You may have seen an article in Tuesday's Evening Standard about the rise to fame of Mia Rose, whose homemade music videos have made her the most-viewed person on the video-sharing web site YouTube.
It got me thinking about the effects of increasing interactivity in our media environment. We can't ignore the fact that interactive modes of media are becoming increasingly popular, so it seems worth wondering what the effects of that interactivity are on the way media works.
We can be sure that interactive media engages consumers more actively than traditional modes of media: a consumer reading and posting a comment on a blog site will certainly be engaging with the blog more actively than if he were being presented with the same information in a television programme. This leads consequently to the potential for interactive media to be comparatively much more communicative to its audience than traditional media. Interactive media is also guaranteed to be more relevant to its audience, as consumers only interact with media that's relevant to them. Interactive media then, is more engaging, communicative, and relevant, which must make it more effective.
The reasons for this additional effectiveness of the media make it a good thing in itself for consumers, but increased effectiveness is also a good thing for advertisers. Media is, of course, the vehicle for advertising; more-effective media means more-effective advertising.
Through effectiveness though is not the only way that both consumers and advertisers benefit from interactivity. Interactive channels provide consumers with the ability to create their own content. Interactivity then probably also makes media on average cheaper, both to consume and to advertise in. Now that those we have traditionally thought of as media consumers are generating content themselves - for free, at home or wherever they are - there's a lot more of it available.
The rise of interactive modes of media - and I'm thinking mainly on the internet - has made it free and easy for anyone to communicate to a global audience. This is likely to make it more important for authors to be able to identify themselves effectively (when they want to); which is the same as it becoming more important for branding to be employed effectively. Branding is going to become more significant than it already is - if that's possible.
The article about Mia Rose in the Evening Standard actually focused on accusations that Mia's YouTube campaign has been conducted secretly by a PR team. (See my last post, 'Big Bully', for more on artifice and engineering in the media industry). You might have been forgiven for imagining that an increase in the significance of consumer-created content would cause the nature of interactive media in aggregate to tend further towards being 'honest' compared to traditional media: after all, the traditional consumer loves and demands honesty, and has no hidden agenda. The accusations levelled at Mia Rose however suggest that this is not the case.
The truth is that whoever creates its content, a degree of what we might describe as deception is inherent in all media, whatever its mode, and that in fact, there is even more opportunity in free and easy, interactive, consumer-created media for this deception. The Mia Rose case illustrates the effect that the removal of the line between consumer and content creator can cause: the creator can easily pose as a humble consumer - that's the corollary to the fact that the interactive media consumer can easily also be a content creator. It's central too to the nature of most interactive media that a single person can have an infinite number of different digital identities (real or otherwise). No truth in consumer-created content is necessarily the whole truth, if even the truth at all. Every single media consumer now has the potential to be multiple content creators, and to be on a level with all other content creators. With that potential have come the agenda that are universal to all content creators: not just the desire for audience, but also that which often drives it: the desire for advertising revenue. Services such as Google's AdSense for publishers have made it very easy for any creator of online content to generate advertising revenue from it. For the interactive media consumer, innocence is a fond memory; the interactive media consumer has come of age.
And there's certainly no going back; this is not a passing fad. There is nothing like the economics of an advertising industry in which the number of advertisers potentially matches the number of consumers to sustain the rate of growth of content production. This growth will in turn sustain the advertising industry. So long as the necessary infrastructure - like online storage space and interactive media services - remains in place, the only limit here that I can think of is the number of people in the world with access to the internet.
An interesting side-effect of this evolution in the media I think will be an increase in the importance of the function of branding to lend credibility to a content creator; while at the same time, branding's capacity for this function will deteriorate, as branding becomes cheaper and easier. Those brand values - i.e. brand image attributes - that are associated with moral integrity, trustworthiness or (somewhat paradoxically) innocence will become even more valuable than at present. Once again, Google, who continue to do a lot to drive the evolution of media, springs to mind, with their slogan: 'Don't be evil'.
Mia Rose on YouTube
Blogger
MySpace
Google AdSense for publishers