Overview
The modern media
environment is very different from where it was ten years
ago, last year, and indeed six months ago.
We now have a
proliferation of media, and a limited audience to which to
appeal.
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Fast growing media.
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Slow growing audience.
-
High risk
-
Changes in marketing
tactics.
All of which mean
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Smaller audiences
-
More care to that
audience
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From mass audience to
single viewer.
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Unknown environment
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Few models to go on.
Which means
Go with the flow and hope
for the best
OR
Get innovative and risk
all.
In broadcasting there are
always two choices. There is always a path, and there are
always two extremes to that path.
You can go one way or the
other.
Or you can choose 1000
different shades of gray in between.
Plenty of choices, little
guidance, hardly any precedent.
A lot of us think that
broadcast programming is quite simple. Some of us have
worked in it for a long time, and regard it as something “we
can do in our sleep”.
That’s right. We do it
instinctively and we do it well. But do we know WHY we do
it instinctively?
Instinct is a deceptive
thing. Instinct is based on experience and learned
behaviours.
Let’s take step back and
look at Instinct.
We know that something is
right or wrong instinctively when we have an intuitive feel
that it is right or wrong. This intuition comes from
warning signals that may or may not give us a warm feeling
in our guts.
These warning signals come
from a type of conditioning. A bad experience programmes us
to recoil when we feel the same experience coming back to
us. It’s simple Pavlovian response.
We behave as response to
experience as we have learned to be wary of experiences
repeating themselves.
Here comes the interesting
part. We may feel that something bad is going to repeat
itself because we recognise the warning signs. But are
these signs really the signs that the SAME thing is going to
happen again.
As we get older and more
experienced, and as our instincts get honed even more, so we
respond to warning signs that come earlier and earlier.
This explains why
experienced people are more conservative and less
adventurous.
So is instinct good
enough?
We live and work in
changing and changeable times.
Technology is wreaking
havoc with the order and symmetry that we have been used to.
What we learn in the textbooks gives and impression of
broadcast world that is cut and dried, definite, immoveable
and trundling along as it has done for years.
That’s where our instinct
is so bad for us. Our instinct gives us warning signals of
a world of experience gone past.
That’s fine in stable
times and given the assumption that things don’t change.
But times are not like
that. Broadcasting as it was ten years ago is not as it
will be a year from now. Our instincts have little to offer
us if we are to use them to make decisions based on past
experiences.
We have to learn to mix
them, to make our instincts as moveable and changeable as
the times.
This
is the world of the world wide web, 24/7 day-trading,
satellite television, soundbitten and spindoctored
politics, mobile phoneophilia, pick ’n’ mix lifestyles,
serial monogamy and relentless McDonaldisation. It is a
world of ephemerality, instability, proliferation,
hallucination and, above all, chaos. It is a world where
the beating of a butterfly’s wings in South America can
cause a stock market crash in Hong Kong or swerve the
ball into the net at Old Trafford. It is a world of
unexpected, unpredictable, uncontrollable,
unremitting, some would say unnecessary, upheaval.
(Stephen Brown: Postmodern
Marketing)
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