Our experience today is seamlessly stitched by a series of screens. We need to prepare for a modern landscape where essentially all media appears on a digital screen, where all content is hosted in the cloud and streamed and where each device is merely a context to consume personalized content and likely with ads placed at an individual level.
A horizontal media landscape has profound effects on the worlds of media, advertising, and commerce, it creates vast new opportunities, new consumer behaviors and massive threats to businesses unable to adapt to a radically different communication landscape.
The Pre-Digital Age - Vertical Channels
Since the dawn of advertising and media, we've held the notion of media existing in channels. These were confined units, mainly separate business entities, and all named after the physical devices we used to consume media on them.
On TV sets we watched TV, made by TV production companies, curated by TV channel executives that we navigated by TV channels that came to us either from national networks or from cable TV companies.
On the radio, we listened to radio stations with radio programs from radio companies, with radio ads. Newspapers are a vertical channel of newspaper mastheads, editors, reporters, and ads. And finally, both magazines and outdoor media created their own distinct vertical silos.
The Early Digital Age - Incremental Vertical Channels
The muscle memory of building vertical channels continued when the internet was born.
We replaced both the form and function of existing pre-digital units by first creating the internet vertical with ISP's, online portals, web editors, digital journalists, digital photographers and of course digital advertising and digital media and advertising agencies.
With the popularization of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more, we added Social Media as a channel, we created infrastructure, roles, strategies, to deal with the precise new skills we needed to perfect media in an age of sharing.
Then came mobile and thus apps, mobile advertising, mobile ad networks, mobile journalists making mobile content from mobile strategies.
The Post-Digital Age - A Paradigm Shift
These channels have remained very compelling to those within them but ignore the reality of the modern world and of converged digital devices. At a time where I read magazines on smartphones, watch TV on Tablets, stream Vimeo on my TV, listen to the radio on my Echo, it makes little sense.
We're currently in love with terms like "mobile" and "social", which make little sense when all digital media is intrinsically shareable and social, and everything digital can be accessed from a mobile device.
To explain to a 5-year-old nonchalantly swiping between TV shows on YouTube that they are not technically watching TV, would involve all manner of explanations that are technically accurate, but of no relevance to the child.
