1. The Rise Of Feudal Media
One of the most significant changes of the 2020s has been the rise of “feudal media”—self-contained bubbles of more personalized media: podcasts, substacks, TikTok channels and the like, each attended to by passionate fan bases who are largely unaware of much of what is going on outside of their particular universe.
Compare that to the years of the midcentury monoculture, where three-word phrases like “Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!” or “Where’s The Beef?” can still conjure up collective memories for an entire generation.
It’s why the ascendency of feudal media was at the center of a keynote I gave earlier this week at the IAB Video Leadership Summit. Because if there is anyone feeling the pain of feudal media, it is the advertising community who must now struggle to reach audiences across these fragmented bubbles with some level of consistency and authenticity.
Why It Matters
Back in the days of the monoculture, when everyone in the country was speaking the same language, an advertiser could hang their hat on a national television campaign whose sole goal was to boost brand awareness by creating a tagline and imagery the brand could then hang all its peripheral messaging from.
That we can still recite many of them years later is a testament to their effectiveness: Where's the Beef? Think Different. Just Do It. We Try Harder. Have It Your Way.
The list goes on.
Today, however, a multimillion-dollar television campaign does little to reach Zoomers who spend most of their time on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, stopping to occasionally listen to some music on Spotify, watch a series on HBO Max or chat with their friends on Snap.
Even older viewers are increasingly hard to reach, segregating themselves out on various streaming services, podcasts and substacks where they too can find their tribe. Each tribe gradually growing more insular and less aware of the others, year after year.
We have, in fact, reached a point where the media choices we make are part of our personality, much in the way that music choices once were for earlier generations. We judge people less on what they’re watching and listening to, but rather, where. The markers indicating who we might be friends with, who we respect.
Not an easy road for a marketer, one that is made even more difficult by the range of ways each of these feudal media ecosystems are measured.
Which is not just about a disparity in the way the raw numbers are enumerated but also about the way we do (or do not, as the case may be) calculate factors like attention or even passion.
What You Need To Do About It
This is where the promise of AI should come into play.
Accent on “should” as this is all still theoretical.
As in AI should be able to help you to choose a brand message and then craft different spots that feel authentic to different audiences in a way that goes way beyond sticking in an umbrella because it’s raining or a goldendoodle because someone’s bought high end dog food.
Rather, what it should be doing is giving you spots that play off of in-jokes and memes in each of the many feudal media bubbles your audience inhabits. But in a way that seems authentic for a brand, especially a brand that is an outside to that particular community. So no “Hey fellow kids” moments.
Contextual targeting will be key here too, as this new universe is less about who is watching and more about what they are watching and where.
Success in this new world will also mean accepting that it exists, that the one-size-fits-all media ecosystem now sits in the dustbin of history and we’re in a new era with a new set of ever-evolving rules.
This is, of course, easy to say and to agree to.
Far more difficult is to actually spend the time, effort and money accepting it, and reconfiguring marketing processes, plans and procedures to acknowledge that acceptance.
You need to do the work however. Even if there are some bodies piled up along the way.
Because your competitors are sure to be doing it and your choice at this point is wholly Darwinian: adapt or die.
2. AI Panic Grips Publishers
Within the course of the past week, several major publications all seemed to become aware of the fact that the growth of AI likely means the death of traditional internet publishers.
Or at the very least, a massive change in their business models.
That this awakening seemed to happen all at once is curious, absent any sort of groundbreaking new study, and yet The Atlantic, The Economist, The Week and The New York Times all ran nearly identical stories this week about the potential demise of everyone from Google and Meta to newspapers, digital publishers and Wikipedia—essentially anyone who relies on search traffic for their audience.
Why It Matters
That this is bound to happen is not much in dispute.
It is much easier to ask an AI chatbot what the top hotels in Miami Beach are than to navigate Tripadvisor, Expedia and a range of other travel sites.
That you can then ask the bot follow-up questions (between the Hilton and the Marriott which has the best food) and expect to receive reasonably accurate answers makes it even more compelling.
Which, of course, means that billions of users will soon be abandoning search engines and using the various AI sites to search for everything from the meaning of the word “jumelage” (how’s that for self-referential) to the best place to buy a new coffeemaker to what to watch on TV next.
That this will radically change the television landscape is also not much in dispute, though the impact there will mostly be to search and discovery and to the promotion of TV shows.
If anything, it is likely to boost TV, or at least the non-news part of TV, as advertisers realize that traffic to streaming, cable and broadcast is not much impacted by the demise of the search engine and can actually complement whatever lower funnel ads they are running on chat.
Advertisers though, will need to rethink their game, especially around digital advertising.
Because as much as they deny it, everyone assumes that ad-supported AI is coming and is why ChatGPT in particular seems to append an unasked for follow up to every single request. So that simple “What is the weather forecast for Miami this weekend?” is invariably followed by “Going on a vacation? Would you like me to give you the weather report for the following week so you know what to pack?
Which could then easily include a link to The Gap or Away luggage or United Airlines.
But only if Sam Altman, you know, wanted it to.
Ad-supported chatbots also raise the issue of another level of what we’ve been calling “15 Million Merits” after the Black Mirror episode—a world where some people pay to avoid ads on their chat apps and thus get a very different set of responses than those in the ad-supported realm.
First-class versus steerage, and yet another marker in the ever widening gap between the haves and have-nots in the developed world, one that can at times make it feel like we are living back in the days of Dickens and Austen, with gentlefolk and peasants and all that implies.
What You Need To Do About It
If you are a TV network or streaming service this may, as noted, be a positive development, though you will need to learn how to adequately explain how a TV commercial complements a GPT ad and develop strategies to capitalize on that.
If you are a publisher, you can try to do the legal challenge thing—making Open AI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity et al pay you for using all your content.
I strongly suspect though that the genie is already out of the bottle on that front and you’ll just wind up playing a no-win game of legal whack-a-mole that will drain your coffers even further
Your best bet is to figure out how to work with the various chatbots, to grok the AI version of SEO so that the chatbots pick your site first and send people there.
I further suspect that chatbot optimization will not be as easy or as straightforward as search engine optimization, but that at some point someone (or multiple someones) will figure it out, millions of people will set themselves up as “CBO consultants” and the game will start all over again.
So your goal is to still be left standing when it does.
Bonne chance.
Alan Wolk is co-founder and lead analyst at the consulting firm TV[R]EV. He is the author of the best-selling industry primer, Over The Top: How The Internet Is (Slowly But Surely) Changing The Television Industry. Wolk frequently speaks about changes in the television industry, both at conferences and to anyone who’ll listen.
Week in Review is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.