Inside the Media C-Suite, Issue No. 47

By too late, we mean the one thing that large, high-density objects simply do not react well to: change. Awareness of the environment’s true state is made all the more difficult when the largest, most familiar landmarks are sign-posted with the status quo ante. The result is something difficult to understand while it’s happening. Think in terms of evolution, climate change, or a slow-motion train-wreck. 

Most don’t see the damage or understand how to adapt until after the fact. 

Hindsight is wicked in that way. 

Sight Without Vision

Some observers may have a better vantage point than most, however. For those that can both see and recognise the big picture, preparation becomes prudent. For everyone else, there is only the crash.  

Helen Keller famously lamented the complacent conservative. “The only thing worse that being blind,” she said, “is having sight, but no vision.”

Putting this into our context, there are three primary participants within the Media & Entertainment industry. Those on the inside call themselves “The Business”. Those who finance and invest capital are referred to as “The Money”. For all intents and purposes, those within The Business would stop there. Only they and The Money matter. After all, they take the lion’s share of both risk and reward, right?

In fact, The Business has been so successful and financially lucrative that some of our world’s largest, most valuable and certainly most influential corporate conglomerates are comprised of media companies. These are, of course, the high-density objects of M&E. 

So powerful and self-assured are the senior-most executives within these “Media Majors” that it has become dogma within The Business that the sun and the stars revolve around them. For all intents and purposes, all other components of the industry serve them. All the while, the one element that actually feeds the industry in its entirety has been reduced to contempt.

As one fictional character, who may be a caricature of such exalted media execs, infamously stated on screen, “The lion does not concern itself with the opinion of the sheep.”  

Our Take

Indeed, the third participant within M&E has, for the most part, been a silent partner: the audience.

That silence has been structurally dictated by The Business itself. The delivery of entertainment content, news and information has traditionally been a one-way system. The only true interaction has been transactional. 

Investors provide the capital for production and marketing of content. Media companies distribute and deliver that content. The consumer audience pays media companies for access to content, with advertisers paying media companies for access to the audience. At some point, hopefully, the investor gets paid back.

Seems nicely balanced, and highly lucrative, for the media companies.

Until that is, members of the audience begin to understand that the established media brands are not the only source of entertainment, news and information. 

Here is where the train begins to go off the rails. 

The Tipping Point

The rails, figuratively (perhaps literally) are composed of electrons and comprise what we all refer to as the Internet. The few remaining, now enormous, media brands that are the trains delivering content today move confidently with the density and momentum derived from a century of industry tradition. 

However, while the executives of those Media Majors have been busy in their offices, demographics and technology have conspired to attract 5.6 billion members of a consumer audience to the internet. They are young, they are global and they are fatigued by the same old stories.

Those 5.6 billion people are on average more ambitious and technologically more adept than most senior media executives. 

To the chagrin of the Media Majors, the “train” is not an immovable object; just dense and unable to change direction easily while staying upright. But the global consumer audience is, without doubt, an irresistible force. That irresistible force is now moving in a different direction than the train.

Now, picture the scene.

Just Catching Up?

We’ll help you get up to speed.

The executive power word for this issue is: The Audience.

Who Is Always Right?

Ok, it depends on who you ask. For those at the very top of the Media Majors, it would always be, “me!”. 

Of course, they’re wrong. 

In commerce, the source of revenue is sacred. The Japanese might say, “okyakusama wa kamisama desu” (お客様は神様です), meaning, “the customer is a god”. In Germany, one might hear, “der Kunde ist Konig”, or “the customer is King.” 

That the audience might be given what they want seems to have been lost in the archives of board of directors’ meeting minutes at the Media Majors. So, when it’s finally realised that the audience who pays for access to content no longer wants the content being provided, it is little wonder that the Media Majors don’t quite get it. 

But [we ask rhetorically], how can that be?

What It Means

What if one considers that the chief executives of these companies are, generally speaking, some of the highest paid chief executives in the history of corporate commerce. In addition, these chief executives has access to the highest-paid advisers and consultants on Earth.

The chief executives of these Media Majors each have the same job: to articulate a vision for dominating this industry and to implement that vision.

But what if these CEOs have no clear vision for the future of the Media & Entertainment industry? What if they just don’t see it. 

What if they know that this is true?

This would mean that change is already here.

Looking Forward?      

Preparation is the Key.

Here are a few articles to get you moving in the right direction.

Who Iger Answers To

One of the highest paid executives on Earth is credited by many in Hollywood with holding unionised creatives to the fire as if it were his personal inclination.  But it is strategy, not animus, that drives experienced CEOs with legacies to protect.

Creatives Can Beat the Studios at Their Own Game; And Should

But will they?  The only obstacle to equity in the Media & Entertainment industry is a mindset carefully cultivated by decades of corporate control that is today a mere illusion.

The Insanely Lucrative Ownership of Intangible Matter

This year alone, media executives and corporate shareholders will feast on the leftovers of more than US$2.5 trillion in annual revenues from a product literally willed into existence.