Ruptures in the Mediascape: What Next?

Photography by Reuben Wu

Over four years ago, I published a post called Ruptures in the Mediascape which correctly anticipated 1) the rising importance of commerce media like Walmart.Com and Amazon, 2) The massive influence and rising impact of podcasts, 3) TikTok’s exponential growth, 4) the renaissance in Out of Home Media 5) the likelihood that Meta would find a way around Apple’s privacy initiatives and 6) how creator and influencer media would eclipse traditional media.

The one thing I got wrong was the belief that the major streaming platforms would remain ad-free by failing to anticipate how expensive they would get without ads due to multiple price increases and the crack down on sharing passwords. Today the ad supported tiers are the same price as the ad free tiers were four years ago!

So What Next?

I believe we are now going to see ruptures that are far more significant and deeper happening between now and the end of next year, which will require every business not just those in the media and marketing space to re-imagine many aspects of their products, services and go to market strategies.

Photography by Reuben Wu

Here are 6 shifts in the mediascape already underway and their implications:

1. The Rise of Poetry versus Plumbing: For the past two decades digital media has primarily been built on advances in infrastructure or plumbing to find the right person at the right person at the right time. The point of contact has been enhanced but the content which is the interaction, creative or messaging has not been as customized or personalized due to the high cost of doing so.

Today, with a plethora of new tools like Veo 3, Sora, Runway ML, Suno, Mid-Journey and others we will see a renaissance of customized creativity. The Poetry that builds brands and resonates with hearts and minds will now match the Plumbing that enhances relevance by finding the right eyes and ears at the most appropriate time.

For many years media was a second class citizen and then came to dominate agencies and service providers. Media will continue to remain critical but creativity and story-telling will move from the caboose to the front of the train too.

2. Conversation the third Interface: Today, two interfaces dominate media particularly digital media: Search and Streams. These will be joined by a third which is Conversations. Whether it be the back and forth with Chat, next generation messaging or Agents interrogating and driving outcomes we will see conversations become a key interface which will also further the rise of voice as an input device besides typing and finger swiping.

Some of these conversations will be about relationships ( today the most popular AI apps are where people look to AI for relationships or growth) and the next CRM will use variations of these conversation interfaces while many conversations will be about getting answers.

One of the reasons Search Engine Marketing works is because Search does not.

If we got the answer we were looking for would we hunt and peck across a sea of links? Companies and interfaces are going to have to be answer optimized.

My friend Pete Blackshaw, the founder and CEO of Brandrank.Ai posits that SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) will be replaced with AEO ( Answer Engine Optimization)

3. Anticipation the step beyond Personalization: Combine the ability to customize creativity and messaging with the ability to surface answers in real time and the persona based research enabled by AI and the best marketing will not just personalize but anticipate what one needs when one needs it.

In addition to the first moment of truth and then the zero moment of truth movements in marketing we are now going to hear about the minus one moment of truth where the best anticipator will win over the best personalizer.

Photography by Reuben Wu

4. The rise of the Experience Stack: The new marketing stack will combine real, digital, immersive, virtual and mixed experiences to anticipate needs and create impactful storytelling, commerce and services. The real will be the physical world including events, concerts, out of home and physical stores, the immersive will incorporate gaming and interactions such as the Sphere in Las Vegas, the digital will incorporate the next generation of today’s open and closed web and apps, while the virtual will include VR and spatial computing such as Oculus and Vision Pro and mixed experiences will be built around AR glasses from Meta, and AI/XR glasses and Project Astra from Google.

The trick will be to combine these experiences in ways that anticipate, allow for conversations and answers while delivering interactions that win hearts and minds.

5. Platforms become Outcome Engines: In a recent conversation with Ben Thompson which is worth a read Mark Zuckerberg spells out one of his visions for Meta as follows:

A client comes to Meta and says “I want customers for my product,” and Meta does everything else. It generates photos and videos of those products using AI, writes copy about those products with AI, assembles that into an infinite number of ads with AI, targets those ads to all the people on its platforms with AI, measures which ads perform best and iterates on them with AI, and then has those customers buy the actual products on its platforms using its systems.

Mark said the quiet part loud but that is the model with which the supposed decline in search engine marketing revenue for Google is offset. Google combines You-Tube, AI mode of search, Google Lens, Gemini, Project Astra, Project Mariner, Flow and more to drive outcomes not just search results or contextual advertising. Play around at Google Labs and you can imagine these great tools leveraged by the marketing and engineering talent they have collected over the years to drive outcomes: https://labs.google/

It will not just be Google and Meta but also Amazon and Walmart and many others that will morph from platforms to outcome engines.

6. Brands will continue to matter but will be built and sustained in new ways through a fusion of carbon based humanity driven emotional levers combined with next generation mathematics and technology: People choose with their hearts and use numbers to justify what they just did.

Without a person’s need to belong, stand out, aspire, be inspired and story tell there would be no brands. If all that was needed was a superior product at a fair price there would really be no need for brand marketing. A brand is far more than the utility of the product but also involves desire, provenance, design, storytelling and much more.

A brand has been a trust mark that stands for a promise. A brand is about integrity where what the brand delivers, what a brand says and what a brand believes are aligned. A brand is about a story of the product, the buyer, the culture around it and more.

In an AI age Trust, Integrity, Story-telling, Cultural resonance will matter but will be architected, honed and sculpted using conversations, anticipation, experience stacks, outcome engines and most importantly poetry and not just plumbing.

And it will not just be the tech but the talent, the taste, the voice, the touch and the not yet imagined that will create and sustain the next generation of great brands.

But every company needs to interrogate themselves on the products and services they can create or sustain which complements or supplements outcome engines. What value can we add in addition to those of outcome engines?

We should ask if we have the right talent, urgency, partners and organizational structure to navigate experience stacks and remain relevant in a world where every product will also be a service due to conversation and agent technologies.

The future while uncertain is coming fast and definitely will not fit in the containers most incumbent companies have designed for today…

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