As Gordon Moore’s Law continues to drive cycles of technological development, it can be tempting for marketing folk to wait until the resulting merry-go-round has stopped before trying to get on. However, in reality, if you choose to wait you may well find Silicon Valley’s carousel just keeps on spinning. My own shorthand for this is that, when it comes to understanding developments in networked media, it’s best to get in when it’s messy. When the web service or innovation is in the early days and the rules are being written. That way you get to understand the reality of a new development and the ideas behind it, rather than waiting for someone else to write up the best practice manual. For example, when blogging began to makes its presence felt within media and marketing circles, it was largely dismissed as a pastime for the lonely and the confused. What possible benefit could come from letting readers actually give you their opinions? ‘My readers are like the cast from the bar in Star Wars,’ a journalist once told me, ‘why would I want to speak to them?’, he exclaimed. This type of viewpoint led to people who wrote blogs being categorised, initially, by the marketing industry as a group suffering from rage issues and bad breath - regardless of what they were blogging about. For some, the ‘blogosphere’ became shorthand for a modern version of the ‘great unwashed’. That has obviously all now changed, and even the most erudite commentators employ blogs as their personal platforms where they can interact with enthusiastic and well-informed readers. In short, those who got into blogging when it was messy benefited from their early experience. Twitter was a similar example where it was best to hold your nose and jump in when it was messy, learning from experience, rather than ranting about the evils of people talking to each other in a 140-character format. Just a few hours on Twitter in its early days revealed it to be a promising, accessible tool for creating communities of people who were organising themselves around their passions. Today, of course, no marketing exec worth their latte would suggest Twitter is a waste of time. And the platform has gone onto to become a love-in for celebs and media players around the world. Then there was Facebook, that initially appeared to be a WASP-driven club for American frats sharing holiday stories about the Hamptons and their latest drinking escapades. However, just investing a little attention...
...in this early, messy period, it was clear Facebook was - at the very least - a group of smart, well-financed people, who were executing a vision to bring mainstream audiences into the world of participatory culture. Today, of course, no one scoffs at Zuckerberg’s empire; more likely are they to be snaffling up pre-IPO shares on SecondMarket.com and talking up its stellar valuation.
Of course, getting in when its messy can be time-consuming and there will no doubt be many examples of services and innovations that go nowhere. However, the time invested in the early stages of these modern media experiments will give you a sense of what doesn’t work and why, which is often as interesting as what succeeds. Observations that can seem counterintuitive if only viewed from afar, can seem perfectly evident when experienced first hand.
For instance, who would have predicted the explosion over recent years in virtual goods? On first sight, the idea of paying real cash to have a virtual dog neutered seems like an act of lunacy. However, when experienced within the fun community of FooPets, it seems like the harmless bit of fun that it is. And, again, the people who got into this market when it was messy have reaped the financial rewards. Virtual goods make up the majority of the eye-popping revenues of Tencent, the vast Chinese social network, and of course that of Zynga’s giant, social games.
So what’s messy at the moment? Well as the huge cycle of creative destruction taking place in the marketing and media world grinds on there’s no shortage of messy places to poke around. TV is clearly going through a period of realignment that may change the industry forever. And Google TV is about as messy a technological development as it gets at the moment. And then there are the vast data flows of personal information that a few smart operators are aggregating to try and provide market insights of a seemingly Minority Report-like, real-time nature.
Who knows which will succeed and which will go onto transform the world’s media and marketing industries further. However, one thing is for sure. Only the people who get in when it’s messy will be there to collect the glory, and the dividends, from those innovations that fly.
Google has been working hard to bring the web experience to your HDTV, but it hasn’t been an easy road thus far. Viacom has just been added to the growing list of networks that are blocking access to Google TV. So far the only networks that allow streaming content to be viewable on Google TV are TBS and Time Warner.
With popular networks like Comedy Central, MTV, Disney and CBS already out of the picture, your choices for streaming content from your Google TV are not looking good at all. Google TV is just in it’s infancy, so this is a sad situation.
Posted by: Ruby Training | November 26, 2010 at 03:36 PM
Early days indeed. Maybe Google's track record with "other people's" content isn't helping. Perhaps they are making the market for others eg Boxee.
Posted by: James Cherkoff | November 26, 2010 at 03:53 PM