Relevance = Mass Production + Mass Reach + Mass Customization
“What publishers think about news ‘relevance’ does not always align with what the public considers relevant to them.” — Center for News, Technology & Innovation
Any Mass Media journalist, professor, or pundits who recommends that newspapers, magazines, and news broadcasts ‘need to become more relevant to consumers’ is hypocritically flapping his lips like a donkey if he doesn’t recommend individuation of those news outlets’ products and services.
Comprehend an astounding fact: consumers are individuals, not a uniform mass of people who each has exactly the same needs, interest and tastes. It is simply asinine to propose continuing to send the exact same selection of stories to all of a periodical’s readers. Or a broadcast channel to transmit the exact same selection of videos to all of its channel’s listeners or viewers.
During previous centuries, publishers and broadcasters had no choice but to select and send the same mix of items. Analog printing presses and analog electromagnetic waveform transmitters weren’t technologically capable of customizing and sending a unique selection for each person’s unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes. That is the hallmark flaw of Industrial Era’s analog media production technologies.
The media theories, doctrines, business models, practices, products and service of the Industrial Era, which collectively became known as the ‘Mass Media,’ arose from and were shaped by that fundamental flaw of analog media. The eponymous Mass Media is capable of mass production and has mass reach yet is incapable of simultaneous mass customization. As a result, publication editors and broadcast producers have used one or both of the following criteria to make educated guesses selecting which items to include in an edition or program or program schedule: (1) items about which they think everyone must become informed and (2) items that might have the greatest common interests to the audience for periodical or broadcast.
However, computer-mediated ‘digital’ production technologies have no such inherent flaw. Those new technologies are entirely capable of mass production, mass reach, and simultaneously mass customization. (If you don’t believe me, skip four paragraphs ahead). So, why the hell are publishers and broadcasters not utilizing this clear advantage of digital media? Why do they continue online to select the same mix of stories for every visitor to their website, thereby transplanting the hallmark flaw of Industrial Era Mass Media into Informational Era new media?
Mass Media executives do so due to myopic cognitive bias. In other words, because they don’t seem to realize they are needlessly transplanting a huge flaw of old media into the new media. Indeed, they don’t comprehend that there is a better or any other way. They seem to think that the theories, doctrines, business models, and practices of Industrial Era Mass Media are theoretically the highest manifestations, the ultimate evolution of media, regardless of whatever new technologies are developed. Yes, they are that shortsighted.
Indeed, the strategy that the Mass Media industries formulated during the mid-1990s to adapt to the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the media environment was simplistically based upon the such rudimentary assumptions. It calls for Mass Media companies’ websites to become the equivalent of either a publisher’s analog press or a broadcaster’s transmission antenna, or both. That strategy of simply transplanting into online the products and services of the Mass Media mistakenly envisioned that consumers would use these websites the same ways (i.e., as often, thoroughly, etc.) as consumers had used printed editions or terrestrial broadcasts and thus the traditional business models of print or broadcast would succeed online. The implementors of this strategy abjectly failed to realize that it simply created online versions of product and services which arise from the hallmark flaw of Industrial Era Mass Media and don’t take full advantage of Informational Era computer-mediated technologies. This was the seed of the Mass Media industries subsequent failures.
New companies whose executives weren’t still stuck in the Industrial Era comprehended the capabilities of computer-mediated technologies to mass customize of media contents. Although many of these companies weren’t initially founded to be media companies, their executives had the business acumen and perspicuity to see how consumers had begun using their companies’ services as competitively superior ways to obtain news, entertainment, and other information. These executives accordingly transformed their companies into phenomenally successful media companies. These companies are the search engines, social media, and other algorithmic recommendation engines (such as Spotify, YouTube, etc).
Billions of consumers have discovered that by using these new companies’ individuated services, they could each obtain a selection of news, entertainment, and other information that better matches that individual consumer’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, than can any Mass Media company’s products or services in print, broadcast, or transplanted online. These Individuated Media companies have equal (or even greater) capabilities of mass production and mass reach to those of any Mass Media company but add to those two dimensions the third dimension of mass customization. More than 5 billion consumers nowadays use these companies’ services as their predominant means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information. Likewise, advertisers have discovered these advantages. Individuated Media companies nowadays control more than 50 percent of the world’s international, national, and local online advertising, a percentage which used to be controlled by the Mass Media industries.
The Mass Media industries mistakenly assumed that ‘convergence’ of industries was the epochal change that would be wrought by computer-media technologies during the 21st Century. Yet individuation of media is.
Compare the largest Mass Media company against the largest Individuated Media one. China Central TeleVision (CCTV), with reportedly 1.3 billion viewers, is the world’s largest Mass Media company. The world’s largest Individuated Media company is Facebook with 3.12 billion users. If all users of CCTV simultaneously access its Channel One, all see the same selection of contents. Yet if all of Facebook’s user simultaneously logon, each sees on Facebook a different selection of contents than any other: a selection based upon that user’s own recorded and predicted needs, interests, tastes. The contents Facebook users see is far more relevant to each than that any Mass Media company can provide.
When the search engines, social media, and other algorithmic relevance recommendation engines first arose, media executives affected by cognitive bias towards Mass Media dismissed these Individuated Media services as somehow merely ancillary or supplemental to Mass Media websites: as new services on which consumers could find, discuss, or post about what the Mass Media was providing. Why the Mass Media industries ‘digital’ executives were too obtuse or dimwitted not to perceive the competitive advantage mass individuation created will be a topic discussed at these industries’ funerals.
The Mass Media ‘digital’ executives have seen their industries massacred by competition from the Individuated Media companies. Yet they still fail to adopt the wildly successful advantage of individuation. As I described in my May 12th/25th newsletter, the costs of the computer-mediated individuation technologies dropped to the point that any Mass Media company can now begin to individuate products or services. I fully expect that the Mass Media ‘digital’ executives will continue to braindead and staggeringly zombie-like failure to take advantage of it.
I shouldn’t blame solely them. Mass media editors and journalists bewail their companies’ grave declines. Yet lack of individuation is a product problem. The high priests of Mass Media production in newsrooms are like the medieval monks in 15th Century scriptoria whose bible copying businesses were being devastated by the bible printing technology of Johannes Gutenberg’s new printing press. The monks refused to adopt the new technologies themselves; strove to find ways to continue doing things the old ways; and within 30 to 50 years disappeared from history. Today’s editors and journalists who bewail their enterprises’ grave declines because they haven’t adopted the newer and demonstrably more successful technologies, will go that way, too.