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Tech Boom, Media Bust

An industry in decline often continues with the same premises, activities, and outward appearances as it’s always held. Business as usual. Then, overnight it seems, the bottom drops out. The small incremental changes converge to dramatically shift an entire industry. Happened with music, classified ads, news, and now advertising (I still maintain that educators have lessons to learn from the change in these fields – the experiences of centralized, content-centric industries are worth observing as potential indicators of what may happen in education). Forbes reviews the tremendous drop in advertising dollars for traditional publications. Like most anything else, advertising is moving from centralized expensive investment to smaller, more decentralized approaches. Instead of projecting the message in one paper with one ad, companies are advertising in a network-model, relying increasingly on blogs. The problem (opportunity) with networks is that the originator of a message losses control over what happens and how it’s received. Not much value in talking back to a magazine ad. But when the audience has a platform to speak, authenticity of message becomes critical. Tech Boom, Media Bust: “A successful blog can simply grab more readers, per employee, than more traditional media.”

One Comment

  1. Virginia Yonkers wrote:

    Actually, Advertisers have always had limited control over the message once it is broadcast. The difference is that there were always measures to follow the impact of the measure (e.g. big market research firms like Nielson). What has changed is that the old methods of feedback don’t necessarily work any more and niche marketers have more control in targeting their message. There have been innovations in the last year that address this (e.g. MySpace add-ons for companies). However, as you mention, this requires a whole new business model and methods of research/analysis which many of the big businesses are not ready for.

    I agree that education should take a look at what is going on. Are the rating publications still as powerful as they once were (US News and World Report) or are there other voices within the cybor world that give the “truth” about a college or university? Are standardized tests, surveys of student, teacher or parents, and other pen-and-paper testing instruments measuring what is really going on in schools and the messages our schools want to send? I worry that many of the “new” leadership models being taught to school administrators are models that were taught in the 1980′s when I was going to business school and many businesses now have set aside those top-down centrally controlled models for a distributed model that requires multi-tasking, group work, cross-training between disciplines, networking, critical thinking skills, and information literacy skills.

    Tuesday, July 17, 2007 at 10:53 am | Permalink

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