This is the last part of the keynote address on the future of television delivered by Gary Carter of FreemantleMedia at the National Association of Television Program Executives in Las Vegas in January 2007. (See part 1 and background, and part 2.) All emphasis mine.
"If you'll excuse some simplification, it seems to me that we can divide the history of television, as medium and as form, into three generations: mine, my mother's, and my son's.
For my mother, when television arrived in the fifties, it was a technology without history. It appeared as revolutionary, although in fact, like most technology it was evolutionary. Its technology was mysterious, new, perhaps related to film, and the form of programmes derived from other technologies and traditions -- the movies, the theatre, the radio. Television was a window on the world, a Modernist project which explained the world to its audience -- the world as it 'really was'. This was the era of television as social instrument, the era of the rise of the public broadcaster. The voice of television was the voice of the social establishment. Famous people as represented on television were famous because of their achievements, because of what they had done. Television came at you, it was a 'push' technology, in current terms, and in fact, it moved down -- it came from a position of power and moved down to the people. It is in this period that the means of reception -- the screen, the set -- begins to be domesticated, it drifts from the shop window into the living room.
But my generation -- the generation which came of age in the early eighties -- we grew up with television. Entirely domesticated, it had moved into our space, and appeared in bedrooms, in kitchens, even in toilets. It had a history of its own, it had a culture of its own to which we could refer, it had already codified its own conventions. And in this generation, fame began to share airtime with celebrity -- those people who were famous because of the amount of media exposure they gained.
And since television programmes started to provide exposure, in an unholy alliance with the dark arts of marketing, it was possible to become famous for being on television, or in the media. We were the first generation who had grown up as the subject of audio-visual media -- the Super 8 movies, the early videotape, which our parents used to film those important events in our lives. We grew up then, with an understanding of the conventions of television, and with the domestic version of the technology filming us at home, and as the subject of the camera's gaze. This we could characterise as the beginnings of the post-Modern phase, the development of a medium which was a mirror, not a window, one with its own dubious heroes -- porn stars, politicians, their mistresses, their rent boys, retired gameshow hosts, and 'ordinary' people. As Andy Warhol said, In the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes. This was the era of television as reflective and creative of different worlds -- and it was the period of the rise of the commercial broadcaster. Television came at you from different directions, not just 'down' -- but it also started to come from you -- in programmes like Fox's COPS and AMERICA'S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS, where, for the first time, the material was generated by the subjects of the camera's gaze.
But for the generation represented by my son, the world is very different. Television -- or rather, the moving image with sound -- has become totally personalised, and in all aspects: subject, production and distribution.
The digital project means that media represent no reality, where the image multiplies indefinitely, perfectly, and represents only itself, and no reality at all. Or rather, a reality in which the image is the only reality.
A reality in which 98% of photographs in the average glossy magazine are digitally altered, in which 98% of Hollywood movies -- even those without special effects -- are digitally altered; in which newsreaders and gameshow contestants appear in environments that don’t exist. A separate pseudoworld. Now it is possible to define celebrity as utterly divorced from achievement at all -- as someone who 'is recognised my more people than they themselves can recognise'.
This generation has a different understanding of media and technology -- for a start, it has grown up with games in which the individual audience member can affect the outcome directly. It has grown up with an in-depth understanding of genre derived from television history, with an in-depth understanding of technology -- a technology which is now of broadcast quality, with domestic editing sets which rival those used in what we like to call an industry, and now --crucially -- the audience has distribution. This is the world of digital television, digital networks, digital everything. Power, in this environment, is certainly not a push, but it's probably not, in fact, a pull: it is distributed equally, in all parts of the system, acting in all directions simultaneously. In fact, power is a peer-to-peer distributed network. The audience, having been first the recipient of the camera's gaze, and then its subject, took control first of the means of production, and now, finally, of the means of distribution.
Media has become totally personalised, in all its aspects. It has moved into 'my space'. The artist formerly known as the audience has become -- to use MacLuhan's prediction from the early '70s -- the prosumer. To quote Andy Warhol just before his death: "My prediction from the Sixties finally came true. In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, in fifteen minutes everybody will be famous."
I believe that we are living through a profound moment in the evolution of technology, and therefore of our species. We should be careful that when we mourn the so-called death of television we are only mourning our own loss of power as a media elite. I know that sounds rather dramatic at the end of a long day in a seminar, but I believe it nonetheless. We are not living through the death of television, for the simple reason that this is not about television. Technological development is a story, which runs through human history, and which shapes it and is shaped by it, and part of that story is the rise and rise of that which we call the media. This is about us, in a very deep and profound way, and it's about the way in which we as a species are driven by creativity. Obviously, I realise that I sound alternatively naive and pretentious when I say this, but these concerns of ours -- is television dying, what's the next big thing, will people want to watch television on a mobile phone, who will want to pay for it -- these are not the questions which are important, culturally or historically. The important ones are: now that we have it, what will we do with it? As it grows, who will control it? And finally, what will we become?
This is a moment in time in which we can all help to answer these questions, and that's why it's an exciting and important moment. It's exciting and important because it will require us to do the thing which ultimately defines us as people: it requires us to dream, and to create the products of our dreams, and to fill the flickering screens around us with those dreams. "
(c) Gary Carter 2006.
- A note of gratitude to Mr. Carter for sharing the full text of the speech with Adverlab.
Advergames Bump Burger King's Profit
"Since the fast-food chain launched a limited-edition collection of three Xbox games in November -- Pocketbike Racer, Big Bumpin', Sneak King -- sales of BK Value Meals have spiked to bring home meaty profits during the company's second quarter.
The world's second-largest burger chain said Tuesday its fiscal second-quarter profit jumped 41 percent to $38 million. Company officials cited consistently strong Value Meal sales and the video-game giveaway program for the positive report.
BK's games joined the ranks of other top-selling Xbox titles during the holiday shopping season with more than 3.2 million copies sold."
-- Sun-Sentinel
It's worth reiterating that food chains can be powerful distribution systems for all sorts of stuff, not just calories (see an earlier post for more).
The world's second-largest burger chain said Tuesday its fiscal second-quarter profit jumped 41 percent to $38 million. Company officials cited consistently strong Value Meal sales and the video-game giveaway program for the positive report.
BK's games joined the ranks of other top-selling Xbox titles during the holiday shopping season with more than 3.2 million copies sold."
-- Sun-Sentinel
It's worth reiterating that food chains can be powerful distribution systems for all sorts of stuff, not just calories (see an earlier post for more).
Discovery Promotes Show with Toilet Paper
Discovery Channel Sweden promotes its "Dirty Jobs" series with rolls of custom printed toilet paper.
-- thank you, Gustaf
Related:
Advertising On Toilet Paper
Voice Advertising For Bathrooms
Bathroom Advertising Round-Up
Display Embedded Into Bathroom Floor
Boston Cops Mistake Ad Lights for Bombs
image: Channel 5
Boston was crazy today with at least five choppers hovering over the river on a news that seven suspicious packages were found under the city's bridges. One of the packages was blown up. "Officials said the package contained an electronic circuit board with some components that were "consistent with an improvised explosive device," but they said it had no explosives."
The "explosive devices" turned out to be ad installations for Adult Swim's new animated show Aqua Teen Hunger Force. "Parent company Turner Broadcasting is in contact with local and federal law enforcement on the exact locations of the billboards. We regret that they were mistakenly thought to pose any danger." (More on ABC, Boston Globe.)
Update (9pm): More pictures via AdRag, Make and other sources:
source: MSNBC
source: Make (follow the link to see video)
Source: Vanderlin @ Flickr
Here's a YouTube video about how the device works.
Why do people keep referring to the campaign as "hoax"? How was it intended to misguide anyone? What is it about these LED displays that looks like a bomb? Besides, MAKE wrote about this project two weeks ago.
Earlier:
Bomb Squad Blows Up Tricked Out News Box (a promo for Mission: Impossible similarly gone wrong).
Lorem Ipsum Generator for Web 2.0
Eskobo goowy manjam. Guba simpy bebo, zecco plazes moola gpokr. Idio moola umundo zingee jaxtr mikons foldera doostang! Soonr mog!
Do you speak webtwooish?
Mike Lee took our Friday's lexicological rant one step further and created a lorem ipsum generator made from the crazy web 2.0 names. Awesome!
Do you speak webtwooish?
Mike Lee took our Friday's lexicological rant one step further and created a lorem ipsum generator made from the crazy web 2.0 names. Awesome!
Gary Carter's Speech, Part 2
This is part 2 of 3 of the keynote address on the future of television delivered by Gary Carter of FreemantleMedia at the National Association of Television Program Executives in Las Vegas in January 2007. (See part 1 and background, part 3) All emphasis mine.
"But let's look at the question of the survival of television as content, as opposed to the distribution medium, or platform. By this I mean to make a distinction between the technology of television -- the distribution medium -- and the content -- the form of content made exclusively for television. I am asking whether content specifically made for television -- like gameshows, for example -- will survive.
In an unscientific way, I analysed a week of primetime in the UK, during the period 19:00 to 23:00 (23:30 in the case of ITV), across all terrestrial broadcasters. If we consider programmes created just for television, and exclude: news and sport, as being retransmission of existing material or common to other media, and dramas made for cinema or based on books, then of the 196 shows in this time period, 64% were 'television' and 36% was not, and of the 136 hours, 70% were television and 30% were not.
You could say, by this analysis, that some of the stuff in primetime was not television, although it was distributed by television, and that in fact it represented older historical or past media content forms surviving in a new medium. This means that the content which is intrinsically television, like the gameshow, for example, is likely to survive on emerging technologies. Certainly this is true for my own company, where our catalogue of gameshow formats has been reborn on the web, and on mobile phones, in the gaming environment.
So if it is true that television as medium and form will survive, what other lessons can we learn from the history of mass communication technology which might help us understand where we're going?
Well, for a start, no mass communication technology has ever been exploited in the way in which the inventors predicted it would. In other words, the really good news it is not just you and I who don't know what's going on -- nobody does, not even -- in fact, especially not, the engineers.
When radio was introduced, it was marketed in kit form, sold to men, as a kind of quasi-engineering hobby. It was only when families complained that men were spending too much time 'playing' in isolation that the set migrated into the living room, and kits were replaced with readymade radiograms.
When the telephone was commercially introduced in the United States, it was originally believed that it would find its primary market amongst businessmen. In fact, so convinced were the operators that they tried to prevent any other use. When women in rural America discovered that they could use the telephone to communicate with their neighbours, the operating companies tried to stop them through prohibitive legislation. Until they realised that this represented a market.
SMS has a similar history. Introduced originally as a channel for communication between engineers, the first commercial short message was sent in 1992, from PC to mobile. Its triumph was the triumph of the consumer, since it was barely promoted until it was already widely used. It was originally presumed it would remain an industry communication medium -- not the symbol of a youth movement, a set of manners and a culture, a way of extracting revenue from television audiences, the source of a new language, a flirting medium, a sexual technology. The users -- the audience -- has made it all these things, not us.
So far, I hope I have also explained why I won't try to answer the questions with which I began: Will anyone want to watch a television programme on a mobile phone, and who will want to pay.
Given that I think that an examination of history has answered the question of whether we are living through the death of television, and given the impossibility of trying to understand where technology is going, let us try to understand some of the forces underneath current trends in media. In other words, now I am not going to answer the question, What's the next big thing?
It is possible to describe what's happening in the contemporary media by looking at the way communication devices have historically become personalised. Communication devices tend to follow the same pattern of domestication. They move from the public domain, to the domestic, then to the private sphere, and then become intensely personalised. For example, the telephone was originally public: in offices, in public spaces in phone booths. When the phone reached the home, its first position was at the threshold, typically in the hallway, as a kind of uneasy marker of the division between the public and the private sphere. By freeing itself from the party line -- one phone line serving many customers -- it became domesticated: extensions allowed it to move into the bedroom, to other rooms -- and then freed by wireless technology it became possible for the telephone to roam with the 'owner' of that extension. The phone became personalised with the invention of the true mobile: now, for example, I don't know the number of my best friend's domestic landline, I only know his mobile number. This pattern of movement is followed time after time by communication technology, and you can map the same pattern of movement in the development of so called 'new media'.
Now you can explain this pattern of personalisation by ascribing it to capitalism, the triumph of the market, the segmentation of customer bases. But I think there is something more profoundly human going on.
The story I am going to tell you is like all stories, dependent on your position for its truth."
next: part 3
(c) Gary Carter 2006
"But let's look at the question of the survival of television as content, as opposed to the distribution medium, or platform. By this I mean to make a distinction between the technology of television -- the distribution medium -- and the content -- the form of content made exclusively for television. I am asking whether content specifically made for television -- like gameshows, for example -- will survive.
In an unscientific way, I analysed a week of primetime in the UK, during the period 19:00 to 23:00 (23:30 in the case of ITV), across all terrestrial broadcasters. If we consider programmes created just for television, and exclude: news and sport, as being retransmission of existing material or common to other media, and dramas made for cinema or based on books, then of the 196 shows in this time period, 64% were 'television' and 36% was not, and of the 136 hours, 70% were television and 30% were not.
You could say, by this analysis, that some of the stuff in primetime was not television, although it was distributed by television, and that in fact it represented older historical or past media content forms surviving in a new medium. This means that the content which is intrinsically television, like the gameshow, for example, is likely to survive on emerging technologies. Certainly this is true for my own company, where our catalogue of gameshow formats has been reborn on the web, and on mobile phones, in the gaming environment.
So if it is true that television as medium and form will survive, what other lessons can we learn from the history of mass communication technology which might help us understand where we're going?
Well, for a start, no mass communication technology has ever been exploited in the way in which the inventors predicted it would. In other words, the really good news it is not just you and I who don't know what's going on -- nobody does, not even -- in fact, especially not, the engineers.
When radio was introduced, it was marketed in kit form, sold to men, as a kind of quasi-engineering hobby. It was only when families complained that men were spending too much time 'playing' in isolation that the set migrated into the living room, and kits were replaced with readymade radiograms.
When the telephone was commercially introduced in the United States, it was originally believed that it would find its primary market amongst businessmen. In fact, so convinced were the operators that they tried to prevent any other use. When women in rural America discovered that they could use the telephone to communicate with their neighbours, the operating companies tried to stop them through prohibitive legislation. Until they realised that this represented a market.
SMS has a similar history. Introduced originally as a channel for communication between engineers, the first commercial short message was sent in 1992, from PC to mobile. Its triumph was the triumph of the consumer, since it was barely promoted until it was already widely used. It was originally presumed it would remain an industry communication medium -- not the symbol of a youth movement, a set of manners and a culture, a way of extracting revenue from television audiences, the source of a new language, a flirting medium, a sexual technology. The users -- the audience -- has made it all these things, not us.
So far, I hope I have also explained why I won't try to answer the questions with which I began: Will anyone want to watch a television programme on a mobile phone, and who will want to pay.
Given that I think that an examination of history has answered the question of whether we are living through the death of television, and given the impossibility of trying to understand where technology is going, let us try to understand some of the forces underneath current trends in media. In other words, now I am not going to answer the question, What's the next big thing?
It is possible to describe what's happening in the contemporary media by looking at the way communication devices have historically become personalised. Communication devices tend to follow the same pattern of domestication. They move from the public domain, to the domestic, then to the private sphere, and then become intensely personalised. For example, the telephone was originally public: in offices, in public spaces in phone booths. When the phone reached the home, its first position was at the threshold, typically in the hallway, as a kind of uneasy marker of the division between the public and the private sphere. By freeing itself from the party line -- one phone line serving many customers -- it became domesticated: extensions allowed it to move into the bedroom, to other rooms -- and then freed by wireless technology it became possible for the telephone to roam with the 'owner' of that extension. The phone became personalised with the invention of the true mobile: now, for example, I don't know the number of my best friend's domestic landline, I only know his mobile number. This pattern of movement is followed time after time by communication technology, and you can map the same pattern of movement in the development of so called 'new media'.
Now you can explain this pattern of personalisation by ascribing it to capitalism, the triumph of the market, the segmentation of customer bases. But I think there is something more profoundly human going on.
The story I am going to tell you is like all stories, dependent on your position for its truth."
next: part 3
(c) Gary Carter 2006
Second Life Shorts, Set 2
image: moomoney via Giff Constable
A number of interesting Second Life developments happening all at once:
- The subscriber numbers for SL are now over 3,000,000. I think it was 2M a month and a half ago. And around 200,000 this time last year. If you follow the entire numbers controversy that's been smoldering for a long time and has recently erupted on Valleywag, you wonder what these numbers mean.
- Speaking of Valleywag: the blog last week featured an article by a financial consultant (see the full version on his own blog) who argues that because it's so hard to cash out of Second Life with any meaningful amount, the virtual world is nothing but a giant 3-D pyramid scheme. The money quote:
"And that’s the story of SecondLife. Like the paid promotion infomercials that run on CNBC, sadly SecondLife is a giant magnet for the desperate, uninformed, easily victimized. Its promises of wealth readily ensnare those who can least afford to lose their money or lives to such scam in exactly the same way that real estate investor seminars convince divorcees with low FICO scores to buy houses sight unseen with no money down.
Even some corporations have dedicated marketing budgets to creating a presence in SecondLife. While few will shed a tear for the frivolousness of these companies’ spending, such adds a false legitimacy to SecondLife. Interestingly, no legitimate, real world corporation has earned net profit from SecondLife activities."
My question from a few posts back is still standing: does anyone know what amount of Linden currency is in circulation?
- In the meantime, Sweden is about to open its embassy in Second Life. Ars Technica writes, "The embassy will be built and run by the Swedish Institute, an entity run by the Swedish Foreign Ministry and who is in charge of promoting tourism to the country. The Second Life embassy will be there to provide information about Swedish culture and history, as well as suggestions for places to visit in the (real-life) country, according to the Swedish Institute's director, Olle Wästberg." No word on whether the new embassy will have the authority to grant asylum.
- One of the best promos run in Second Life was the one for the Smokin' Aces movie where players were invited to play Assassin in-world. Why? Because it was interactive and engaged lots of people unlike the empty branded edifices. Details at 3pointD.com. I can't believe I missed it last week, and I hope it was really as cool as it sounds.
Also see the previous set of Second Life Shorts.
AdAge on Contextual Billboards
"It could take months, if not years, for patents to be approved and technology to be fine-tuned, but no matter how soon Silicon Valley giants-and possibly outdoor's legacy players-reshape the retail experience, it's safe to say the out-of-home industry will have a shelf life much longer than its static beginnings could have indicated."
-- AdAge
Related stories:
In Wired back in 2003:
Booth's team [at Mitsubishi] is developing a system that projects
product information onto a wall. As a customer approaches the wall,
the system senses that someone is getting closer and alters the
message it projects, incorporating data about the person gleaned
through facial-recognition technology. The closer the customer
approaches, the more specific the information gets. Eventually, the
message would focus on the actual product the person is handling.
A press release back from 2001:
"Visitors to the exhibit will be able to experience the process of
using face recognition technology to enroll into a loyalty database at
remote wireless enrollment stations."
-- AdAge
Related stories:
- Billboards With Face Recognition from Microsoft
- Google Eyes Contextual Billboards
- Concept: Wi-Fi Billboards
- Near Future: Personally Targeted Advertising
- MINI Tests Personalized Billboards
- Moving mannequins with face recognition
- Mirrors in fitting rooms equipped with RFID readers:
- Another such mirror
- A few advertising predictions
In Wired back in 2003:
Booth's team [at Mitsubishi] is developing a system that projects
product information onto a wall. As a customer approaches the wall,
the system senses that someone is getting closer and alters the
message it projects, incorporating data about the person gleaned
through facial-recognition technology. The closer the customer
approaches, the more specific the information gets. Eventually, the
message would focus on the actual product the person is handling.
A press release back from 2001:
"Visitors to the exhibit will be able to experience the process of
using face recognition technology to enroll into a loyalty database at
remote wireless enrollment stations."
Reverse Product Placement in Games
BrandWeek has a follow-up on David Edery's HRB piece on reverse product placement in games (see David's earlier post on the topic, my old post on the fictional brand Sprunk in Grand Theft Auto, and a summary of the HBR article in Gamasutra). What's reverse product placement (I call it "proxy branding") ? BrandWeek writes: "While traditional product placement refers to integrating a real brand into a fictional environment, an idea that's gaining traction is to create a fictional brand in a fictional environment and then release it into the real world."
"One possible twist is to plant a real brand that exists outside the U.S. and then gauge the reaction. Mitsubishi, for instance, placed its Lancer Evolution in Sony PlayStation's Gran Turismo videogame years before the model was available in the U.S. in 2003. A Mitsu rep said placement in the game "helped heighten awareness here for a model that was not yet sold in the United States" and played a role in the carmaker's decision to release it here."
"One possible twist is to plant a real brand that exists outside the U.S. and then gauge the reaction. Mitsubishi, for instance, placed its Lancer Evolution in Sony PlayStation's Gran Turismo videogame years before the model was available in the U.S. in 2003. A Mitsu rep said placement in the game "helped heighten awareness here for a model that was not yet sold in the United States" and played a role in the carmaker's decision to release it here."
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