Is Media Finite?
Here’s the basic idea. In the 1800′s, our culture looked upon the earth as basically infinite. Endless sky, endless oceans, endless fields. North America was a big continent and it created men with big ideas.
Mark Twain named the time of big steel, big railroads, and big ideas in electricity The Gilded Age. Big men with big egos who were taming the elements and wrestling wealth out of the Earth. The sky seemed the limit. Literally.
But then, there were a few signs that maybe things weren’t infinite. Like buffalo. In the early 1800′s, there were an estimated 60 million buffalo roaming the great plains. By the 1890′s, maybe 300. And nope, that’s not a typo. “3″ with two “0′s” after it. We hunted the endless buffalo almost to extinction–for sport.
Now, we’re filling our skies with carbon and our oceans with plastic. Children growing up today are learning the message that the world is not infinite. In fact, there are limits, and we have to live within those limits. It’s the challenge of our generation to figure out how to live within those limits.
Doesn’t the marketing & media industries share an 1800′s mentality, but in media’s case, of infinite attention? Isn’t this the fundamental problem facing marketers of our generation?
Here’s an illustration of the problem. I think many marketer’s deep seated mental model is a one to many broadcast network. TV. Cable.
The brand makes the message. The network delivers it. The audience receives it. Like this:
This is how mass marketing has worked since the hackers of the early part of the 20th century got their chops building crystal radios. Marketing worked fine. All you needed to do was create a message that resonated with your audience and you’d be fine. The network took care of delivering your message like a guided missile to it’s target. (Hence the term, “targeting”). Kaboom! Sales increase.
But then, that satisfying Kaboom! grew a little fainter. Come the ’80′s and cable TV and media buyers blamed “clutter”. Like so:
How to combat clutter? Make creative that “breaks through” the clutter! Sounds simple!
It’s as if clutter is this wall that separates you from your prize–the audience. They’re still there, they’re just being hidden by clutter.
But is clutter too simple an idea to explain everything that’s going on? Doesn’t clutter assume that attention is essentially infinite? The audience is still going to pay attention to something, aren’t they? You just need to make the best creative to punch through and win the clutter wars. After all, with 300 million people, attention in the US sure does seem infinite.
But is it really?
I’d argue, no, as the image below illustrates:
Sure, there’s clutter. But what’s even more important, the audience is not there like it used to be! With so many things competing for people’s time (video games, the Internet, digital cable, on demand, movies, kids, parents, work, a second job, maybe that third job, therapy sessions, whatever), people aren’t just viewing your message, they’re not viewing ANYONE’S! They are–no, we are–tuning out and dropping out. Why? Many reasons, but one is that we’re overloaded.
Our attention is finite, much in the same way that the oceans are finite. The atmosphere is finite. The earth is finite. Mom’s don’t have time anymore like they used. Neither do dads. Or even kids. Who has time anymore? Really?
What we need is a model, or models, for what I’ll call sustainable marketing.
But that’s for another time…
