Tag Archives: digital revolution

New media fundamentalists, how will they react to the revolution in TV?

Maurice_Levy_2008I read with interest  remarks by Maurice Levy (pictured) on how he thinks about life after the failure of the Omnicom -Publicis merger.

“We have a strategy, and we will accelerate that strategy. It calls for strengthening our digital operations to reach 50% of our revenue [from 40% currently], and investing in big data and accelerating the capabilities we have in integration.”

Levy knows much more about the industry and about Publicis than I ever will and I defer to his greater knowledge.  But I have to say these remarks sent a chill through me.

There’s no question that the digital revolution continues and that it will change everything we know about marketing, advertising and communications.

It is also true, as I have been laboring to show the last couple of days, that there is a revolution taking place in old media as well.  TV is changing at light speed.  (See posts here, here, and here.)

It looks as if Levy is concentrating more on the digital revolution than the TV revolution.  To be sure, this is a bias that has swept through the advertising business.  A new generation came up, insisting that it was now going to be all digital advertising all the time, that the 30 second spot was done for, and that TV was now just another victim of the technological revolution. New media fundamentalists scorn old media and especially TV.

(Just to be clear, I am no old media apologist.  My book Culturematic assumes new media.  No culturematic is possible without new media as a means and an end.)

The trouble with new media fundamentalism is that it misses what is perhaps the single biggest story concerning popular culture in the last 10 years.  Against the odds, and in the teeth of the hostility of the chattering classes, TV got better.

And this revolution means several things.  That consumers as viewers are getting steadily smarter.  That they are now accustomed to and expectant of a new order of story telling.  I think it’s far to say that old media is still better at telling stories than new media.  This is another way of saying that old media (both TV and advertising) may have been trailing new media…but that they suddenly caught up.

I know some readers are going to take this as the voice of reaction, an attempt to return the old order to former glory.  So just to be clear.  I’m NOT saying that old media is better than new media.  What I am saying is that those who now diminish old media because of the rise and great success of new media are missing something.  And just to be really clear: as cultural creatives, as content creators, whether they like it or not, new media fundamentalists can’t afford to make this error.  They are after all in the business of NOT MISSING THINGS, ESPECIALLY THINGS AS BIG AS THIS.  Sorry for shouting, but there is a new media orthodoxy in place and shouting is sometimes called for.

And no, this is not an argument that says advertising was perfect just the way it was.  There is work to be done in the world of old media, lots of work.  Remember when the ads on a show were often better than the show? These days have mostly passed.  Now the ad surrounded a show looks shouty, simple minded and a little clueless. Like it doesn’t know what is going on around it.  Like a revolution took place and the brand and the advertiser didn’t notice.  Oh, if there is something that is NOT ALLOWED in the branding and advertising business, it’s not noticing.  

So it’s not as if anyone wants us to go back to old media circa Mad Men and the 1950s.  Old media must now evolute as ferociously as new media.  To catch up.  To keep up.  That revolution on TV tells us that our culture is changing in ways no one anticipated at speeds no one thought possible.  And anyone in the communications game (using old media or new media) is going to have evolve in something like real time.

Our culture is becoming a hot house.  Those who want to contribute will have to flourish to do so.  It makes me think of that Wieden and Kennedy moment after a recent SuperBowl.  W+K had floated that Old Spice ad and as they looked at the tidal wave of online content they have provoked, they thought, “Damn.  Better get on this.”

A group of them retired to a building somewhere and just started turning stuff out.  Call and response.  Call and response.  Real time marketing.

This may be where we are headed.  There are so many things in play, and they are moving at such speed, concatenating in ways we can’t anticipated, this is perhaps not the time to up your digital bet, Mr. Levy.  In this very dynamic world, we want to use all our media all the time.

Will New York City go the way of the newspaper?

The digital effect rolls on. The record store has been vaporized by iTunes. Retail is being disintermediated by Amazon. The newspaper has been dealt a mortal blow by Craig’s list, the print magazine by PSFK, Huffington, etc.  Clearly, education is next.

No one talks about cities.  However natural they seem to anyone born in the 20th century, cities are arbitrary constructions.  They are predicated on the idea that humans must congregate and colocate.  But this idea is contingent.  A "face to face" connection matters only when there is no digital alternative.  

And now there is.  We can interact digitally.  You can be in a cab in Singapore and I can be in a cab in Philadelphia and our voices have real fidelity.  If we don’t need to be in motion, we can use the camera build into our computers, adding facial expressions to voice.

The fidelity of teleconferencing is still pretty horrible.  Jack Conte and I tried to create a conversation on line Friday using Ustream and it was spectacularly unsuccessful. (I ended up called Jack on the phone, and he held the received up to his computer microphone.) But this is merely a technical problem.  By the end of the present decade we will have perfect fidelity of audio and video.  (See Cisco’s Umi for a glimpse of the future.)

And then what?  I wonder if it isn’t the end of New York City as we know it.  

Here are a couple of crude speculations that will indicate what I mean.  In a perfect world, we would have Steve Crandall build one of his amazing thinking machines to help us work this through.  In the meantime:

Let’s say there are 8 million people in NYC at any give time.  And let’s say 1 million of them are there as commuters, traveling in from New Jersey, Connecticut and Long Island each day.  

When there is TCWTF (teleconferencing with true fidelty), these people will no longer commute every day.  They will probably commute once a week, because, and here I am making the BFA (big, fat assumption) that some face-to-face contact is called for, especially when the people in question or idea workers, cultural creatives or, as I like to call them, Floridians.  

The commuters who now come in one day a week will need perches more than offices and the corporation will now be in position to cut space requirements substantially.  Let’s say they do so by 15%.  

We have remaining 7 million people who live in the 5 boroughs.  (Forgive me if I am way off. I just need some figures to paint the picture.)  Let’s suppose the 2 million of these residents qualify as idea workers or Floridians.  I think we can assume that some 80% of this group will give up their homes or rentals in the city.

No longer tied to the city by the need to be there everyday, these people will give up tiny living circumstances for something larger, cheaper and less onerously taxed.  (Again, I am assuming that these people will want to be in the city say a day a week.  Face to face contact will continue to be important.  This too may eventually change and then there won’t be anything stopping us from moving to the rain forests of the Amazon or the stormy coast of Newfoundland.  For the time being we will telecommute from Philadelphia or New Haven.)  

Now the city is really up against it.  With a decline in demand for office space and housing, the tax base will take a tremendous hit.  (Given the kind of taxes paid by idea workers and the companies that employee them, it’s not unthinkable that this exodus would remove something like a third of the city’s tax base.  This without actually reducing very much of the need for the services that taxes support.  Actually, Richard Florida is exactly the guy to run these numbers.  I hope he will favor us with some rough calculations.)

We might be looking at the return of the 1970s "downward spiral" scenario.  Tax base falls, social services falls, crime rises, the city becomes chaotic, even more people leave, and the tax base falls again.  The city tries to correct by charging fewer companies more, and more companies leave.  After all, the tech now makes this easier and easier to do. 

Thoughts, please!