I have no intention of turning this into a media blog, but the symbiotic—or is it codependent—relationship between the media and advertising businesses provided the day's best reading, again. Friday, it was the IBM paper on media strategies, predicting divergent strategies for content and media distribution. Today, Bob Garfield lit up the advertising world with Chaos Scenario 2.0, an Ad Age cover article on how mass media and mass marketing are threatened by the same trends.
Print it now, before the article goes behind the subscribers-only wall.
Online distribution appears to be the future of entertainment video, from the open distribution of YouTube or the paid download of iTunes. Garfield paints a challenging, but ultimately positive, picture for marketers, while advertisers will need to get on their interactive game if they want to be part of the emerging system. The biggest challenge appears to confront traditional media outlets.
You can hardly turn around without bumping into a prediction (observation?) of the death of the newspaper. The current environment is equally threatening to TV and radio. Garfield lists examples of media companies losing value and otherwise experiencing pain as he leads to a conclusion that the advertiser-supported model is failing. The IBM model suggests a movement toward very low-cost content and micro niche targeting, but what if the revenue model has to change?
Garfield mentions The Digital Consumer: Examining Trends in Digital Media, the January 2007 Oppenheimer report on trends in media and related industries. That one requires a bit more commitment, coming in at 92 pages. Garfield pulls a quote that summarizes the challenge for media companies: content "is not likely to be ad-supported."
If that's not the starting point for a very interesting strategy session, I don't know what is.
