One of the more vexing questions facing rights owners in the post-Internet age is how to realise best value from their back catalogues. When content is commonly viewed as all-you-can-eat, and when the controlled and focused model of distribution through fixed channels, evolves into a model of simple release, where consumers are left - collaboratively and individually - to find value more or less serendipitously as they drift across networks, how are we to evaluate and market rights?
I sat a while back with a senior executive of a very large production company whose worth, it emerged in the discussion, was significantly determined by analysts as a direct function of their large and reasonably credible back catalogue of drama, news, sport and documentary programming. My colleague was, I felt rightly, disturbed by the instinct that the company was a hostage to fortune: "Where, when and most of all, how are these rights going to realise the level and range of exploitation that the City is, literally, banking on?
Not that the traditional revenue streams associated with catalogue have gone away, and I won't go into those here: readers will be more or less familiar with the landscape. But the concerns of the rights holding community are well-founded, in that the upward pressure of the investor's dreams of fresh - largely digital, alarmingly - profits, combined with the very real downward pressure of the market reality - where both consumer attention and advertised spend look increasingly unreliable - smacks clearly of rock and hard place.
"500 (or 300 or even 25) channels and nothing on ...". Is this just about quality of content, or more interestingly about consumer or audience relevance? One man's boring rubbish is another man's compelling and timely instruction or distraction ... M'learned friend Rory Sutherland of OgilvyOne points out that, when for example battling with the assembly of a flat pack piece of furniture from Ikea, a plodding, step-by-step video manual to the mobile, irrespective of dry Scandinavian voice-over, would be seized upon like water in the desert.
Levelling the terrain dangerously, but in order to make this point: we are reaching a time in our post-internet culture where meta-content - data about content - alongside "meta-taste" - information about user preferences - is becoming commercially more important than the content itself ... But how could the index possibly be of greater value than the book?
Whether through search, social media, traditional hard-slog research, pure luck, or “Media Through Wandering About” (surfing), the consumer’s chances of finding media content they value and might pay for with cash or quality attention (thereby supporting advertising investment) – putting aside genre for the sake of brevity, though clearly that is very influential on preference and value – are dramatically improved through tagging of one sort or another.
And while users are – again generalising broadly – consciously, deliberately or unconsciously by publisher/retailer automation – tagging the content they encounter with their various associations – let’s agree to call this “folksonomy” - rights owners have some catching up to do on the taxonomy side of this crucial equation. Standards of mark-up language pre-existed – indeed fed the evolution of – html in the form of the publisher’s standard “sgml”.
Rights owners and publishers, to enable and capitalise upon the finding, preference, sharing and consumption of their back-catalogue media by consumers, must find ways to develop and link the meta-content of their media assets, with the declared meta-tastes of the consumer, to move towards ensuring that the value of their catalogue is – while we will never return to the Eden of a truly lucrative, growth-enabling syndication-based distribution model – at least optimised for the “planned serendipity” that is so often the model of discovery and exploitation.
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