hi

hi, i’m noah

Brand Tags: The basic idea
of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people's heads. Therefore, a brand is whatever they say it is.

1.9 million tags Since May,
2008

What is the future of
creative development in media? Changing rules behind the creation of content and the new roles brands and agencies now play.

First let’s agree on a
few things.

Everything is N media. At
this point most people have the ability to create content, whether that means taking a picture with their phone and posting it to the web, publicly saving a link or writing a blog read by millions, individuals are content creators and media owners.

The medium is the O
message. "The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs."

Content was never that P
important. Sure on a micro level it can matter, but the types of changes we're seeing are macro, not micro, and focusing on content can cause you to lose the forest for the trees. (McLuhan once wrote that the "'content' of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.")

The internet isn’t Q killing
anything. It’s easy to say it is, but when you really dig in, it’s just not true.

Right, so how is the
creation of content changing? 1. Creation 2. Distribution 3. Consumption

Creation

“The opportunities for media creation
have been rising for decades,” Danah Boyd recently wrote.

N O
P Q

The majority of the content
being created is personal. The stuff that sat on VHS cassettes and scrapbooks in years past: Media that wasn’t easily sharable.

The majority of the content
on the web was never created to be monetized. What’s particularly interesting about this explosion in content creation is the different players. Whereas worlds and business models used to be segmented, they all now sit in the same sea of content, competing with one another.

Everyone is N playing the
same ibpplk game ... by different rules.

In the old days, media
companies fought media companies. They were always willing to take down a competitor, but never at the expense of the industry.

Today, media companies fight brands
who fight consumers. They are all locked up in the a battle for the same eyeballs.

It’s always dangerous to fight
the guy with nothing to lose. Brands make money differently than media companies and then consumers generally don’t care about making money at all off their content. Things can get messy.

Take brands for
instance

Distribution

In the past distribution was
one of the most valuable assets. Even above the costs of creating content, distribution kept the regular Joe from getting his word out there.

Today everyone has distribution available
to them. Sites like YouTube, Flickr and Blogger turn out to be pretty powerful platforms.

But the most powerful distribution
channel is people. Web users can spread content at incredible speed.

People are as obsessed with
the O idea of spreading ibpplk an idea as they are with the idea they're spreading.

For the first time the
consumers of the news are also its creators. That unprecedented look has provided them with a newfound fascination with how news moves.

The real content of any
web story is how the story spread. "As more and more Americans become aware of the patterns and forces that shape culture, they begin to develop their own hypotheses about what will spread and what won't. Online with minimal cost or risk, they can test these theories, tweaking different versions of their would-be viral projects and monitoring the results, which in turn feed back into how future projects are made. In viral culture, we are all driven by the ratings, the numbers, the Internet equivalent of the box-office gross." [Bill Wasik, And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture]

“In a networked culture, there
is also power in being the person spreading the content.” Danah Boyd. The spreader is a creator, a medium in the vast sea of web content.

Consumption

What happens in a world
where there are more creators than consumers?

20 hours of video are
uploaded to YouTube every minute.

That means every hour, enough
video is uploaded to YouTube for you to watch for 50 days.

That’s 10,512,000 hours of video
a year

Or 1200 years of content
uploaded in just 12 months. (And that's only if we continue at our current pace.)

There is more than enough
content out there for people to only watch unique YouTube videos for the rest of their lives. Think about that for a second.

Quality is in the P
ibpplk eyes of the beholder

Quality matters to you, not
consumers. It’s something the industry tells itself to feel better about what we do.

What is the most popular
video in YouTube history?

106 million views

75 million views

138 million views

So what does it all
mean?

Try things and iterate. Face
it, you’re not as good at predicting success as you think you are. It is well-established that things become popular mostly randomly. Sure you can spend against it, but even that isn’t a guarantee.

Stay out of the middle.
This is where content producers are really being squeezed. As The Economist put it, “As sales become ever more concentrated, it is becoming both more urgent and harder to establish a foothold near the top of the market. A book or film that fails to attract a mass audience tumbles quickly into the depressed middle.”

Build on prior success. Too
many brands rebuild their audience for every campaign, spending the same money to reach the same people over and over again. Even if you’re not sure what to do with it yet, you’ve got to recognize the value of building an audience.

Stop focusing on the content.
If I am to leave with one thing I want to leave with McLuhan. "The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." If you want to better understand how things are changing, dig in to the medium, not the content.

Awesome. Thanks. Noah Brier nb@noahbrier.com
http://www.noahbrier.com