Mobile mass media is currently at the grass
roots level, but
it’s power and influence is growing daily. It’s evolving and rapidly
becoming a technological revolution.
In it’s path, it’s creating new products, industries, and
services. All the while destroying or redefining existing services and
products.
It’s not however a clear and defined brand, such as the
behemoths of Google, Yahoo, YouTube and Second Life of this Internet
age.
The Foundations are now being laid for the future corporate
giants of the 7th mass media to emerge.
Differing from the Internet,
mobile as the 7th mass
media
channel is similar to the five legacy mass media, economically viable
with a stable business model from day one.
Yet, differing from the
legacy mass media, all of which are witnessing a decline in their
audiences and revenues, mobile like the Internet, is an interactive
media enabling it to fully capitalize on social
networking and digital communities.
But more importantly from a media audience point-of-view,
there already are over twice
as many mobile phones worldwide
as there are personal computers, nearly twice as many mobiles as TV
sets.
The only mass media that is carried upon the owner at all
times,
mobile is also the first mass media where near 100% accuracy is
feasible on measuring the audience.
In the following report originally published by Alan
Moore,
CEO of SMLXL, you will be able to read about the evolution mass media
and the trends they established within our culture and our
communication habits.
Today I republish for you the first part of the
white paper, which introduces the topic by rolling out the history of
mass media and their characteristics.
Here are more details:
Mobile as the 7th Mass Media
by Alan Moore
And in the beginning was the word: Print 1st of the Mass Media
Prior to
Gutenberg
inventing movable type and printing the worlds first book, the 42-Line
Bible
information was vigorously controlled by the church, ensuring its
control over a society that is described as a feudal society, but, it
was also a feudal economy. And to whose benefit? The church.
The church was a controlling institution, it was wealthy and
it was
powerful. Wresting control from the gate keeper is, we would argue
never an easy business.
Printing
technologies
from late 1400’s, opened the floodgates for information and
knowledge
to be shared through pamphlets, books, newspapers, music scores, and
magazines.
It was the First Mass Media, and it was a significant
contributor to the demise of the feudal
system
and the hegemony of the church over large swathes of Northern European
populations’.
As printing spread and publishing developed,
technological innovation created new market structures. Soon publishers
become the controlling institutions, wishing to exercise their control
and hence domination of that market space.
The Oldest Media Giants
The oldest of today’s media giants such as
Time Warner
and Rupert
Murdoch
etc, trace their roots to the newspaper and print industries.
Printing
and publishing created a whole new raft of job descriptions the
author/writer as the creative talent, with other professional writers
including journalists, columnists, screenplay writers etc.
For the
newspapers and magazines, the job of editor was invented to manage the
written content.
Illustrators appeared for books and periodicals,
and after the advent of the
photograph
in the 1850’s, photojournalists and photographer illustrators
also were
added into the creative skills of print and publishing. Advertising was
born through the newspapers and magazines.
Advertising revenues also
changed the business model of newspapers, and became the model
thereafter on how every mass media made a sizable proportion of its
money.
But importantly because of the possibility of reuse, public
libraries were born, where industrial man and woman could better expand
their knowledge were they so inclined.
With newspapers and magazines,
from a commercial context, the role of information changed. Content
became the necessary glue, for the really important stuff –
commercial
messaging to a targeted audience. Today many free newspapers exist
funded by advertising.
Needless to say, like all industrial economies, barriers to
entry
for print publishers were high. The capital costs of setting up a
publishing business were not insignificant, and as publishers realized
they could reach greater audiences with wider distribution, those
capital costs increased.
However, the considerable benefits were that
whoever had the wider distribution controlled the story, the news and
the information. Until very recently it was a few media proprietors,
from around the world that were the arbiters of what we could or should
know.
Lessons from First Mass Media: a
new media will
introduce new industry, new professions, and new business models.
Advertising can support, even carry a media channel.
Rocking all over the World: Recording 2nd of the Mass Media
Analogue recordings from late 1800’s introduced the
first “new” mass media. What
were first only music recordings on “clay”
records eventually evolved to the vinyl recordings
of the later half of the last century.
The music industry added new
recording methods from open reel audio tape in the 1960’s to
the
C-cassette and music cartridge in the 1970’s, the music CD in
the
1980’s and digital music stored as MP3 files from the late
1990’s and
the ringing tones now in the current decade.
The music recording alone
is worth 30 billion dollars worldwide today.
Music was not the only recorded content.
In the
1970’s movies appeared on video cassettes and a second major
content
category for the recording industry was created.
Movies stated off as a
rental business but then added video cassette sales and then the DVD
sales and rentals. The movies sold and recorded on DVDs today are worth
about 20 billion dollars or nearly as much as Hollywood earns on the
box office “cinema” income of
first-run movies.
Today several other recordings categories exist including
computer
programmes, video games, TV shows etc.
Recordings as a new mass media
Recordings as a new mass media
channel was radically different from print, in that while anyone could
read a book, magazine or newspaper, for consuming a record
or tape, CD, DVD, you needed to own a media player.
This forced
households to go buy the new home entertainment gadget, the record
player.
And then later the cassette player, the CD player, the DVD
player
etc all replicated this pattern, needing the player to consume recorded
media.
Early recordings were music concerts, longer symphonic
orchestra
music, which was what you would go to listen to, if you went to the
theater to listen to a concert.
The recording industry then innovated
and created shorter forms of music, inventing the pop song of about 3
minutes in length.
This was not viable on the stage, we don’t go to
listen to the London Symphony
Orchestra play 3 minutes.
This new format created the pop music industry which today
features
the artists like Justin Timberlake, Brittney Spears, Coldplay, 50 Cent,
Black Eyed Peas etc.
At its peak around the 1950s and 1960s the music
recording industry produced the biggest global artists such as Elvis,
Frank
Sinatra, the Beatles etc.
They were able to use their music
success to expand into other media, most notably radio and the movies.
Bringing Entertainment To The Masses
Recordings brought culture and entertainment to
the masses.
It meant for the first time, you did not have to be wealthy, to go to
the opera, own your own instruments or be able to enjoy music.
It was
also like publishing a controlled economy and distribution system.
Analogue recordings created a new industry, the music business and
slowly cannibalized music from print.
Analogue recordings as a mass media and distribution model
created a
new spectrum of jobs; from studio and live recording, to music
management and touring bands – created for the modern era by
the
Beatles. A&R, publicists, managers etc., but as ever the story
evolves.
Lessons from Second Mass Media: a
new mass
media can cannibalize from the old, but also add new opportunities. A
new media can create formats which were not viable before it.
In
addition to creative and technical talent there can be performing
talent in media. Even with an expensive media player to be purchased by
users, a media can flourish.
Easy Riders Raging Bulls: Cinema 3rd of the Mass Media
In the 1910’s cinema
became the 3rd evolution of the Mass Media. This introduced yet another
very distinct form of enjoying mass media.
Cinema thus became an
audience media, mostly enjoyed in the movie theater with hundreds of
other members of the public. Interestingly it was a communal
experience, and still is.
Reservoir Dogs
Technically we now had a first truly visual mass media, with
moving
pictures. Movies told stories of the Wild West, brought to us the
madness of war via Vietnam and
Apocalypse
Now, scared us to death via Jaws, and took us to new galaxies
via Star
Wars.
Very popular cinema content formats were invented in the first
half of
the last century for the cinema. These included
“newsreels” short about
5 –10 minute news summaries in moving pictures – the
precursor to
today’s nightly TV news.
Also weekly “serials”
were introduced, where the same hero
would battle a series of villains one week, be left in a perilous
situation, to be continued next week.
The cliff-hanger style of serial
short movies which brought cinema audiences back every week for a
further installment.
Interestingly this format continues on TV with soap
operas and continuing storyline TV series such as; The Shield,
The
Sopranos, Desperate
Housewives, Big
Brother, Pop
Idol, and, Star
Trek Enterprise etc.
Gone with the Wind
Cinema was thought of threatening books as a viable media. The
exact
opposite happened. Good books spawned movies, and successful movies
that were not based on books, were turned into printed books.
Hollywood
ruthlessly cannibalized the topmost talent and content from print and
recordings and attempted to turn them into movie stars. Some succeeded
like Ian
Fleming’s
James Bond series of books or Elvis Presley’s transition into
movies.
Madonna and Prince are examples of where cinema tried but
failed in
transferring a recording artist to the silver screen.
Comic books were turned into movies such as Superman,
Batman,
Spiderman
etc, which in turn helped sell more of the comic books but other titles
such as Darkman
have failed.
While recording was a decade older as a mass media, cinema
was able to overtake recordings in its importance due to its
distribution model.
As soon as cinema theaters started to make money,
they sprung up everywhere and by the 1930s there were dozens, even
hundreds of cinema theaters in major cities around the world.
Recordings were still suffering from the high cost of
individual
record players and thus the slow adoption and expansion of record
players which did not reach most of the population until the
1960’s.
Like recordings, cinema also introduced new skills and new
artists. The
Hollywood star was born, with Charlie
Chaplin
the most recognized person on the planet in the
1930’s.
Even
long after
its peak influence in the 1950’s, cinema still today holds a
premier
position among all media stars, as the ultimate indication of true
celebrity.
The most paid artists worldwide tend to be the big box office
Hollywood stars, and most music artists, stage actors, TV celebrities,
professional dancers, comedians etc hope to land a major movie role to
boost their careers.
Lessons from the third Mass Media:
moving
pictures are more compelling than written words or just sounds. People
are willing to pay per view. And a media that does not require the
audience to go buy new equipment has the ability to bypass older
media in adoption speed.
Radio Romance: Radio 4th of the Mass Media
The 1920’s brought us radio
and 4th of the Mass Media. Radio was the first ubiquitous broadcast
media, the first “streaming”
media.
This was the first time a media required the audience to make
an
appointment to join and listen. With books and newspapers we could read
at any time we wanted. With recordings we could replay the recording
whenever we felt like it.
With cinema we could select which night we would go and see
the
movie, as long as it was still playing. But with radio our show came
once and was gone. If we were not there to hear it, we missed
it.
This
meant the birth of the broadcast schedule and appointment in the
instance to listen. And introduced the need for new printed magazines
and newspaper pages telling us what was on radio, on which channel, and
at what time.
Radio Brought Diversity
Radio brought a new diversity of news, information, debate and
music
to the people. And, it brought a new channel for commercial
communications.
Radio
was
the engine that started to drive mass consumption, content became the
glue for commercial communications. And that is an interesting and
important point to consider.
Radio brought us the Soap Opera
as continuing storyline radio plays that were sponsored by the consumer
detergents and soaps giant Procter
& Gamble and featuring their main brands such as
Palmolive, Colgate and Pepsodent.
Radio also did something that never before was possible the
rapid
dissemination of breaking news and information, experienced live as it
happened. It complimented the long-form more in-depth analysis of
newspapers and specialist magazines.
Radio
was funded either on an advertising model or by national license fees,
or in some cases a mixture of the two. However a strange symbiotic
relationship developed, with music recordings and the Top 20 chart
radio play format.
Suddenly the music recording industry noticed that those songs
that
the radio DJ’s played would become economically successful
chart hits.
Like each new media, new talent was needed and
radio’s new
talent were
the DJ’s and announcers, newsreaders and other radio voices.
New radio
plays emerged and comedy hours and familiar radio voices became
celebrities.
Lessons from the Fourth Mass Media:
include
that broadcast is tied to a schedule, even a cannibalistic new media
typically will not kill off an older media, rather adjust it.
Even if
two mass media use similar content, the newer one will still spawn new
professions and a new industry. It’s possible for two media
to form a
symbiotic relationship.
This is Soap. Confused? You will be TV 5th of the Mass Media
The 1950’s brought us the mass introduction of
television.
TV combined the broadcast concept of radio and its business model with
the visual and multimedia impact of cinema.
Like radio and recordings,
TV required the audience to purchase a consumption device, except that
in the 1950’s and 1960’s even the cheapest TV sets
were easily ten
times more expensive than record players or radios. But this enormous
price barrier was no obstacle to TV.
Television’s economic and cultural
impact was simply seismic:
it was the first mass media to physically and metaphorically replace
the fireplace as the heart of the home.
TV took a great deal from its
older broadcast siblings, radio and cinema obviously, but also print.
The economic model of radio was copied – including the
business models
of either TV license or advertising, or in some countries
both.
Only
much later with cable TV did subscription models appear and today even
pay-per-view models are being introduced for TV.
TV Started To Dominate
More than just a media TV soon dominated all
other media economies.
By the 1970’s TV attracted the largest audiences and become
the engine
room for driving mass consumption via TV advertising.
For example,
Morecombe
and Wise
a British comedic duo got the highest recorded TV audience in Britain,
with 26 million viewers, almost half of the UK population watching
their Christmas special.
The Superbowl
in the United States is the annually most watched TV show gathering
about 80 – 90 million viewers to the show. TV also changed previous
media concepts.
A good example is music. After TV innovated with the
music video (MTV),
suddenly TV became the
determining factor in a recording artist’s chances of climbing the
music charts. Radio, once the sole arbiter of the audiences taste in
music was superseded.
TV introduced again new skills, both technical from TV studio,
video, audio, editing, lighting etc staffs to the on-air personalities
from news anchors, game show presenters, talk show hosts etc.
More
recently VJ’s (
Video
Jockeys on MTV and music video channels), and even reality TV
contestants in shows like American
Idol and Big
Brother have become celebrities that TV audiences aspire to
become.
From Scarcity to Plenty
From cable and satellite TV and now digital TV, various
multi-channel TV systems has given the TV audiences ever more choice.
It has also caused severe fragmentation of the advertising
audience.
P&G
Chief Marketing Officer Jim Stengel says that in 1965, 80% of adults in
the US could be reached with three 60-second spots. However in 2002 it
required 117 advertisements to achieve the same result.
Lessons from the fifth Mass Media: even
a very
expensive media player is not an obstacle to adoption if the format is
right. A media can gain a dominant position without a unique technical
benefit.
A new media rival with an absolute advantage – such
as TV over
radio – will still not kill of the previous mass media.
You are no longer in control: Internet as 6th of the Mass
Media – and the first interactive media
The 1990’s brought us the 6th
Mass Media, the anarchic Internet.
But, of all instances of a new media appearing onto the scene, the
Internet was the first time that a new media could do everything that
the earlier five Mass Media could do.
Furthermore the Internet added
two unique benefits never possible on the previous five: interactivity
and search.
From Cold Media to Hot Media
What the Internet has achieved single-handedly is to
demonstrate that humans are a “We”
species, a social and networking species. We have an innate need, to
connect and communicate.
The networked and interactive nature of the
Internet suddenly enabled us humans to get back to what our DNA demands
us to be via: the blogs,
Wikis, Citizen
Journalism, peer production, collective
intelligence, Netvibes
and del.icio.us.
Multiplayer
Online Role Playing Games such as World of Warcraft, social
networking like MySpace
and Cyworld.
Or even Habbo Hotel,
a virtual children’s playground which releases new variants
every six
weeks based on the feedback of its 8 million users worldwide.
This
enables a community-improved system with improvement cycles unheard-of
in legacy media, capitalizing on the “wisdom of the
crowds.”
As Alan
Moore the CEO of SMLXL
likes to say:
“Nobody is as clever as everybody“
This radically changes the relationship between media content
creation and media content consumption.
Industrialization and the mass media
Industrialization and the mass
media have conveniently forgotten that we are a “We”
species
and really don’t like being reminded of the fact that we want
to be
part of creation, of storytelling, of networks and
communities.
And
that it is a fundamental need of every society on this planet, no
matter whether we live in forests or indeed cities.
The 6th Mass Media demonstrates an audience can, and indeed
demands the possibility for
direct participation in media creation and consumption. We can think of
the first five mass
media as “cold” mass media, consumed
passively.
By
contrast the Internet was the first “hot”
mass media, which allowing users to create, rate, participate in and
propagate media content.
Business Week explained of the relevance of
social
networking in its June 2006 cover story:
“This is the biggest change to business…
since
the Industrial Revolution“
Napster: You’re a very naughty boy
Napster
was perhaps the earliest example of the destructive power of our
technological revolution. Napster demonstrated
how rapidly a 6th Mass Media service can change consumer
behavior.
Not
over decades as with previous mass media, but rather in years, months
even. The result, a decline of over 10% of global music sales and a
reordering of the music industry.
By the time it shut down, 57 million people were using
Napster’s
people powered music-swapping site. Were all those people
criminals?
Or
does this say something fundamental about the shift in the relationship
between mass media, consumption and the audience?
Audiences migrating away from legacy media
Today, readership of newspapers is pointing to terra firma,
traditional TV viewing is in terminal decline, whilst Internet use
continues to look to the blue sky of growth.
Print, radio and TV are
also becoming media channels for increasingly older people.
The ITU
Digital Life Report for 2006
reveals that over 55 year olds spend 31.5 hours per week with
traditional news media (print, radio and TV) and only 8 hours with
modern digital mass media (mostly the Internet).
Meanwhile young people i.e. under 35 year olds, by contrast
spend
only 25 hours with all the three major forms of legacy media and
already 16 hours per week with interactive media.
Young people spend
50% more time on the Internet as on TV, twice as much as on the
Internet as on radio, and four times as much time on the web as in
print media.
Search
“I search therefore I am,”
is the mantra of today’s digital
natives. Search changes everything. A good example of how search is
altering legacy media is with recorded music.
Pitchforkmedia.com
has emerged as one of the more important Indie
“must-read” music sites
in any medium, with 125,000 unique visitors a day and only three full
time employees.
Bands that have struggled for years once picked up by
pitchfork have often witnessed a rapid increase in sales and their
music.
Google’s sponsored search words concept has
radically altered
advertising revenues on the web, and in 2006 more revenues were earned
by search advertising than all other forms of advertising on the
Internet.
Like each of the previous mass media, the Internet has
brought about new professions requiring new skills.
Some of these are technical, like web designers, others are on
the
creative side such as bloggers. Already today there are more bloggers
than all professional journalists in TV, radio, newspapers and
magazines combined.
But also most bloggers are not paid for their work,
the number of professional and semi-professional bloggers are measured
in the low tens of thousands out of the 72 million blog sites today.
Lessons from the 6th Mass Media: if
a mass
media is an inherent threat media, threatening to cannibalize all
legacy media, it also will rapidly alter each of the legacy
media.
Interactivity creates digital community and moves
media from push to
pull. A hot media is inherently preferred over any cold media and will
cannibalize older media at unprecedented speeds.
Last thoughts before moving to 7th Mass Media
While this White Paper is intended to explore mobile as the
7th Mass
Media, and the first 6 are presented for lessons to be learned in the
transitional stage to the introduction of a new mass media, we need to
conclude this part with the Internet as the 6th Mass Media with the
sentiment, that it won’t go away.
For all the huge changes
enabled by
the Internet so far, the changes ahead caused by the Internet are going
to be greater than all changes we have seen up to now.
The Internet alone is an iceberg still mostly
under the water. Don’t misunderstand this White Paper in
suggesting mobile would somehow “kill off”
the Internet.
Just like cinema and TV did not kill off books, radio did
not kill of recordings and the Internet has not killed off newspapers,
magazines, video games, etc.
So too, mobile is the newest mass media, it is a very
different mass
media but it will not be the hangman of the Internet. For all of the
major Internet services, companies and media formats, their bright
future is still ahead of them.
Only that while the Internet has started
its path towards the second billion users, the youngest media, mobile,
is already nearing its third billion users.
This white paper has been originally published with the title “Mobile
as the 7th Mass Media: An Evolving Story” by Alan Moore of SMLXL on June
2007. It is available for download
on the same site.
The 3 part series:
- Part 1: Mobile Mass Media | The Grass Roots Of The Mobile Phone Technological Revolution
- Part 2: Delivering Content On Mobile Devices | The Growth Of Mobile Mass Media
- Part 3: Mobile Mass Media Creative & Advertising Models | Mobile Phones Are The Future
Livia Iacolare is a contributing author discussing broadband video tools and software. His work can be found on MasterNewMedia. Post has Some Rights Reserved.
