Since the Internet made its appearance in the early 1990s, traditional media has pondered its impact and often reacted too slowly to emerging trends in Internet use. In amongst this it has failed to recognise behavioural changes that occurred in the general media-consuming public, even though these changes were foreshadowed by Generation Y.
Radio is a good example - it has struggled to maintain its relevance with a listening audience since the visual medium of television entered its marketplace, initially as radio with pictures, before developing its own unique communication style.
Between them, radio and television educated an audience to pay attention in very short time spans. The Internet allowed this shorter attention span to follow diverse paths which are now seen in the Internet phenomenon of browsing.
Media consumers who use the World Wide Web move from topic to topic following some inner desire with no regard to the sequence of consumption envisaged by the media's producer. With the speed of a mouse click, users change topics in a diverse range of content. The more competent and comfortable the Internet user, the more rapidly they will allow their attention (or even drive their attention) to flicker from topic to topic in an endless sea of relatively meaningless web pages, seeking to be entertained, amused, enthralled, and delighted.
Watch a teenager using YouTube in lieu of television, and you will see a media consumer enthralled by possibilities as they sample the first few seconds of thousands of diverse video stories.
It seems that the potential of the video clip is more entertaining and more fascinating than the content of the video clip. The same shortening of attention spans has been apparent in traditional radio for many years. One hour-long radio quiz shows have given way to an hour's worth of programming containing eight or 10 segments, which in turn have given way in turn to talkback radio containing many segments.
The radio consumer has no choice as to the sequence of content, but rather appears to selectively pay attention to those segments which appeal; radio producers, having no option but a single broadcast stream provide a shotgun scattering of content in pursuit of the elusive attention of their listeners.
Often, older media consumers long for a more connected narrative, for the more complete story. Programs like Andrew Denton's "Enough Rope" or Richard Fidler's "Conversation Hour" probably derived some of their success from meeting this need for a longer, more complete, extended-focus narrative. The first-person storytelling style of "Australian Story" without the interpretive voice of an interviewer has also enjoyed spectacular and extended success.
Radio programmes strive for direct engagement and interaction with their consumers. Traditionally the talkback radio and the phone-in competition segments have been the bread-and-butter of audience engagement and interaction. Recent television shows like "Australian Idol" and "Big Brother" extended the idea of audience engagement and interaction into television, empowering the audience through mobile phones to become judges and producers (and provide funding for the program) in ways that were unimaginable a decade ago.
Generation Y is also spectacular for its apparent lack of trust in the media. Cynical as they are, 20 year olds may still be shocked to learn of cash-for-comment or paid product placement when their favourite media stars endorsed the product. Perhaps they shouldn't be. After all, this is a generation that grew up on the infomercial. While previous generations may have seen their media stars as unimpeachable sources of consumer advice, the current teenage generation believes that anything that appears in the media is contrived or heavily influenced by commercial interests and that the anonymous endorsement of a thousand disinterested, unknown individuals is more credible than an endorsement by any authority figure or star.
The success of eBay and the millions of dollars paid by this generation to anonymous vendors every hour of everyday is a testament to the marketing power of the unknown anonymous disinterested endorsement. It is based on no more consumer confidence than good vendor feedback. ‘Feedback' of course is the endorsement of a thousand unknown disinterested anonymous people. While this has implications that are broad and far reaching in commercial media, it also has implications in public broadcasting.
The amount of time that consumers spend receiving electronic input or screen time (if you'd like) is increasing. But the percentage of this time being spent on traditional media is decreasing. Radio might now be more accurately described as television without pictures, and ought to be included in this changing choice of media channel.
Teenagers watching music shows on television are accustomed to listening to the same show simulcast on radio. Literally, television without pictures.
Social recommendation
In designing radio broadcast processes to attract and meet the needs of an emerging audience over the coming decade, the challenge for commercial broadcasters will be how to prevent consumers from avoiding commercial messages. The challenge for the public broadcaster will be how to engage the audience and allow them to pursue their own personalised attention path, extracting the same sort of media consuming experience they seem to crave on sites like MySpace and YouTube in a medium which has only a single broadcast stream.
Public broadcasters in Australia, have developed online web sites and broadcast streams over the Internet and pod-cast programs. It appears that their attempts at convergence have often been little more than flirtations with technology. They have transported the radio broadcast experience to the Internet, literally allowing users to listen to the radio without geographical constraint. Pod-casts are the same process without time constraint.
It is time now that this convergence be extended well beyond the existing, clearly separated channels of television, radio, newsprint. The emerging media consumer expects their convergence experience to be greater than the sum of its parts. Much as television had to progress beyond radio with pictures and instead become a different consumer experience that involves video journalism as a unique storytelling process, so radio must progress to include those features of the World Wide Web to provide a self-selecting, personalized experience so sought-after by YouTube consumers. The ability of the consumer to select the depth of information they require and to explore the related and opposing views needs to be incorporated into the radio experience and of course the consumer will demand that their experience not be bound by geography or time.
The radio studio of the future must be a more sophisticated research and editorial facility rather than just a DJ with the guest and a microphone. Radio station web pages must become more than glorified résumés of presenters. The radio station of the future will be inextricably linked to its Internet presence. It is indeed strange that most consumers can read the text of television programs, even live broadcasts such as Parliament on the foot of the screen but cannot read the text of a radio interview in similar timely fashion.
Were the transcripts of Parliament to find their way to a web site like Wikipedia (which by the way is probably the most popular encyclopedia in the world despite having the least editorial authority), then the Parliamentary transcript would automatically contain embedded hyperlinks to other web pages within the encyclopedia that expanded and defined words and phrases found within the transcript. The idea of allowing a computer to select which part of a transcript is important and to link those parts to explanatory pages elsewhere may be anathema to many journalists, but remember that Google News is selected and edited entirely by computer and is probably the most read news on the planet.
Many commercial radio stations rely on playing music tracks as their primary content to carry commercials, which in turn generate the income. The music is interspersed with information and news usually voiced either by the presenter or a centralised news room. Networking of radio stations has facilitated the decline of localised information. While this made economic sense in a pre-Internet world, networking of music content on a global basis may spell the end of commercial radio stations, particularly where their audiences have been desensitised to the need for localised content.
Rhapsody is a U.S.-based music service, which for $10 a month allows subscribers to select from a database of hundreds of thousands of current music tracks and play them through their PCs on demand. This service now provides Sonos, a home-based stereo system which relies on Rhapsody and other music services to provide broadcast quality content throughout the household. A portable music player is also available. One of the features of this sort of service is their ability to generate playlists based on what the individual listener's social network prefers. We have seen this social recommendation engine technology used effectively in Amazon and on the TiVo for books and television respectively. At the risk of offending music programmers everywhere, I suspect that generation Y will be more in tune with a playlist created by a social recommendation engine, rather than a playlist generated by a music programmer.
Web pages with sounds
Just as television was once described as radio with pictures, future historians will shortly be describing radio stations as being web pages with sound. These threats to radio beg the question of what will happen to the advertising investment that currently finds its way into the coffers of radio stations, record companies and artists. I think only an optimist with a long history of employment in commercial radio would believe that advertisers will be loyal to the medium. Realists are more likely to see that advertisers will follow the consumer and that their advertising spend is likely to migrate from traditional radio to web pages with sound.
Digitisation will facilitate both globalisation and localisation. It is possible to tailor commercial online music content to suit the exact demographics of each listener on an individual basis. This is already done by many web sites for other sorts of content including Google News, MySpace, Amazon.com, and many others.
For both public broadcasters and commercial radio, the foundational question is how to leverage their assets to retain an audience. I suspect that they may either become victims of the web page with sound or creators. The valuable assets of a radio station are many, including local knowledge, audience loyalty, deep experience with the audience, presentation staff, news gathering and editorial capability. The less valuable assets include broadcasting capability, including frequency allocation, music libraries and playlists generated by music programmers.
Since the advent of the printing press led to the birth of mass media and from that, mass marketing, the environment has been dynamic and technology has always been a major driver of new media experience. The Internet is just another technology that will give birth to a new media experience every bit as revolutionary as each of its predecessors.
January 23, 2007
Further information or clarification is available from the author.
Wayne Bucklar
P.O. Box 857
Fortitude Valley 4006