Bang Bang You're Dead

Capsule:  Parts of the 2010 media life-cycle promise new sustainability when viewed from the vantage point of the technologies on deck at last week's CES.  It's not that the latest consumer hardware is a slam dunk success; it's that the hardware and software components are integrated across industries, promising fertile immediate links to the commercial marketplace. In the same week that CES was attempting its own lingua franca, traditional media wars continued to rage.  A broadcast network shot its own TV talk show legend in full public view rather than concede that advertising-reinforced TV time slots are so 2009.  At the same time, cablers and cable nets aimed old-fashioned revolvers at one another in the name of program access and controlling content costs.  Will a sped-up media maturation process propelled by markets coming slowly back to life result in evolution or a new spate of media homicides?


Financial Times  (registration required)
The Wrap
Multichannel News
Gizmodo




What's with the 2010 reruns of generations-old media wars?  If the last five years have taught anything to the multi-billion-dollar world of content and distribution, it's that divorce hurts, only slightly less than homicide.


Newspapers and magazines have absorbed the Solomonic wisdom that dividing their brands into two separate businesses--traditional dual-revenue stream print and seemingly modern single-stream internet--is like cutting the baby in half.  It doesn't work for either side.


Representing their new lessons to the world, publishing companies are embracing a hybrid content-and-distribution model by collaborating with equipment manufacturers to get the word out in newly efficient forms.  Wherever the ten new electronic readers end up when consumers vote, the resulting consolidation should benefit publishers and their reading public.  


The new collaborative media business model embraces subscription revenues--with print and e-readers representing the best of mobility as its own brand value--and advertising, serving both print and the place-based online world.  The best of the new collaborative brands borrow from all of the content and distribution participants.  Making commercial sense of so many brand attributes--accurate information, meaningful advocacy, quality presentation, complete portability and ease of access and use--will be the challenge of the new media decade.  Media marketers will succeed when their promotional messages trumpet a winning consumer proposition that includes product design, service design and financial integrity.


Conveying a brand's financial integrity will be tough for most marketers, especially in a market where so many brands suffered significant losses and some were lost entirely during the last three years.  But financial integrity is a value that has assumed significance following a major recession that forced a new American frugality as well as a healthy distrust of major corporate brands.  Pricing and offers that look too good to be true are more likely to be judged as false by the post-recession consumer.  Witness the last two lackluster holiday seasons where sales were lost in a sea of for sale signs.


The fractionalized look of today's media just may suit the consuming public.  Seeing big companies who used to make big profits broken into little pieces might feel like payback against the last decade's commercialism and its demonstration of the unbalanced power of American banks versus the people who funded them.  The problem is that most brands can't survive cut up into pieces, requiring companies to find new ways to reconstitute themselves into commercial models that work.


One model that might work for multi-channel broadband distributors is to construct a pay content and commerce layer on top of their broadband services.  This pay layer could embrace the distributors' content partners akin to the aspirations of TV Everywhere.  But the new brand requirements of excellence in product and service design, as well as financial integrity, will require greater versatility than simply duplicating the TV model in the internet space.


Maybe it's time for cablers and cable content brands to look at the near-death experiences of publishing with some healthy humility and a respect for the adaptive abilities of the survivors. If TV online looks and is controlled and priced in exactly the same way as TV through traditional cable service, there'll be nothing new for audiences to buy.  Of course, rate increases are a possibility; but jacking up the rates for an appreciably unchanged product seems tried to the point of conviction and no longer commercially true.


If TV Everywhere becomes an exercise in customer retention rather than product expansion and revenue growth, the cable industry will see a further economic softening.  As it is, TV's commercial situation is reminiscent of publishing, humbled by divorcing its essential elements into two separate businesses without enough of a commercially sustainable representation on either side of what customers really want.


What customers want is to have their content delivered through an affordable unified place-based system that includes a mobile product and service experience.  If the media puts the customer at the top of its new marketing hierarchy, a set of complementary products that fit the bill with better ways to watch TV news, sports and entertainment will result. Of course, these complementary products will force a breakdown of the "not invented here" resistance inside many major media companies.


Better entertainment as well as better business models are already beginning to follow technology across new collaborative corridors.  Hastening the transformation is a strong realization that advertising alone can't make the world spin, especially since advertising economics are at war with the economics of internet search, whose supreme efficiency has temporarily forced all ad media prices to the floor.  


Google isn't to blame for overtaking advertising with the best available search system. Traditional media failed to keep pace. Multi-channel content and distribution failed to imagine better navigation, keeping the broadcast channel model predominant rather than expanding Tivo-like-models across their TV platforms. It seems clearer in retrospect that for the media like the banks and the insurance companies the last decade was a harvesting decade after all. 


So, what follows the harvest?  We'll see.  Not even the biggest of yesterday's distribution giants have enough of their profits left to support endless content fee increases.  At the same time, the traditional media doesn't have enough of its traditional media luster to retain customers while raising subscription prices in a stagnant or even slow-growing economy.  


Most importantly, today's consumers with options--exhausted by bickering between political partisans, between new media and old, between content and distribution--don't have the spending mojo to support the familiar.  With all of these factors converging, the media brands that survive will have to right a world turned upside down by putting the customer back on top; and, the rest will be consigned to our collective media memory.