At Jupiter, Some Rays Of Light In The Darkness Of Feudal Media

Does today's Feudal Media landscape serve you well? 

That question came into sharp focus when The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey joined me on stage at the Jupiter Festival in Miami to discuss some key takeaways from my new book, Welcome To The Age Of Feudal Media: What Happens Once The Monoculture Collapses.

Morrissey argued that his own media diet was much fuller and richer than it ever had been and that for a well-educated savvy consumer, it was actually the best of times.

He’s right, of course, but the problem, as I gently pointed out (Brian and I have been good friends for at least 20 years) is that he and his ilk represent a small percentage of the population and that the vast majority of the population are trapped inside their little bubbles, unaware that there are other realities out there, other takes on the world, other styles of music with massive fan bases, with superstars they may not ever have heard of.

For Morrissey, the world has never been better. He has access to a wide variety of interesting voices, almost every movie or television series ever shot, millions of creators, and entire record stores worth of music.

But his gain, I argued, is everyone else’s pain, as so many people are not motivated enough, sophisticated enough, or a combination of the two to bother to look outside their bubbles.

And what we have given up is a shared sense of national identity, the feeling that we are all singing from the same songbook, as it were, and pulling in the same direction. 

What Morrissey describes fits neatly into the current best of times/worst of times scenario that is playing out all across the West, as the upper classes, that top 15% of the income curve, enjoy the fruits of the technology revolution, having been savvy enough to understand how to use it to their advantage, while the bottom 85% bears the brunt of it in terms of lost jobs, shrinking opportunities and a loss of the sort of national culture and awareness of the wider world that created those opportunities. 

If you are a student of history, it may strike you that this parallels late first millennium Europe, when the glory of Rome sank into what became known as the Dark Ages. It’s a situation not all that far removed from our own, hence the term “Feudal Media” to describe a world where opportunity and enlightenment both seem to have been limited.

(It’s not all that bleak. Though you’ll have to read the book to find out why.)

Meanwhile, just as Rome lived on for another millennium in Byzantium, so too does the monoculture live on in the Land of Sports.

Which was the topic of the other session I was in at Jupiter, all about expanding the opportunities for advertising on live sports.

The premise there was something I’d also discussed in my book, how live sports was the last place that brands (or politicians for that matter) could reach the sort of mass audiences that characterized the monoculture, audiences that cut across demographics and location and still numbered in the tens of millions.

I was joined on stage by Scott Young from Transmit, Alex Willats from WPP and Dan Conti from PMG, and the discussion hit on all of the hot buttons impacting sports right now: 

• How do you increase inventory in the face of increased demand without messing with the user experience?

• What new audiences are we seeing with the rise of women's sports, niche sports and hyperlocal sports, and who are the advertisers who want to reach them?

• What do we do about Zoomers and their inability to sit still long enough to watch an entire game—they’re relying mostly on highlight clips.

• How to take advantage of the rise of the athlete-creator and the effect that has on popularity of various sports

• How to make use of the vast amounts of data around both audiences and the games themselves to create contextual targeting (e.g. run your upbeat ad in the city whose team has just hit a grand slam home run.)

• At a time of massive fragmentation (I sense a theme) how do we make it easy for fans to find and watch the games they want?

It was a good group (I was moderating) and the inclusion of the UK-based Willats lent it an international flavor. Transmit’s highlights ads were an eye-opener for me, if for no other reason than they just made so much sense—run a highlight from the current game as a way to drive tune-in. 

That aside, the consensus here was that fans saw live sports taking on a greater role in their lives, as the place where they could have an experience that was shared with millions of other people all at the same time, and, as such, were more open to hearing from brands. Especially when the option was listening to the announcer blather on for five minutes straight.

This then brings us back to the larger truth, which is that like Brian Morrissey, sports fans are well-served by the Feudal Media ecosystem: they have access to more types of sports in more places, across more platforms. 

The difference though is that the group dynamic is very much part of the appeal here, to be a part of something along with millions of other people, all enjoying the same thing at the same time.

That is an inherent part of human nature and it’s why I remain optimistic that we will see our way out of the Dark Ages of Feudal Media.