you can have good content, culture and conversations, but if you can’t commercialise it, it’s hard to have a sustainable media business. The stable overall growth pattern of the media market masks an underlying shift and volatility.
Brands are clamouring for attention and so are always looking to be where their target audiences spend their time, where they have conversations and make connections. Yet the media industry has a constant tension with audiences that typically don’t want to a) have their media interrupted or influenced by advertising and b) pay for their access. Media business owners, therefore, are always looking at how to commercialise their platform and audience without alienating and turning audiences off their platform or losing their attention. As summarised by Max Willens of Insider Intelligence:
“Media is good business if you can attract a sought-after audience and keep their attention.”
THE VIRTUOUS MEDIA CIRCLE
We believe there is a virtuous circle of five parts that modern media owners look to create (Emily need image of a circle with the 5 parts illustrated somehow below):
1) Build an audience: Create a platform that gets people’s attention
2) Sell either:
a. access (e.g., subscriptions or licences) directly to the consumer
b. or attention to brands looking to get their message (i.e., advertise) to that audience
3) Make sure you can track that audience’s behaviour so that you can:
a. improve and iterate your product (the content and media experience)
b. justify the cost of your product (selling advertising to the brands)
4) Make sure that:
a. the consumer trusts you
b. you can measure your audience
c. brands trust your data and are happy to pay for access to the audience
5) Retain the audience’s attention so that you can move to point 2 again
The tension in media is in getting the above right—the frequent trade-offs between the experience of the medium, the consumer expectations and the monetisation.
A digital whirlwind has whipped up and merged media, advertising and retail. The lines are blurred. The media highway has everyone exploring new avenues. Traditional media agencies are being either disrupted or cut out. We are seeing tech collaborations between social media and e-commerce tools, media groups adding e-commerce platforms for clients and large consultancies making moves in media buying and strategy. Digitally native media businesses and those with large newsletter-based publishers are being swept up in a busy M&A market with companies that are looking for ‘logged-in audiences’ fuelling acquisitions. Physical retail is becoming media and boundaries are being broken down between CPG companies direct to the consumer. Major global brands and large companies are creating their own in-house modern media houses.
Brands and consumers are now welcome to participate and co-create conversations and content. Active conversations as much as passive content mean that creator communities are increasing their influence on consumers’ buying habits. The choice for business is a simple one: embrace a warm welcome from the creator community excited to share in your story… or be left behind.
THE GREAT DIGITAL MEDIA SHIFT
Traditional print media and now linear TV are the poster children of the traditional-to-digital shift. In 2022, streaming TV overtook linear TV. In the 1980s, there were 64 million print newspapers in circulation throughout the US on any given day. Now, that figure is closer to 24 million. The Washington Post, for example, now has 3 million online subscribers and only 159,000 print readers. The business of journalism is an increasingly less lucrative industry. Most revenue comes from digital ads running on news sites—so rather than selling the news to consumers, it’s the time and attention of consumers that is being sold to advertisers.
The pressure remains on media owners to find sustainable business models without impacting their product—the content consumer’s experience. As a result, some of the best-quality content is locked behind subscription-based paywalls. If it’s a sustainable business from advertising revenues, marketeers are demanding more effectiveness for their spend (from both efficiency of spend and attribution). Efficiency in the money they spend gets the most bang for the buck. Then comes attribution—understanding the impact of the spend—on brand awareness, sentiment and for most, ultimately, sales.
Many media platforms are starting in a specific genre such as music and then looking to leverage our attention into a platform for all media. Land and expand…
Digital media is revolutionising the way we consume content, and the future is even more dynamic.
Some of the sectors that saw immense gains due to technology and consumer adoption such as SVoD (streaming video on demand) will not be able to sustain that growth, while others will continue to build from their higher bases. Yet there are still billions of people in the world who are not able to regularly access high-speed internet, which means there is still large room for media industry growth. Governments are beginning to realise that media is a core part of a strong ‘orange economy’. All of which means the future of the $2 trillion industry is very exciting one…
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