Boring Our Feeds To Death

Why platforms are becoming the new entertainment battleground, and our feeds the new Cable TV.

“Nobody wants to know what you’re having for lunch.”

That was pretty much everyone’s reaction the first time they saw somebody’s status update for the first time on Facebook and Twitter.

We were told that these were more than status update services. More than ephemera. They were the new global public square. The great connector of civilizations that would enable us to unlock our true potential as a species. The voice given to the voiceless. The platforms gifted to us to use to self-organize and overthrow dictatorships. Not since the printing press have so many people been able to communicate with so many other people, and now they could do it all at once.

But instead of using this technology for powerful, game-changing dialogues, most of us just used it for selfies. Instead of using this connectivity for rich discussion, we used it for trolling. Instead of being able to see the world for what it actually was, we spread fake information about what we wanted it to be.

It’s not our fault, really. For all of our complexities, the more we embrace technology the more we fall into the same human traps. We just want to be loved, and our reptilian brains will do what it takes to make that more likely. As it turns out, it’s easier to show people what we think they want to see than the truth.

Advertising has tended to be a caricature of this notion. Brands have always been telling people what they wanted to hear so they could be who they wanted to be. While people continue to react to Pepsi’s latest controversy, what would people on 1971 Twitter have said about Coke’s (and Don Draper’s?) “Hilltop” commercialization of the anti-war movement?

The evolution of social media has convinced everyone that their name is a brand, their life is a show, and their friends are an audience. We learned by watching traditional media create celebrities from scratch, giving us the confidence that we can be ones too; and our feeds have been curated so as to be filled with people who react to things in the same ways we do, and content that makes us feel less lonely.

Unfortunately, it turns out that “transparency” and “authenticity” are not the great things businesses thought they would be because what they reveal is probably either too boring to be interesting to enough people, or something we would never want anybody to see.

There’s more money in creating something new. But there’s also more risk that enough people will come along for the ride. When everyone can create content, and everyone can get an audience, the barometer of quality needs to be re-calibrated. For years, broadcast and cable TV were dominated by reality shows, most of which continue to survive because of their low production costs. Now that the traditional TV model has been disrupted by the likes of HBO, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, we are in what many consider to be another “golden age” of the TV format (even if the way we consume content is more on our terms than ever). People’s expectations have been reset, and ultimately, raised.

So here’s what I think is going to happen as a result:

Social media platforms are primed to undergo the same kind of disruptive transformation. As they become more of a primary media consumption platform, we will get bored with “reality”. Our feeds will become more balanced with professionally produced content. These feeds will become the new cable TV, with content companies paying carriage fees for access. We’ll see some new players get the formats right, and they will create new competitive companies with new business models that threaten the Hollywood status quo. The status quo will attempt to move into platforms but not all will be successful. They will try to spend their way to success, but many will realize that the platform model isn’t the same as the safety net of the Cable TV model. Short-form and long-form content will co-exist as long as they are both good, and content will continue to move fluidly between our devices and our bigger, more connected screens.

This year’s “Digital Content Newfronts” will be the first time we see the major platforms getting behind significant original content pushes. Advertisers will get their first cracks at episodic content built for the newer ways that consumers have been consuming their media for the last several years.

Given the newness of the content on these platforms and the willingness of people to adopt early, we may find some early successes. But regardless of the scale of that success, the platforms will finally have content that can serve — and they can promote — as more ad-friendly counter-programming for your crazy uncle’s Facebook Live rant.

Either that, or our feeds will be filled with people asking for free chicken nuggets.

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