The Coming Up Next Economy
For decades, Coming Up Next as both a turn of phrase and a business model has affected the way we create and consume television. Initially, television programming was a story in two acts with a single sponsor. So creating spaces for more sponsors in those breaks between acts made a lot of sense. Networks, and media planning created immense wealth by selling this time. But the economy of spot television has always been dependent on captive viewership and scarcity of inventory.
As Alan Wolk describes so well, the early 1990′s killed the value of commercials: we’re only seeing the final throes of it’s ugly, drawn-out death now. With the rapid expansion of cable channels (which we’ll see again here soon in the expansion of DTV) living on this commercial model has proved fatal. Scarcity has been gone for just over a decade now, significantly depressing the market of both revenue and creativity.
So many interruptions have been created to try and recapture revenue, there isn’t enough money to create quality programming to fill all the space in between the ads. Much of television has been reduced to previewing and recapping as a workaround to the channel-flipping systems society has created on its own to find what solace exists in the small bits of original worthwhile programming left.
Coming Up Next thinking has dominated the culture of TV production for so long, it has blurred into the perception that we don’t like TV. But we really do. Our rooms are still organized around them. We’ll buy special clothes for optimized TV-viewing comfort. We’re willing to invest as much as thousands of dollars every year in technology and premium channels that take the commercials out and present the stories as fluidly as possible. We’re just coming to the end of our rope on the interruptions.
Related posts:
