Everything is Media

hi, i’m noah

Brand Tags:The basic idea of thissite is that a brandexists entirely inpeoples heads.Therefore, a brand iswhatever they say it is.

1.9 million tagsSince May, 2008

What is the futureof creativedevelopment inmedia?Changing rules behind the creation of content and thenew roles brands and agencies now play.

First let’s agree ona few things.

Everything isN 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 theO 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 thatP important. Sure on a micro level it can matter, but the types of changes were 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’tQ killing anything. It’s easy to say it is, but when you really dig in, it’s just not true.

Right, so how isthe creation ofcontentchanging?1. Creation2. Distribution3. Consumption

Creation

“The opportunitiesfor media creationhave been risingfor decades,”Danah Boyd recently wrote.

N OP Q

The majority ofthe content beingcreated ispersonal.The stuff that sat on VHS cassettes and scrapbooks inyears past: Media that wasn’t easily sharable.

The majority ofthe content onthe web wasnever created tobe monetized.What’s particularly interesting about this explosion incontent creation is the different players. Whereasworlds and business models used to be segmented,they all now sit in the same sea of content, competingwith one another.

Everyone is N playing the sameibpplk game ... by different rules.

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

Today, mediacompanies ﬁghtbrands who ﬁghtconsumers.They are all locked up in the a battle for the sameeyeballs.

It’s alwaysdangerous to ﬁghtthe guy withnothing to lose.Brands make money differently than media companiesand then consumers generally don’t care about makingmoney at all off their content. Things can get messy.

Take brands forinstance

Distribution

In the pastdistribution wasone of the mostvaluable assets.Even above the costs of creating content, distributionkept the regular Joe from getting his word out there.

Today everyonehas distributionavailable to them.Sites like YouTube, Flickr and Blogger turn out to bepretty powerful platforms.

But the mostpowerfuldistributionchannel is people.Web users can spread content at incredible speed.

People are as obsessed with the O idea of spreadingibpplk an idea as they are with the idea theyre spreading.

For the ﬁrst timethe consumers ofthe news are alsoits creators.That unprecedented look has provided them with anewfound fascination with how news moves.

The real contentof any web storyis how the storyspread."As more and more Americans become aware of thepatterns and forces that shape culture, they begin todevelop their own hypotheses about what will spreadand what wont. Online with minimal cost or risk, theycan test these theories, tweaking different versions oftheir would-be viral projects and monitoring the results,which in turn feed back into how future projects aremade. In viral culture, we are all driven by the ratings,the numbers, the Internet equivalent of the box-ofﬁcegross." [Bill Wasik, And Then Theres This: How StoriesLive and Die in Viral Culture]

“In a networkedculture, there isalso power inbeing the personspreading thecontent.”Danah Boyd. The spreader is a creator, a medium in thevast sea of web content.

Consumption

What happens ina world wherethere are morecreators thanconsumers?

20 hours of videoare uploaded toYouTube everyminute.

That means everyhour, enoughvideo is uploadedto YouTube foryou to watch for50 days.

That’s 10,512,000hours of video ayear

Or 1200 years ofcontent uploadedin just 12 months.(And thats only if we continue at our current pace.)

There is morethan enoughcontent out therefor people to onlywatch uniqueYouTube videosfor the rest oftheir lives.Think about that for a second.

Quality is in the Pibpplk eyes of the beholder

Quality matters toyou, notconsumers.It’s something the industry tells itself to feel betterabout what we do.

What is the mostpopular video inYouTube history?

106 million views

So what does it allmean?

Try things anditerate.Face it, you’re not as good at predicting success as youthink you are. It is well-established that things becomepopular mostly randomly. Sure you can spend againstit, but even that isn’t a guarantee.

Stay out of themiddle.This is where content producers are really beingsqueezed. As The Economist put it, “As sales becomeever more concentrated, it is becoming both moreurgent and harder to establish a foothold near the topof the market. A book or ﬁlm that fails to attract a massaudience tumbles quickly into the depressed middle.”

Build on priorsuccess.Too many brands rebuild their audience for everycampaign, spending the same money to reach thesame people over and over again. Even if you’re notsure what to do with it yet, you’ve got to recognize thevalue of building an audience.

Stop focusing onthe content.If I am to leave with one thing I want to leave withMcLuhan. "The message of any medium or technologyis the change of scale or pace or pattern that itintroduces into human affairs." If you want to betterunderstand how things are changing, dig in to themedium, not the content.

Awesome. Thanks.Noah Briernb@noahbrier.comhttp://www.noahbrier.com