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THE ENDOF US AND THEM The future of our industry doesn’t depend on technology, it depends on partnerships with the customer
changing, as multiple scandals break around data being misused or sold to the highest bidder. In fairness, a lot of this use may well have been within the terms and conditions agreed to (but probably not read) by the customer. Be that as it may, customers are waking up to the fact that their data is a vitally important commodity in an ecosystem they were previously only aware of dimly. A backlash has begun and Europe’s GDPR legislation is an initial attempt at responding to it. Customers are going to demand a return to privacy and greater control over their data. They will want to monitor exactly what their data is being used for, who is using it, when and why. There very well may come a time when customers decide not to give away any data at all. We have been in a paradigm where giving up personal data is part of the price of buying a product or a service. Those days may be on the wane. So how will media companies provide targeted content and services without full access to customer data? How can they construct a digital-first business model at all without having libraries of information about their audiences to hand? The – slightly painful – answer we’re likely to hear from customers: ‘You’re the content provider. You figure it out.’
e have a tendency to believe in the myth that we only need better technology, more technology, cheaper
technology to achieve our business goals and to make everyone in the supply chain supremely happy. But there was always a limiting factor to technology, one so obvious we’re inclined to overlook it. Yet it’s the most important thing in our business, bar none. The human factor. The person at the other end of the network. The audience of one. It’s the viewer. Media companies, if they hope to thrive, need to rethink how they are treating the viewer. If our industry can put the viewer first – seriously and mindfully – there’s almost no end to what it can achieve and the benefits – economic, social, creative - it can bring about. But if the viewer experience takes second place – or third, fourth or fifth – as it sometimes does, then we can look forward to fragmentation, unpleasant backlash and, worst of all, the cancelling of subscriptions. PRIVACY We have never been on such intimate terms with customers. The model of the 20th century in which a content provider broadcasts its message to millions of anonymous individuals is almost gone. Now, each media company is like Ed Harris’s god-like creator in The Truman Show , who was there when Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank took his first steps, went off for his first day at school and, finally, discovered that his every move was being recorded. And remember what happened at the end of that movie? Truman left. So far, most viewers have been unaware of just how much of their data media companies have access to. But that is
MEDIA COMPANIES, IF THEY HOPE TO SURVIVE, NEED TO RETHINK HOW THEY ARE TREATING THE VIEWER
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