I had the honor of sharing some thoughts with the Small Business Festival about the Future of Media, with the context being the impact of…
Digital media (online media: marketing and advertising) is not as complicated as we all make it seem. As a small business person, you don't need to know how to do SEO, how to advertise on AdWords, how to be on Facebook, or how to build your own website, but we get distracted by these opportunities because we do need to be there. How do we simplify what we're doing online so that we can appreciate, in what we're doing as businesses, that our customers are no longer on "Television," "Print," and "Radio," as the traditional sense. Everyone is now on the right hand of this chart reflecting the migration of media consumption to "Digital." But what is "Digital" really??
Interestingly, many (largely in places like Silicon Valley) have now been working in "digital" for decades. I started my career with Yahoo nearly 20 years ago and imagine the perception that people therein had then - digital isn't (wasn't) the future, this is now. Everything in 2002 was already digital: audio consumption, video, and advertising: there is already a generation of people who don't really know anything traditional, as "digital" is the default. But that still doesn't define what "Digital" means nor why pundits and studies are distinguishing it from Radio and Print - at least not really... do you know what to do with "Digital" in the same way that you know how to buy a newspaper ad? No, of course not; Digital doesn't mean anything making the very idea that media and advertising today is "Digital," a complication for you. A distraction, like VR, no? Digital is not the default for most people, for most business owners, and it's only today becoming so for millions more as we adopt mobile, streaming, social media. How might we help small businesses grasp HOW to leverage digital media given that they must but don't naturally do so?
That distinction, that challenge, is drastic in looking at the consumption of television, newspaper and magazine, radio, and digital channels by age. Small businesses are challenged with continuing to serve the majority of people who still largely consume traditional media, while shifting to our next generations which all but only consume digital. And we're still distracted by what it means to actually be present in digital given so many ways in which to do so.
In media today, thanks to the internet and digital experience, search and scroll are the dominant ways content is consumed. Read, watch, and listen are the formats.Change the way we think about how people engage with media. People engaged with the newspaper or television in certain ways. When we watched a commercial on television we were sitting back, engaged without distraction. That way of consuming media is gone. We search and we scroll. That's HOW people consume what's digital. That's how they consume video, audience, written and written content because of digital: because of the internet and smartphone. Behavior has changed and what small business owners can appreciate is though the technology and formats have changed and become complicated, what really matters is only that the audience's behavior is different. At the end of the day, everyone still reads, watches, and listens. Driving on the road listening to the radio or seeing a billboard... they can't search or scroll. But because our lives are now attuned to digital experiences (the internet and smartphone), that's what people expect to be able to do. If your messages, promotions, and advertising aren't designed with that behavior in mind, YOU DON'T EXIST. Plan for people to do that and then address the experiences where people expect people to engage with you effectively.
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