PBS Brand Masters Keynote
David Liroff
VP/CTO
WGBH/Boston
Orlando 5/20/06
There‘s so much enthusiasm for all of the new media these days that
it‘s easy to lose sight of the fact that our principal delivery system –
the one which continues to reach the vast majority of our viewers and
listeners – is broadcasting.
We don‘t want to leave our traditional audiences behind as we explore
new media opportunities, so we need to balance our investments of
money, time and energy between serving our audiences where we
know most of them are now, and serving our audiences where we
think many of them will be heading in greater numbers eventually.
That said, at the moment – and likely for some time to come - there‘s
a remarkable ―sweet spot‖ at the intersection of broadcasting and the
Web. Take a look at these stats which quantify the joint power of
broadcasting and the Web – they‘re from surfing on Google last night:
Enter ―Evolution‖ in the Google search window
- result: five hundred thirty one MILLION hits
- #1 on the list – after a paid-for ―sponsored link‖ – is the website
for ―Evolution‖, the WGBH-produced series first broadcast in
September, 2001.
Enter ―Jesus‖ in the Google search window
- result: one hundred ninety four million hits
- #7 on the list is the website for ―Frontline: From Jesus to Christ
– The First Christians‖, the WGBH-produced series which first
aired in April, 1998
Enter ―Africans‖ –
Result: twenty-three million nine hundred thousand hits
# 1 on the list is the website for ―Africans in America,‖ the
WGBH-produced series which first aired in October ‘98.
Enter ―Open Source‖ –
Result: one BILLION, six hundred forty MILLION hits
#23 on the list is ―Open Source with Christopher Lydon‖,
presented by WGBH Radio, distributed by PRI, a joint production of
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Open Source Media and Umass/Lowell – which airs four times/week,
first aired in May ‘05.
Enter ―Nature‖ –
Result: one Billion, 260 Million hits
#4 on the list is the website for the WNET-produced ―Nature‖
series, first aired in October, ‘82.
Any for-profit company would give its eye teeth for this order of
magnitude of market visibility and brand recognition. We haven‘t
begun to scratch the surface in fully exploiting the value of this ―sweet
spot‖.
Needless to say, this phenomenon is also a validation of ―The Long
Tail‖ phenomenon, in which content – once created – can live on
indefinitely in digital form, continuing to deliver public service value
years after its initial broadcast.
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A week ago, several of us in this room were at the Harvard Law School
in Cambridge, along with several hundred others, at a conference at
the Berkman Center for Internet and Society provocatively called
―Beyond Broadcast‖.
Pat Aufderheide is the Executive Director of the Center for Social Media
at American University. Here‘s how she covered the opening session
for the conference blog.
(The blog is still up, by the way, and growing richer by the day with
comments from participants and audio and video from the sessions.
Just search on ―Berkman Beyond Broadcast‖)
Pat wrote: ―What a crowd! Pubcasters, video bloggers, radio folks,
tech heads, scholars, VCs, community media activists….and more, and
everybody excited to be here. Amazing!
Jake Shapiro (executive director of the Public Radio Exchange) kicks it
off by posing the question—what are the public possibilities of
emerging ―social media‖? Participation, collaboration, grassroots
expression and distribution—what can they mean for civil society, for
our public life, for an open and democratic future?
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Is participatory media a solution to fragmentation and lack of public
conversation - or an ―embarrassment of niches‖? Could the spirit of
participation change what public broadcasters—committed to localism,
civic engagement, quality presentation of knowledge—are able to do?
Or could we be missing opportunities? Is there a danger that this new
burgeoning expression could be engulfed by corporate management? .
..
The threats to the Internet and its openness are real. . . . .(but)
between public and participatory media, the promise of a democratic
and open Web could be fulfilled. We need a public square in our public
life and culture.
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The conference keynoter was Professor James Boyle of Duke
University Law School, who speaks and writes on policy and legal
issues concerning media.
His three basic propositions were:
- First, we have a very poor track record at predicting the future of any
new technological innovation. (By way of illustration, he said that the
FCC thought cellphones would be a niche market.)
- Second, Boyle suggests that we look at patterns of errors in
prediction, over time.
One error that he flags for special attention is our inability to see
clearly the potential of user-created content, of commons-based
production, the potential of forms of media that are not tightly
controlled by media organizations. ―At every level of network
policy‖, he says, ―we are blind to the opportunities of the less
controlled, open-access side of things . . . we have a systematic bias
against openness.‖
(Even one year ago, who would have thought that blogging and
podcasting would have such an enormous impact on the media
marketplace. At last year‘s Integrated Media Association conference,
I don‘t think I heard the word ―podcasting‖ even once. This year in
Seattle, I don‘t think there was a single session without a reference to
podcasting. And who knows what next year‘s ―new phenomenon‖ will
be?
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- And third, Prof. Boyle observes that the rules intended to regulate
and control new and emerging media are written by those in control of
the old media.
He argues that in their zeal to ―lock everything up‖, the established
companies make decisions which may not even be in their own self-
interest in the long term, perhaps in part because the established
players are anxious about losing their positions in the marketplace to
newcomers, even if the changes make sense from a public interest
point of view.
It‘s kind of like asking the whale oil companies which produced whale
oil for lamps whether they thought that introducing electric light to the
public was a good idea.
As a more recent example he cites the first concerted legal response of
the American film industry to the emergence of home video recorders.
When Sony introduced the home VCR to US consumers in the mid-
70‘s, it promoted the machine‘s ability to ―time shift‖ programming off
the air.
As you may know, Universal Studios and Walt Disney filed suit,
charging that the VCR‘s ability to copy programming off the air
infringed on their copyrights.
The case eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court, which
upheld the right of consumers to tape programs off the air for
entertainment, and to time shift, saying that the practice was covered
under ―fair use‖. The Court also opened up the rights of consumers
to purchase or rent videos for home use.
The movie companies thought they had lost when the Supreme Court
ruled in favor of the consumers,
But in fact, with the advantage of hindsight, the studios had won – big
time. As a result of the loosening up the studios‘ control of home
video, the video rental business and sales businesses were created.
And as it‘s turned out, this is what‘s kept the movie business alive.
And now it‘s happening again with television programs generating
millions of dollars in sales in the home video market.
It makes you wonder what positions we‘re clinging to today which may
turn out to be counter-productive in the long term.
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We‘re in the very first nano-seconds of the emergence of a new media
environment.
Those who say that they know how all this will turn simply don‘t know
what they‘re talking about.
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I‘ve been struck in our conversations of the last few days by the extent
to which our conceptual approaches to issues involving public media
continue to be shaped by our understanding of the world as we have
known it.
In this context, we use terms like commercial/non-commercial, for-
profit/not-for-profit, ―community‖ and ―public‖ and ―the public interest‖
because - based on our own experiences, and the experiences of
those who have come before us - we think we know what we mean –
more or less - when we use those words.
But what do we mean by ―public media‖ in this emerging
environment??
In The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan quipped
that ―When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to
attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past.
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march
backwards into the future. . . .‖
It is difficult for any of us to fully appreciate the extent to which our
experiences growing up shape the way in which we see the world
today. My mother was born in New York City in 1910, remembered
cooking with coal, and gas lights in the house, went on to be one of
the first women to earn a law degree at Brooklyn Law School.
Flash forward: Years later, I was living in Chicago and she was still
living in New York. She came to visit me. But instead of flying, she
took the train. It arrived - on schedule - in Chicago - seventeen hours
after leaving New York. When I met her at the station, I said "You
know, Mom, you could have flown - it would have taken you less than
three hours to get here." To which she responded, "Yes, but it should
take seventeen hours to get from New York to Chicago."
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Compare that with my daughter Brooke whose best friend in the fifth
grade was the daughter of a Swedish doctor who was in the US on a
medical school research fellowship. When the school year ended, the
family went back to Sweden. For the next year, Brooke and her
friend Cecilia stayed in touch by phone (this was in the mid-80s, pre-
Internet.) And then Cecilia invited Brooke to come visit her in
Sweden.
An exciting adventure for a sixth grader, or so I thought. We made
the arrangements for her trip. I asked her if she'd be interested in
seeing where Sweden was on a map. "Nope", she said. "Oh, C'mon".
"No - I pick up the phone, dial the number and Cecilia's on the other
end. You tell me that when I get on the plane, I stay on it for eight
hours and when it gets to Stockholm, I get off and Cecilia and her
family will pick me up. Why do I have to know where it is?"
My mother and my daughter. Two travelers with very different
concepts of distance and time.
I‘m grateful to Larry Grossman for introducing me to a book called
―Today Then‖ - It‘s a collection of essays written on the occasion of the
1893 World‘s Fair in Chicago by 74 prominent Americans, each of
them predicting what the United States would be like over the next
100 years.
Here‘s one of my favorites: David Swing - a Chicago preacher -
anticipated modern air travel. Here‘s what he wrote in 1893: ―It is
almost certain that the United States will continue to advance in (the
next) 100 years . . . Considerable traveling will be done by the air
route. The fact that air is an ocean which will float a man settles the
question of aerial navigation. Man has simply to invent the kind of
boat. It must be very large and strong.. . . . This boat may be guided
from city to city by a wire strung about 100 feet above ground, so as
to let the balloon pass over trees and houses. Thus, a wire one
quarter of an inch in diameter will hold and guide many balloons full of
people.‖
If it‘s not already apparent, I‘m going on about this because right now
we need to acknowledge that our understanding of our world and of
the fundamental structure and organization of our societies,
governments, economies and nation-states, is based on what had
been an immutable premise – that geographic distance was an
absolute barrier to instantaneous interpersonal communication.
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Think about the basis for the whole premise of representative
democracy. Or even the way in which broadcast networks and their
affiliiates (or member stations) relate to each other. Our definitions
of wholesale markets – the networks – and retail markets – the
member stations – are based on geographic definitions - defined by
broadcast coverage areas – which are no longer real boundaries or
barriers to entry. And we spend more and more of our time fighting
about it among ourselves.
Marshall McLuhan had this pretty well nailed 35 years ago. (I must
confess that when I was teaching McLuhan to undergraduates at Ohio
University in the early 70's, I barely understood what he was talking
about. Now it seems so clear.)
In "The Medium is the Massage", he wrote: "Electric circuitry has
overthrown the regime of "time" and "space" and pours upon us
instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has
reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change,
ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old
civic, state and national groupings have become unworkable. Nothing
can be further from the spirit of the new technology than "a place for
everything and everything in its place". You can't go home again."
And later: "Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. "Time" has
ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in a global village . . . a
simultaneous happening. We have begun again to structure the
primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of
literacy divorced us.
"We have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction.
We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or
action, since the results are experienced without delay. Because of
electric speed, we can no longer wait and see. George Washington
once remarked, "We haven't heard from Benjamin Franklin in Paris this
year. We should write him a letter."
How could McLuhan have been so foresighted? He was a student of a
Jesuit priest and paleontologist named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
From the 1920‘s to the 1950‘s, de Chardin wrote about evolution, and
theology, and the global eco-system.
McLuhan quotes de Chardin directly in ―The Gutenberg Galaxy‖ –
―. . . Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car
and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly
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restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more.
Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by
the discovery of electromagnetic waves, each individual finds himself
henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land
and sea, in every corner of the earth‖.
McLuhan went on to popularize de Chardin‘s idea as ―the ―global
village. But it goes further than that: De Chardin introduced the
idea of a ―global consciousness‖, a membrane of information
enveloping the globe which he called ―the noosphere, after the Greek
word ―noo‖ for ―mind‖. In a Wired article about de Chardin, John
Perry Barlow is quoted as observing: ―With cyberspace, we are, in
effect, hard-wiring the collective consciousness.‖
On the RadioOpenSource web site, click on ―Chris (Lydon) explains,‖
and you‘ll read:
….One of the unspoken reasons we are drawn to the Internet is that it
realizes so many of our primal old definitions of God. It’s invisible. It’s
everywhere. It knows everything. ….The Internet — so closely
resembling the “noosphere” that Teilhard de Chardin foresaw 50 years
ago — marks a new stage of human evolution. We do not begin to see
the dimensions of the new reality.
I will readily admit that all of this seems pretty far out – and off the
point – until we attempt to accomodate the explosive growth of ―social
networking‖ and ―the blogosphere‖ within a comprehensive
understanding of ―public media‖. Surely, under the heading of
―global conciousness‖ we would include instant messaging and RSS
feeds, and gather.com and myspace.com and friendster,
backfence.com and flickr, wikipedias, blogging and podcasting, to
name a very few of today‘s examples, as well as ubiquitous always-on
cell phones and gaming on a real-time, global scale.
And then, of course, there‘s the question of what ―business models‖
will power these new media. At the Berkman conference last week,
Professor Boyle quoted a British record company executive as saying
that media companies have to embrace what he calls ―Tarzan
economics‖, which means letting go of the last income stream before
the next vine is within your grasp.
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That‘s very scarey for all of us, comparable to Intel Chairman Andy
Grove‘s notion of the Strategic Inflection Point in the life of an
organization, when fewer and fewer of the old rules apply, the new
rules haven‘t been written yet, but you know that if you continue to
play by the old rules failure is almost certain.
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None of us should be surprised by what will happen in the next several
years. And despite Bill Gates‘ observation that we have a tendency
to over-estimate the speed with which technology innovations will
unfold, in recent months we appear to have arrived at a tipping point
at which the rate of change in the media environment is accelerating
exponentially.
Here‘s a punch list of technological changes, most of which are familiar
to you:
GO TO POWERPOINT
We have to accept the fact that our traditional metric for
understanding how audiences use our programming – the Nielsen
ratings – tell us less and less about what we need to know about
audience attitudes and behaviors.
I was looking for a succinct way to capture this idea as I was reading a
recent book by Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School
titled ―The Innovator‘s Solution‖. It‘s a sequel to his book ―The
Innovator‘s Dilemma‖. I recommend both to you highly.
In the book, Christensen and his co-author Michael Raynor talk about
how companies typically segment their markets - identifying groups of
customers who are similar enough so that the same product or service
will appeal to all of those in that segment.
They segment markets by product type, by price point, or by the
demographics and and psychographics of their customers. They use
the attributes of their products and customers to delineate the
segments
The problem is that this approach often fails because it assumes that
there is a cause-effect correlation between the characteristics of a
customer and the liklihood that a customer will purchase a product.
For those of us in public broadcasting, it‘s like saying that a viewer is
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more likely to watch NOVA because the viewer is a 25-34 year old
male.
But what causes audiences to behave the way they do?
Christensen and Raynor assert that ―predictable marketing requires an
understanding of the circumstances in which customers buy or use
things. Specifically, customers - people and companies - have ―jobs‖
that arise regularly and need to get done.
―When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in
their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can
―hire‖ to get the job done. This is how customers experience life.‖ . .
.
―......Companies that target their products at the circumstances in
which customers find themselves, rather than at the customers
themselves, are those that can launch predictably successful products.
Put another way, the critical unit of analysis is the circumstance and
not the customer.‖
So here‘s a clue to how we can determine why people watch certain
television programs, or find certain web sites particularly appealing
and useful.
The example they cite is a fast-food chain which wants to increase its
sales and profits from milkshakes.
First, the chain segmented their customers using a variety of
psychobehavioral descriptors to develop a profile of the customer who
was most likely to buy a milkshake. They then assembled panels of
customers with these attributes, to determine whether making the
shakes thicker, or more chocolate-y, or cheaper or chunkier would
help them sell more milkshakes. The chain got clear feedback, but
none of it affected sales or profits.
Then a new group of researchers came in to understand what
customers were trying to get done for themselves when they ―hired‖ a
milkshake. They determined that - surprisingly - nearly half of all
milkshakes were bought in the early morning by people who
commuted to work in their cars. Most often, they were the only items
these customers purchased, and they were rarely consumed in the
restaurant.
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Further research revealed that most of the customers had ―hired‖ a
milkshake to achieve a similar set of outcomes. ―They faced a long,
boring commute and needed something to make the commute more
interesting‖. They were in a hurry, were wearing their business
clothes, and had only one free hand – they needed one to drive the
car.
If they ―hired‖ a bagel, it got crumbs all over their clothes and the car.
Any cream cheese or jam, or eggs or sausage got their fingers and the
steering wheel sticky or greasy. And if they tried to drag out the time
they took to eat a sandwich, it got cold. On the other hand, it took at
least twenty minutes to suck a milkshake through a skinny straw.
―It turned out that for the commuters, the milkshake did the job better
than almost any available alternative.‖
But there was another group of consumers who showed up later in the
day. They were the parents who were tired of saying ―no‖ to their
kids, and wanted to placate their children and feel like they were
loving parents.
But there was a problem - It took so long to drink the milkshakes that
parents ran out of patience after they had finished their own meals.
Many of the milkshakes were discarded, half-full, when the parents
decided that it was time to move on.
So a parent who is a commuter in the morning ―hires‖ a milkshake to
do a very different job than that same parent in the afternoon with
kids in tow.
―Knowing what job a product gets ―hired‖ to do (and knowing what
jobs are out there that aren‘t getting done very well)‖ may be one of
the keys to addressing audience needs.
So we need to develop a far better understanding of what our
audiences want and need us to do for them.
We need to back away from over-dependence on quantitative audience
data, which provides little insight into what our viewers think are
important to ….
Very promising first steps are being taken at CPB - Andy Russell and
Terry Bryant are working with Chris and Nick Schiavone on the NPS
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Research project which has produced ―a framework for program
decisionmaking.‖
You should be familiar with this matrix of eight audience segments
identified in the first round of research. It‘s available – along with
other NPS Research project materials – at Just
enter ―research‖ on the CPB home page.
The vertical is hours of viewing of Prime Time PTV –
The horizontal access is the extent to which viewers in each of these
eight segments agree with these statements: (on Powerpoint).
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BTW - That ―fifth grade daughter‖ I mentioned a few moments ago is
now grown up, out of college, married, and gave birth to her first child
in April.
What role should ‗public media‘ play during the lifetime of Lucy Jean
Fabian?
Talk about a research agenda . . . !
Thank you.
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