I was in NYC last week, and got to spend a bit of time chatting about advertising with one of my favourite New Yorkers, Noah Brier. Of course, we talked about the way media consumption is changing and what it means to the traditional view of advertising, and one of his comments really clicked with me.
I won’t attempt to paraphrase, but his point was that advertising has always been about media ownership. That is to say, advertisers paid to own a small piece of the media that could be used to carry their message. Buying an ad in the New York Times is the rough equivalent of owning a portion of a page – it’s yours to do with as you please.
This was valuable because the media was controlled by a small number of people and corporations. Media was scarce, therefore it had value. Now, thanks to the web, anyone with broadband and the inclination to do so can be a media owner. Sure, a tumblog probably doesn’t have the reach of the Times, but it has the potential to, just as a YouTube video has the potential to exceed the viewership of a prime time network show.
When you’re selling media ownership in a world that’s giving it away for free, two things happen. First, as supply approaches infinity, value approaches zero. Second, the number of choices that any one person has keeps getting higher, and as a result, their individual tolerance for noise goes down. People now have the luxury of consuming media on their own terms, and if they can’t get something the way they want it from one source, they can get it from another.
Of course, none of this on its own is completely groundbreaking, but one of the nice things about talking to smart people is that it often leads to small moments of clarity, as this did for me. Hopefully it did the same for at least a couple of others. If not, go read Noah’s blog… it’s always good for a dose of clarity.
