Setting the context for the new debate
A critical piece of work in the unfolding set of new insights that inform the way we view the impact of the new media on culture, identity and of course commerce, is Mediated, by the US academic Thomas Zengotita, published in 2005.
The book – and this approach is a part of its genius – opens with a tale from the theatre. Students (our writer among them) in a method class, NYC 1963, are told as they warm up for a class, that John Kennedy has been assassinated. They assume – gloriously – that this is a game, nothing but a cue for an improvisation exercise, a classroom trick. Each student commences to evolve their own (unique, from the gut, utterly authentic) acted reaction to the fake tragedy for the no-doubt-soon-to-appear method guru whose approval – indeed whose attention of any kind – they crave.
They weep, gesticulate, freeze, frown. Snatches of practice script are tossed around. Each is in their own world. The assassination has been created for each of them, a command performance to set the scene for their own special performances.
But no: it’s true of course. Kennedy, it turns out, has died. And the gritty realities of their method preparations are shown up for what they are. The distorted, self-obsessed faces of children in the bathroom mirror, thrown into excruciating, shameful relief by, well, the real reality.
You at once get – as I did – the point. In a world where the media now form, contain, deliver, explain, validate and embellish – but most all define – so much of our lives, we’re told that the only performance that really matters any more … is our own. We have slipped from the stalls to the stage, we find ourselves suddenly behind the microphone, in front of the camera. And giving, it goes without saying, the performance of our lives.
The rest of this well-written, very readable book explores, details and proves the point. From teen queen in the high school playground, through the falls and rises of our many heroes, and why pop stars still matter so much … to the cosmetic surgery operating room, our mediated life is shown to us in riveting, living colour.
The implications for the future of culture, media – indeed human experience itself – are big. The author writes of “flattered” media consumers – those whose own mediated performance is not simply a partial replacement of time with TV, stereo or browser: it is now the most meaningful piece of their entirely reflexive life experience.
MySpace users, YouTube fans, passionate IM-ers, constant SMS-ers, are no longer “consuming content” except in the most generic sense. They are – every day – selecting, assembling and representing out to the network an entirely new persona: “The Distributed Me”.
They co-opt images and sounds snatched from Big Media. Note that these are referential borrowings, made not for the purposes of inbound entertainment, but to be used as outbound qualifiers for the way I wish to present myself today. The tribe – my social network near and far – I hope feeds back to me, builds on today’s “Me Hypothesis”, creating a reflexive pendulum of the most compelling, immersive (and, worryingly, exclusive) media experience you can imagine.
So, it’s their show, with Big Media second to the table. If, as we’re beginning to see, interruptive forms of media cut fatally across the bows of the networked consumer’s fantastic, flattered, voyage, where next for the producer, the rights owner and most of all, the advertiser?
Is digital media just about technology?
Media is in one way or another about the consumer from here on, in that the consumer, as opposed to the media industries, determines and captures – and in quite a few compelling instances as we saw above, creates and distributes – the value.
To assume, as has largely been done to date without too severe a penalty, that the Internet is “just another channel”, that digital media and marketing are simply the previous models, but with added technology, is to fatally miss the point. All media, to speak of, are digital, and all modern marketing – the exceptions being more or less marginal – depends on digital technology. In this sense, the technology angle is tautological, and adds nothing to our understanding beyond the obvious.
No. There’s something both bigger and more subtle in play here. Consumers … well they just don’t consume the way they used to, when it comes to media. The primary attribute of today’s affluent consumers’ media behaviour is not merely their usage of various digital channels and devices. It’s their “empowered elusiveness”. Their infinite power to choose, to put it simply.
This power enables consumers to select and control – in fact, to own – their media experience, to a degree unprecedented in the now-receding Age of Television. That previous lack of control – consumers’ dependency on the careful, corporately determined scheduling of content by the media owner, the model of appointment-based viewing – was indeed what enabled advertisers to enter the equation, as the gatekeepers of the consumer’s access to entertainment.
This is important background for our discussion: we assume that this commercial control of consumers’ media access and choice is the rule … in fact, it’s the exception. Only since TV really took off in the 50’s have advertisers held their powerful chokehold on media experience. It was the very limitations of broadcast technology, its peculiar combination of kludged systems and highly sophisticated compromises, that created the gap that advertising so completely filled, till the affluent networked m-consumer took back control.
“Brought to you by Brand X” used to really mean something, till consumer choice came along. Ads were an integral part of the entertainment equation, as opposed to the nose-against-the window image we have of them today, in a world of TiVo, the EPG, search, ad-blocking, and as we are seeing today, consumer-created media value.
So, the consumer in control. But with what? Well, with better technology really, constantly evolving tools that enable them to skip ads, personalise and trim content back to the bare minimum they need.
Need … in order to achieve what for themselves, exactly?
The concept of Return on Attention
I’d argue it’s the media experiences, not just on- but also off-line, that deliver adequately against the godlike expectations consumers now have, that are being initially sought and then managed here.
Let’s call this brutal measure Return on Attention.
My argument here is that, where the consumer controls the game and holds the ball, Return on Investment for advertising brands at the tail end of the Age of Television, is more or less completely predicated on the delivery, again and again, of Return on Attention.
We on the brand side may not be able yet to exactly define what does and does not meet the benchmark, but we all acknowledge that the m-consumer knows, almost in an instant, how, where and when to allocate - and equally when and why to withdraw - this priceless bargaining chip at the table of media – their focused attention to the content, the brands, the experiences we hopefully throw into their path.
Can mass media expect to support Return on Attention for this uniquely flattered and jealous new god in our marketing landscape?
We do know that mass media can continue to fill in the background – a sort of perpetual chorus line to the new digital superstars – in the form of the half-listened to radio, the always-on but patchily attended-to TV in the corner (remember when TV was “the new hearth”?) the looming, vaguely-noted billboard, the hardly-ever-even-scanned newspaper and magazine ads.
Note also that digital has its own mass plays, the largely derided and often ill-used banner ad, and of course (ironically constructed out of the gold dust of the CRM database …) the email marketing drop. And worst of all, we have the awful gibbering of spam.
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