Jeff Jarvis on Everybody’s a Network
Jeff Jarvis fires off a jeremiad ("A literary work or speech expressing a bitter lament or a righteous prophecy of doom" -- I mean the latter) on the decoupling of the traditional network value chain, and wonders in what bits of the resulting mess will the real value accrue.
[from Everybody’s a network]On the business side, the old networks have no end of new competition. The scarcity economy is over; networks cannot continue to raise their rates even as their audiences shrink, because they no longer control the clock; there is always somewhere else to reach audiences — somewhere more efficienct and less expensive, by the way. The upfront buying season for commercials is going on now and the only way the networks can save themselves from the inevitable shrinkage Warren Buffett predicts for newspapers is by coming up with blockbusters. But as Umair Haque points out often, the blockbuster economy is not a longterm winner and it is getting riskier and riskier. See also Seth Godin: “If your marketing strategy requires you to hit #1 in order to succeed, you probably need a new marketing strategy.”
On the “consumer” side, the people formerly known as viewers have taken control of what, when, and how they watch and they do it without commercials.
And of course, the networks face no end of competitors in content, as well. Rocketboom now has twice the audience of many cable news shows because the stranglehold the networks had on distribution and audience is over. The audience is on stage. Your customers are your competitors.
Or maybe not. The smart network response to all this is to liquify. You let your stuff be found anywhere, in any medium and any network. You let your public distribute for you (see Jon Stewart’s Crossfire rant). Most important — and this is where Umair said ABC should have been going next — you should recommend good stuff to people and it shouldn’t be just your stuff; you use your relationship, trust, and resources to aggregate stuff and audience across the world of possibilities. (This is essentially what I’m also suggesting to the BBC in my Guardian column this week, coming soon.) In the old static-network world, it made no sense to send people to other networks; in the new, fluid world, they’re going to go there anyway, and so the best thing to do is to help them find the best stuff, redefining the value of a network. And from a business perspective, I argue, you’re wise to grow audience and ad inventory across open networks of the stuff you recommend. Umair says that ABC took a good move in unbundling content from distribution but what it should really be doing is rebundling content with audiences:
Rebundling is where value capture will happen - at communities, reconstructors, markets, networks - that direct people’s attention to individualized ‘casts. This is where branding will be reborn - and where advertising is already being disrupted, ripped apart, and reborn (viz, Google, PPC, pay per call, etc)
The edge will dissolve the center. I don't believe that the only place where value can wind up, though, is in the area of rebundling, even rebundling of audiences. I think that there a big oportunity in new ground, where we finally get past the concept of audience. We are still discussing this -- more or less -- using the terminology and mindset of traditional media.
The center will fall apart. We are not just breaking up the traditional value chain, we are abandoning it. People are naturally, without thinking about it in these terms, moving away from the brands, models, and enchantments of this generation of media. We are not moving around the old Chess pieces, we are moving to a new game, moving into a new basis for competition: a game like Go, where all the pieces are equal in strength when in your hand, but differ based on their context on the board.
Parts of the old world will remain. I believe that something that looks suspiciously like advertising will persist for some time, since it is easy to do, easy to insert into other things. But easy to do and recognize, and the whole notion of sticking something foreign into a stream is ugly, and easy to block or ignore. We will slowly transition to alternatives, although they may actually wind up being called ads. Embedded product placement, testimonials and endorsements, and other personalized "advertising" will survive and expand. (I plan a post on experiential marketing, later this week, following up on that thread.)
Everything streams. In a world where any stream, or whatever sort of media -- writing, voice, music, video, or all of the above -- can be accessed by anyone, and all streams are two-way, the might of the old networks works against them, and to the benefit of the individuals or small groups that comprise the new networks. Like five foot aikido masters dispatching muscle-bound pro wrestlers, the new will outstream and outflow the old.
A brand is now an invitation to participate, not a one-sided promise. Brand is just as distributed as everything else, just as fragmented, just as much a stream of involvement.
The media folks see it as an end, not a beginning, and they hope to wait it out as long as possible, instead of getting with it. David Carr, in today's New York Times, shows what is rattling around in the heads of today's newpaper people, and the same thoughts are everywhere in traditional media:
[from In Print, Staring Down a Daily Worry]A YEAR ago, I was talking on the phone to the editor of a major newspaper for a column I was working on. With business concluded, we had The Conversation, the one about the large boulder that seems to be tumbling through the newspaper business. "How old are you?" he asked. Forty-nine, I told him. "Me too. Do you think we outrun this thing?"
I said I thought so.
He's deluding himself. He's are falling down an empty elevator shaft and saying that it's ok, because he'll be retired before he hits bottom. Bull. Print newspapers will be largely dead in a few years: it's completely uneconomical, and once (as Buffett recently pointed out) the investors snap out of it and realize there is no turnaround, they will have to cutr staff and raise rates for subscriptions which will only accelerate the migration away from print, and so on. The fall will accelerate. And they won't fire all the youngsters, who are cheaper, they will fire the big, fat, old dinosaurs with the big salaries.
Companies will die rather than make revolutionary changes. I did a consulting gig with a company-that-shall-not-be-named at the start of 2004, a tech magazine group of a larger media monster. It was ostensibly about blogging, but quickly (in like 3 hours) veered into the future of media. When I put up their Alexa numbers on the display it showed that half of their online readers had left in the prior 12 months. I asked when they had starting blogging, and someone said a few months earlier. I asked "Do you see any change on the rate of defection?" They answered no, and I pointed out that what they were doing was not blogging, though they might have been using blogging technology, because blog readership was growing quickly, even with established media companies like Businessweek. I also suggested that it was probably the readers that they most wanted to keep that were leaving fastest: they agreed. The day dissolved into a battle between various editors about who said what when, whether to stay the course or do something radical, and who was to blame for this situation. Weeks later a SVP was fired. Months later a new guy came aboard to urun online properties, full of optimism. A few months later, he quit, discouraged and humbled. And a few months later, a month ago, they shut the whole group of pubs down. As I said at the time, if they didn't do something fairly radical, they would hit the bottom and bounce in 18 months, which turned out to be only a few months off.
I predict the same sequence of events is going to play itself out in all corners of the traditional media, with different starting points and duration. Even areas that seem healthy today, like popular magazines, will ultimately fall to the same forces that spell the end of tech magazines, newspapers, movie theatres, brick-and-mortar music stores, radio, and conventional television. They will all work hard to deny the coming future, they they will try to embrace the easy parts, and then and only then, when none of their ineffectural conjuring takes, they will try to reengineer themselves into a new phylum of beast, but in general it will prove to be too, too late.
The edge will dissolve the center, and there is only one thing the center can do: move to the edge before the edge comes to them.
[Update: Scott Karp (who I just met at mesh) joins the discussion.]
Funny you should say that - a small but highly vocal bunch of 'us' are making life noticeably uncomfortable for certain online media. Maybe the gnat's bite on the elephant's backside is a lot more poisonous than we think.
Posted by: Dennis Howlett | May 22, 2006 at 09:53 AM