TV, Newspapers and Music are Being Atomized
Posted by Sebastien on the 2007/05/08 at 09:12
in Apple, Atomization, Blogs, Google, Music Industry, News, Newspapers, Search Engines, TV, Video, YouTube -
The Wall Street Journal talks about the age of fragmentation in this article about the Copiepresse/Google case. I called that phenomenon “Atomization” in my 2007 predictions. Here’s my “atomized” version of this article…
TV:
For years, the implicit bargain underlying free TV was that consumers watched shows at certain times and accepted a certain number of commercials and promos for other shows on a given channel. That bargain was dented by VCRs, (…) DVRs fulfilled VCRs’ promise by making finding, recording and watching programs easy. (…) Increasingly, consumers don’t know or care when their favorite shows are on or what channel shows them — they find them through search interfaces and watch them whenever they wish. TV has the burden of being reworked from two directions at once — the other hammer blow is coming from sites that let consumers post video, such as Google’s YouTube.
Music:
For years, consumers bought albums to get a song or two they’d heard and liked. The handful of hit albums paid for the many albums that failed, as well as the cost of developing new bands, promoting existing bands, making recordings and mounting tours. But that implicit bargain had a flaw that would eventually prove fatal: Consumers liked songs better than albums. When digital technology broke albums into individual songs, consumers voted against the album by either stealing individual songs from peer-to-peer
networks or buying them from services such as iTunes.
Newspapers:
In moving online, newspapers have become collections of individual articles, each of which often stands on its own. Once, readers encountered articles by reading the paper a page at a time. Now, such readers are being supplanted by voracious online consumers who get their news in any number of unpredictable ways. Articles are emailed around, copied to blogs for commentary, grouped together with stories on the same subject from rival publications, and found by search engines and aggregator services.
What it means: if your business is not one of the three mentioned above, how is it being atomized by the web? Make sure you do the exercise and think strategically how things could evolve in the future for you. Learn from the TV, music and newspaper experience.
May 9th, 2007 at 09:42
As “atomization” has impacted 3 of the 4 main media channels, the last bastion of old school advertising medium remains outdoor display ads. Still today, most of the billboards we see as we commute back and forth are large sectioned posters glued into large grotesque placards that are leased on a monthly basis. With the costs of electronic display screens becoming more favourable it shouldn’t take long for outdoor media to atomize. Image the large electronic billboard you pass on the way to work in the morning enticing you to get that moka java latte at Starbucks. Or the same billboard at noon showing a smiling faced worker ant biting into a juicy Harvey’s hamburger. Atomize even more: as you head home from your long day, an ad on our favorite billboard offering drink specials at local pub in the vicinity.