Storytelling, Consumer Attention and Making Money on Media
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Earlier this month, at Stanford University’s Future of Media Conference, I was asked to share some thoughts about this moment in media and what’s ahead. Since I’m at least as bad as anyone else at divining the future, I focused on something more obvious and fundamental: paying attention.
Media doesn’t work if no one is paying attention. Forget about paywalls and online ad rates, meters and bundles. The foundation underneath anything and everything we do in media is consumer attention. It’s attention, really, that we’re selling. If our stuff is worth enough of the consumer’s attention, she might buy a subscription, make a donation, or buy a ticket. Advertisers, of course, are buying access to that same attention.
Jeff Zucker, the former CEO of NBC, is famous for his pithy comments about the erosion of advertising rates as an audience moves online. “We are trading analog dollars for digital dimes,” he said (later upgrading dimes to quarters). In other words, CPMs for digital advertising are much lower than CPMs for TV or print.
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