The Chaos Scenario
Contents:
It's a huge proliferation in the last two years. And so people are going to start broadcasting from home and so on. You will have zillions of people, broadcasting for the audience of A month ago, a little girl named Dylan Verdi posted a home movie on her father's Web site. The link went viral and, as her father Michael reports on his own videolog, "24 hours later 2, people had downloaded her video.
The Internet has also demonstrated its ability to outdraw TV. JibJab satirical animations have been downloaded by the millions, for instance. So what's more powerful, the network CNN owns or the network no one owns? So now suddenly the distribution is exploded. Now on the Internet we can all swim in the same pool as content created by, you know, Universal or Disney. The tools are cheap and easy. We, the people, cease to be demographics.
We become individuals again. The more choice we have the more power we have. The most important invention in the history of media was not the Guttenberg Press, it was the remote control.
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It gave us control over the consumption of media. Now I can create a radio show and put it on the Internet. The new Pepsi One campaign will use no TV whatsoever. TV, meanwhile, accounts for only In the wake of BMW films, such diverse U. Mercury's "The Lucky Ones" is so barren of product and brand messages it is scarcely advertising at all.
THE CHAOS SCENARIO
Netcasting, of course, also delivers pure programming, too. Lasica's alpha Web site Ourmedia. So that should be the answer: But not so fast. George Jetson does his vlogging in Om Malik says he believes the scenario could just as easily take place by But this is What if the rope bridge finally snaps, say, next year?
If you're going to create a product for passive consumption it has to be good. Slefo - 17 hours ago 0. This approach, which Garfield dubs "listen-omics," may well turn out to be a more effective method of marketing. Because there has been and there is not currently on the horizon anywhere near as effective a way to market products to the mass consumer marketplace. Stielstra Publishing; First edition August 3, Language:
Because the future isn't quite ready. Perhaps you are familiar with it. It used to be a country, ruled by an authoritarian criminal. Then it began to fragment. There went Slovenia, and Croatia next. Kosovo made its move, and in the ensuing madness, the regime collapsed.
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The unshakeable Slobodan Milosevic, who had fomented four wars in the name of Greater Serbia, was overthrown. The prime minister was assassinated by organized criminals and the country's most notorious war-crimes suspect is at large. Pantic, formerly of Belgrade's freedom-fighting radio station B92, is only too familiar with the problem.
Because as with democracies you need five or six newly elected parliaments, you need to replace people who have ties with the old regime. The author of the forthcoming "Life After the Second Spot" doesn't believe there will ever be a dollar-for-dollar transfer of TV money to the Internet. Jaffe says, "and then be able to at least kind of sustain that increased demand. But for the most part, when the tsunami hits, all hell's gonna break loose.
Dylan Verdi is a cute little girl, but once the novelty of world's-youngest-vloggerdom wears off, there is no reason for anyone outside of her immediate family to watch her iMovies. Malik, "but how many people want to watch that? If you're going to create a product for passive consumption it has to be good. I mean look at all the shows that fail. There is very low tolerance for bad television. Malik asks, "does the money come from to produce the programming of high enough quality to reach the audiences that are obviously going to be smaller than the status quo? A collapse of the old model could create a Hollywood dustbowl.
Peer-to-peer software such as BitTorrent, which permits affordable transfer of large video files, also enables video piracy, and could be legislated or litigated into oblivion by a beleaguered Hollywood desperate to preserve the value of its backlist. As pricing in the search business has amply demonstrated, any influx of spending into the online space will drive prices upwards, potentially erasing the efficiencies promised by even the most ultra-targeted media buy. The metrics of reach may change radically, but not necessarily those of frequency.
Tobaccowala puts it, "Millions of people arrive at the Yahoo Homepage. What people don't realize is that they arrive one at a time. Content will be enormously diverse, agrees Forrest Research research director Chris Charron, but will it constitute a legitimate advertising medium? Well, it never became a very viable advertising outlet and that's because it wasn't a great context for people to place ads.
Advertisers weren't interested in putting it on a personal homepage for Chris Charron for my friends and relatives to see. Convergence means not only technological and economic disruption; it means social disruption. The idea of a vast digital underclass mocks the Internet's promise of the democratization of media. Then, of course, there is the biggest monkey wrench in the works: Tobaccowala, "what isn't ready really is either clients, agencies, or the media companies. Because in effect what we have to change is the way we do business.
Earlier this year, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. GRPs are buggywhips that just feel so familiar and reassuring in their hands. Stengel is showing up at the 4A's revival tent preaching salvation: Even the revolutionaries aren't quite organized for the revolution. Among those not quite ready for the end of prime time is Yahoo, which hired ABC programming chief Lloyd Braun to develop whatever content will be when content will come from the likes of Yahoo. As to what that might look like, he was a little bit fuzzy. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
His argument was that mass media is dying and that the Internet will never become a mass medium -- resulting in a period of chaos for the media, brands, marketers, and advertisers. That's my abridged version. Garfield's essay can be Googled. It is prescient and compelling. Version One of The Chaos Scenario changed my mind. I bought the premise, and moved deeper into cyberspace.
As of this writing, in , I believe we have entering the marketing chaos Mr. I've seen it first hand with my clients. Almost all of my marketing consulting work is now focused on the Internet.
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My criticism of the book is that it feels more like a collection of essays and blogposts than a coherent whole, but since his title hinges on the word "chaos," perhaps this ad hoc approach simply delivers on the brand promise. In the prologue Garfield does admit "writing a book about the digital world is like trying to sketch the Kentucky Derby.
Garfield persuasively expands his case that mass media is dying due to high overhead, new technologies that bypass commercials, audience fragmentation brought on my more choice, and steadily declining reach. And he points to the need for the transition from telling and selling to building relationships through the social capabilities of the Internet. Garfield's recommended start is for brand managers to listen to what people are saying online. The book proceeds to show how the power of brand voice is shifting from the advertising overlords to individuals and groups.
People trust ads less and rely on each other more through online search, blogposts, and reviews on Amazon, eBay, and social media. So he sees listening and surveying this new landscape as a necessary first step. The Chaos Scenario also provides many case studies of successful engagement on the Internet. LEGO and Dell have engaged online with customers to develop new products.
Office Max succeeded with a fun and interactive promotion called Elf Yourself. Not surprisingly, as a media critic, Garfield does an excellent job charting the dark side of the Internet. Starting with his own crusade against COMCAST, moving onto his experience with an Internet hater, and ending with sad stories of kid's being bullied into suicide, The Chaos Scenario provides pointed reminders that everything posted online is public and permanent.
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If people hate you or your brand and Google ranks nasty diatribes about you on the first page there is nothing you can do about it. As Garfield says, "Never mind what Andy Warhol said. In the future everybody will be slandered in perpetuity. While Garfield clearly predicts more gloom and doom for mass media, he sees the advantage of democratized journalism.
4 days ago Meet George Jetson, circa He doesn't have a personal hovercraft or a food computer, but the rest of the future is more futuristic than he. The Chaos Scenario Paperback – August 3, Welcome to The Chaos Scenario. In his roles as Advertising Age editor-at-large and as co-host of NPR's On the Media, Bob Garfield long ago connected dots that many in media and marketing refused even to acknowledge.
My FlipBoard feed of my Twitter lists on the iPad has become one of my favorite news sources. What this book does not do, and what no book can do, is chart a clear course for marketers on this new road. For the first time since the advent of mass media, marketing is in a period of fundamental creativity and innovation. The power balance in marketing has shifted from the manufacturer, to the mass media, to the retailer, to you and I. Engage, Revised and Updated: One person found this helpful 2 people found this helpful.
The Chaos Scenario has many attributes to recommend it. It's prescient, quite funny and perhaps most intriguing, it makes sense of things that an observant person is probably aware of but just hasn't had the time or distance to connect the dots to understand what it all means. Bob Garfield does that in spades. As true thought leaders do, he creates meaning for others and shows us why the death of the advertising industry will have consequences for everyone, even if you are one of the people who hates ads.
Love 'em or not, advertisements are the vehicle through which someone other than the consumer has traditionally paid for programming in the mass media. Those great episodes of I Love Lucy or Start Trek that you loved were brought to you by advertisers, who paid the media companies to produce entertainment to serve as a wrap-around for their commercials. The bargain was that producers of cereal or soap or toilet paper would amuse us if we, in return, tolerated their sales pitches. And it worked for a long time.
Until digital technology killed television as we knew it. For awhile we just time-shifted our TV viewing and then fast forwarded through the commercials. That was disruptive enough for the advertisers at least , but now, with the extension of Internet services and the advent of "social media" -- the Web platforms that allow the average person to publish and produce programming now called "content" -- everyone is a content provider and consumers not only skip the commercials, they are increasingly skipping television altogether!
So now the big question becomes, how does great content get paid for? And just as important, how do we find and nurture the creation of great content, as opposed to all of the schlock that inundates the internet? Read this book and you will have the basic knowledge to become part of the conversation. Garfield's account of his fight with the Comcast cable company and his subsequent creation of a site for consumer complaints about the company is hilarious and not to be missed. After reading this book I felt like I'd just been to an Irish wake.
So pour me another shot and lets do one more jig before we stumble drunkenly into the post-analog, post-advertising, post-hierarchical, post-dualistic, post-capitalist, postth Century, post And then, as they say, "May we be in Heaven an hour before the Devil knows we're dead". I do wonder about Garfield's vision of what is on 'the other side', however. For instance, it's difficult to imagine that those seeking an audience for their product would not be tempted to superficially generate 'buzz' with well placed hired opinion generators dispersed to various social gathering websites.
In fact this strategy is already in practice, and its effects are in evidence in chatrooms every time the person recommending a product must first qualify their statement with something like, "I know I sound like a shill for this company, but And the unforgivable damage that is the result is the continued erosion of trust as advertisers or anyone with an agenda so insideously exploits the most fundamental aspects of human interaction.
Around search, and a search-based advertising platform, it built other fast-iterating marketing response technologies, including an auction-based display ad network that worked far more cleverly than nearly any other. Almost anticlimactically, the company acquired ad network giant DoubleClick. And out of the acquisition of a mid-sized company called Urchin, it built by far and away the leading Web analytics platform in the world, Google Analytics. The key is not to be distracted. Follow us Facebook Twitter LinkedIn.
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