<span class="caps">TV</span>, meet Gilmore’s Law

TV, meet Gilmore’s Law

April 10, 2013 By Terry Heaton Leave a Comment

The NAB is underway in Las Vegas in the wake of an all-time revenue record for the broadcast industry last year. The networks are about to launch the annual sale of their inventory known as the upfronts, and all is well. Well, not exactly. There’s declining viewership, the not-so-little disruption known as Aereo, the increasingly viable civil defense, weather warning and Amber alert efforts of the Telcos, the love affair that all media companies have with online banner ads, and mostly, the way broadcasters make all of their online strategic decisions as if the Web wasn’t a horizontally-connected network.

If you strip away the HTML that displays what, for example, a local television station offers online — also known as “the content” — what’s left is the network and how that web document fits within the whole. This document must follow certain realities about life in the network that contradict the view associated with simply watching or reading the content, especially in the area of mass media. In certain instances, we have to go many years back and visit the minds of those who created the network, and here’s a noteworthy truth: they had nothing to do with media.

These were engineers of the highest level, including John Gilmore, who, according to Wikipedia, is one of the founders (the fifth employee) of Sun Microsystems, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU project. I’ll spare you all the link following by saying that John isn’t likely the kind of guy who’d be running ANY of the companies on display at the NAB this week.

In addition to all his “foundings,” Mr. Gilmore is also the author of the often-cited axiom, Gilmore’s Law:

“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

Why is this so important for broadcasters especially? Because the parameter that the FCC uses to issue licenses to broadcast companies is geography, and online, geography represents a form of “damage.” Geography is an artificial inefficiency that even China is beginning to see doesn’t work in terms of guarding certain kinds of information from the eyeballs of its citizens. In other words, when Aereo wins its legal battle with broadcasters (it will), the just-announced News Corps’ response to take its stations off-the-air will backfire, because anything that attempts to give station owners a piece of the pie through Internet streaming will eventually have to bend its knee to Gilmore’s Law.

News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey told Fox News Entertainment:

“This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can’t sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal,” Carey said at the annual gathering of broadcasters, called NAB Show, in Las Vegas. “If we can’t do a fair deal, we could take the whole network to a subscription model.”

News Corp plans to use GPS to determine how its stream will be divvied up via geography, but this is entirely to satisfy the revenue wants and needs of local affiliates. That may seem fair to the stations, but consumers will get doubly hosed — by cable companies, whose fees aren’t about to go down, and by Fox (and others later), via its own subscriber fees. Something will have to give, and consumers will demand one OR the other but not both. And Gilmore’s Law says that if it ends up that streaming is preferred, the owners of the content will ultimately win.

Whereas terrestrial broadcasting used to be the most efficient way to distribute video content by dividing the airwaves into geographically-defined markets, that is no longer absolute. What we have here is the railroads, who at one time owned shipping across-the-land, believing they deserve a fee for each jet that races across-the-sky, crossing over their land-based tracks in the process.

There are ways that local media companies can make money and even thrive downstream, but riding the coattails of their network big brothers is going to become a net liability sooner rather than later. The ones who will “win” the most will be those who own the programming that people watch, and this needs to be a part of everybody’s long-term strategic plan.

BONUS LINK: The Verge Nuclear option: would Fox really leave the free airwaves to undercut Aereo?

Filed Under: Broadcasting, Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media

When advertising enters the stream

August 31, 2012 By Terry Heaton 1 Comment

Here’s the latest in my on-going series of essays, Local Media in a Postmodern World. I think this may be one of the most important I’ve ever published, so read on.

When Advertising Enters the Stream

Thanks to the Web, the world of digital news and information is moving from static pages to real-time streams, à la Twitter and Facebook. My friend and Harvard geek David Weinberger recently wrote that the Net has altered his personal time scale, and I feel that, too. “The Net can do a hundred years in a gulp,” Weinberger wrote.” Ten thousand years is the new century.” That sense of accelerated time is what’s also contributing to a very old and archaic sense that becomes obvious when consuming various forms of news as a finished product. This is all a work-in-progress, and nobody really knows where it’s all headed.

One thing is certain, however. For this to make any sense, the ad industry is going to have to be a part of it, because content producers won’t contribute to live streams unless they get paid. For the first time, in just the past month, I read an informed article about this, and it prompted an immediate advisory to our clients. This essay expands that thinking and explains why I think it’s time for real action.

Filed Under: Advertising, Continuous News, Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media, Unbundled Media

“Come on in,” said the spider to the fly

June 14, 2012 By Terry Heaton 3 Comments

Media companies have no choice but to leap into the queue for Twitter’s new “expanded tweets” application, but I want to add my voice to those who suggest that this might be ultimately a well-placed shot in the foot for content originators. Sure, we may be able to better attract eyeballs to our content to encourage those click-throughs, but it’s also arming Twitter with a clever way to build its own media empire at our expense.

Of greatest concern to me is the definition of the term “media company,” for that applies to everyone today, including the people formerly known as the advertisers. Twitter and all of social media provides a way for the people with the money to by-pass traditional filters, such as legacy media companies. Don’t ever forget this when reading the new media tea leaves.

Mathew Ingram of GigaOm has nailed another issue for local media companies that use new media opportunities to extend their brands: that they’re being drawn into a clever trap that they seemingly can’t avoid.

…there comes a point where a partner can start to look like a competitor if you tilt your head the right way, and I would argue that Twitter is nearing that point. Facebook is also a partner for media companies who use it to host their comments, or have brand pages there, or rely on the social network to promote their work through “frictionless sharing” apps. But at times it can seem as much like competition — particularly for users’ attention — as it does a partner.

That’s part of what I think blogging pioneer Dave Winer means when he warns that media companies should not see Twitter as their friend. To the extent that Twitter is offering news consumers of all kinds access to the information they want — regardless of whether that information consists of “user-generated content” or links to other media outlets — it is a competitor. And to the extent that it can offer better curation or aggregation or filtering or targeting of that content, it will win.

At some point, we simply have to realize that the Web isn’t about mass media and that there are a staggering number of mostly Silicon Valley web entities out there that hope we never figure it out.

Filed Under: Advertising, Broadcasting, Culture, Disruptions, Reinventing Local Media, Twitter

Damn those knowledgeable customers!

June 10, 2012 By Terry Heaton Leave a Comment

Regular readers here know my views about marketing over the past 100 years. The word took on pejorative tones with the Creel Committee, and reached its one-to-many pinnacle with the era of Mad Men. Edward Bernays was a part of the committee and widely regarded as the father of professional public relations. In his 1947 essay The Engineering of Consent, Bernays described how to manipulate the public (that’s you and me) with clever tactics. Here’s my favorite line:

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.”

This remarkable, narcissistic and cynical statement has crumbled before our eyes today, although most marketers secretly maintain that it’s still applicable. Why is it problematic today? Because people now are beginning to know the extent of the manipulation and are increasingly able to detect it when it’s happening. Hence, Bernays’ “without their knowing it” is problematic today when it wasn’t when Bernays first had the thought.

Thanks to the wonder of YouTube, here’s Bernays himself telling the story of how he advanced the interests of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Bernays’ “torches of freedom” campaign advanced the women’s rights issue for profit, something that continues even today.

Here’s another view of the growing sense that customers are aware of being manipulated. It comes via Doc Searls and his work with Project VRM (Vendor Rights Management). This is a graph comparing the use of the words “consumer” and “customer” in books written since 1780. Notice that the Mad Men era has a clear beginning and a clear end, and it all starts at roughly the same time as the Creel Committee and its work, including that of Edward Bernays. The word “customer” has skyrocketed in recent years, as writers have become increasingly convinced of the pejorative and manipulative reality of the word “consumer.”

This big cultural shift — along with many others brought about by disruptive innovations — signals the dawn of a whole new world with which businesses and people must deal in the years ahead. “Power to the people” has always been a revolutionary theme, and what we’re living is certainly that.

We live in interesting times.

Filed Under: Advertising, Culture, Disruptions, History, Postmodernism, Reinventing Local Media

Holy Twitter

June 5, 2012 By Terry Heaton Leave a Comment

A New York Times article on religious broadcasters and Twitter misses a fairly big point while offering insight to “Twitter Dynamos, Offering Word of God’s Love.”

Joyce Meyer, Max Lucado and Andy Stanley were not well known inside Twitter’s offices. But they had all built loyal ranks of followers well beyond their social networks — they were evangelical Christian leaders whose inspirational messages of God’s love perform about 30 times as well as Twitter messages from pop culture powerhouses like Lady Gaga.

This may be a bulletin to the Times and the good folks at Twitter, but it shouldn’t be a surprise whatsoever to anybody.

Evangelical Christians have long been at the forefront of any technological means that furthers their evangelical ends. Two of the twelve transponders on RCA’s first (Satcom 1) satellite were owned by religious groups, including Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. The Christian Church is the penultimate one-to-many institution, whether it’s inside the worship hall or via the airwaves. Nobody “gets” mass marketing or the art of fundraising like these people do; it is their stock and trade.

This is the church.
This is the steeple,
Open it up
And see all the people.

When hologram transmission becomes a reality later this century, mark my words: Evangelicals will be right there.

The point that I want to note is that people who view Twitter or any form of social media completely as one-to-many miss its “social” reality. This is true of media, celebrities, politicos, athletes or, yes, the Evangelicals. It’s one thing to use it as a form of mass media, but the smart innovators know that who you follow is more important than who follows you. This is not, nor will it ever be what Evangelicals want or use Twitter for. It’s all about promoting their own ministries through blessing their followers with inspirational quotes.

“Pastors tell me, Twitter is just made for the Bible,” (Twitter’s) Ms. Díaz-Ortiz said.

It’s close. On average, verses in the King James Version are about 100 characters long, leaving room to slip in a #bible hashtag and still come in under the 140-character limit.

And proverbs are powerful draws on Twitter.

Religion, like every other institution in the West is being challenged by young (and older) people with a much more postmodern view than their parents’ generation practiced. Top-down or one-to-many fits Modernist thinking, which includes a God-to-us-through-the-church perspective. Postmodernists prefer the concept of God among us, the Holy Spirit. The term “postmodern” is often substituted as “postChristian,” and this is a part of the same cultural disruption that everyone is facing.

I’ve always been a fan of the question “What would Jesus do?” because the answers are rarely what the coiners of the phrase intended. Since Jesus’ ministry was in and among the suffering, the poor and the afflicted, one must ask whether the ministry of “blessing the saints” is what Twitter could or even should represent to Christians. Perhaps one day the New York Times will write about a new ministry that monitors Twitter for signs of distress or suffering among the people of the world — and then rushes in to provide relief.

No, wait. Along with a giant, corporate groan among all these folks, I also hear faint sounds of, cough-cough, well Terry, cough-cough, that’s just not my ministry.

Filed Under: Culture, Disruptions, Postmodernism, Social Media, Twitter

The User Annoyance Issue

May 28, 2012 By Terry Heaton Leave a Comment

Here’s the latest in my ongoing essay series, Local Media in a Postmodern World:

The User Annoyance Issue

One of the essential conflicts between the revenue model of legacy media companies and the people who consume the content created by these companies is how far audiences will go in tolerating the annoying nature of that model. Television, after all, is sustained by messages that interrupt programming, and who likes to be interrupted? This is exacerbated online (where people can do something about it), and so we have a problem that’s so fundamental to doing business that unless we deal with it, we’re going to strike out in trying to replace revenue lost through our legacy platforms. This is one we simply have to get right.

Happy Memorial Day to everyone.

Filed Under: Advertising, Culture, Disruptions, Essays, Reinventing Local Media