Subscribe in a reader
Emerging media under attack
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
In the past two months, I’ve heard a fair bit of buzzing along the lines of “when are media no longer emerging, but emerged?” Or “is xyz technology really ‘new’?” And to all those asking this question, I have only one thing to say: You’re right.
In many cases, the things we call emerging media are long standing institutions. Interactive TV has been around in some form or another longer than I have. I don’t refer to myself as an emerging human, so why should we talk about Interactive TV as emerging media? Really, we’re just talking about evolving media.
Considering this idea further has some interesting connotations. If “emerging media” is actually just “evolving media,” then it stands to reason that there is no use in the differentiation of “traditional” when discussing media.
Continuing on the logic train, one must wonder – if what we call “emerging media” is just the evolving nature of what we call “traditional media,” then “traditional marketers” that don’t keep up with the newest trends and behavior are, in a word, remiss.
But that is an unfair accusation. It is ludicrous to expect “traditional” marketers to be experts on “emerging” media. The two worlds are vastly different, requiring extremely separate approaches. Where one is institutionalized, the other is in constant chaos and redefinition. Where one can focus in on efficiency, the other has to first address viability. Each requires entirely different skill sets. As “emerging” becomes institutionalized, it then naturally fits “traditional” skills and workflows. But while a medium resembles the Wild West, it’d be ridiculous to approach with a “traditional” mindset.
The “evolving” concept breaks down further when considering the trend of consolidation. If online video is an evolutionary arm of television, what about mobile video? Is that an evolution of mobile, or of television? And while mobile may be an evolution of the telephone, it’s come a long way from the rotary.
So whatever one wants to call it, there is a need to identify “emerging” as separate from “traditional.” “Emerging Media” might not be the best term, but it is one that we’re used to, and it’s much less of a mouthful than “evolving strains of established media institutions which continue to exist in a mercurial state.” When a better term comes along, I’ll adapt. But until then, I plan on continuing to use “emerging media,” and suggest others do as well.
Related posts:
March 12th, 2009 at 11:01 am
Great post, Josh.
I more or less agree with you, but will add that terms like “emerging” are really a matter of the relative perspective of the people or organizations terming them. So for people who are among the digerati, most of the media you reference would not be emerging. On the other hand, people who are looking at it from a more macro POV definitely wood.
Let me cite IPG as an example. There are a cross-section of perspectives inside your own organization, and even among departments and people within those departments based on their vantage point and responsibility. So when your colleague Brian Wieser produces an emerging media forecast, he includes ITV, and mobile video, because from his perspective in terms of tracking ad budget market shares they are still emerging.
(Maybe better terms might be “ascending” and “descending” media, or “waxing” and “waning” media, etc.)
Another perspecitve is the one used to define the “critical mass” of mass media. When I started covering this business, critical mass usually meant penetration of somewhere between 50% and 75% of the population. These days, I think the threshold is 50 million users. Therfore, Facebook is no longer an emerging medium, but Wieser lists social networks as one, because they’ve failed — so far — to develop a monetization model that would yield “emerged” advertising budgets.
The same thing with mobile. There are something like 4 billion mobile handsets in the world today, making it the most massively penetrated personal communications medium in the world, but it’s still only an “emerging” ad medium.
So I guess the answer is perspective.
April 13th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
[...] and results-driven balance between breadth and depth of information. As Josh Lovinson addresses in a recent Future of Media blog post, “emerging media” is a troublesome term whose definition is largely in the eye of the [...]
April 15th, 2009 at 11:20 am
[...] Josh Lovinson addresses in a recent Future of Media blog post, “emerging media” is a troublesome term whose definition is largely in the eye of the [...]