The Context Economy

With television mired in a snake eating its own tailspin of a failed ad sales model ruining the quality of its programming, where do we go next?

Our communications economy is now, and maybe forever, valued by the context within which valuable relationships take place.

Television has, and may continue to be perceived as a major influencer on social discourse. How? People watch television, measure it against their own notions of what is acceptable within our society, and make a mental first draft of where it sits with them. They take that draft back to their peer group, and finalize their opinions. This is the broadest way to look at how television affects social discourse.

In the past, this process of consensus-building and social discourse was only available to communicators after the fact. This was generally okay, because television still owned the largest context within which these initial impressions were formed and reformed with each subsequent use.

Now let’s go even farther back to a time when television was in competition with movies, radio, and newspapers for a place in the social discourse. Quality content was everything, and the sponsorship model thrived as a win-win: allowing brands to demonstrate products, and for good programming to continue production. Regional shows that focused on specific topics were popular. Even into the 1980s, many cities still had locally produced entertainment.

This is what we see now in social media. People with similar interests group around well-produced content, that is quite often regional in its origin. The problem is that the context is no longer television’s alone.

The Context Economy

With every passing day, technology is converging the shared-experience space of television and social discourse more fluidly. What used to be a cycle of watching a program, then talking about it over the watercooler has been replaced, albeit awkwardly, by smartphones and laptops providing instantaneous peer mediation. The brands that can facilitate social discourse most effectively are the ones that will win.

Right now, Twitter and Facebook seem most poised to be the brands mediating discourse. Integrating trending topic searches on Twitter, and the Live Feed on Facebook demonstrate that the consensus-building process is in-and-of-itself a type of ambient-awareness entertainment.

This isn’t nutty future-talk. There are television networks who understand that right now, having both the content and the discourse in the context of their brand is significant.

Get your logo as close to the top of the page as possible

Its an adage as old as the newspaper: hierarchy and importance are determined by size, from top to bottom.

CNN has done an excellent job twice with the Facebook Connect API to connect two Obama events with the people watching it. Why build the system for social context when you can borrow Facebook’s for a fraction of the cost. The CNN brand is sponsoring this experience that adds incredible, personal dimension to the experience. No doubt: when watching the CNN stream along with your Facebook friends, there’s a significant flow state achieved.

MTV has known for years that the more abstraction you allow your logo, and the more you show viewers partying as social proof, the more powerful the brand becomes. To that end, they’ve gone even a step further by creating their own Backchannel. The interesting dynamic here plays on the same reason why people wave at the jumbotron: the ultimate prize is seeing yourself on TV, and completing the perceptual loop of being a part of the programming setting the agenda for the discourse in your group.

In the Backchannel, users are assigned roles of “Taggers” and “Clickers.” While you’re watching a rerun of say, The Real World, you’re either tagging moments with Twitter-like bursts of text, or clicking on tags you like. Because half the audience is dedicated to voting, good tags get voted up quickly and visually. You can see a tag starting to shake and light up; within seconds, a very popular tag will literally “blow up” and appear on the TV screen.

CNN and MTV are both showing different flavors of how people want to be entertained in the near-term. And with first mover advantage, many brands and broadcasters are already a step behind. These are signals that cannot be ignored.

Waiting will only cost networks more

While the TV networks largely continue to try and make the spot buy model work with syndicating content to mobile and Internet, they’re even losing ground to brands who see how the future is shaping up.

Last year’s gem of an debut was InTheMotherhood, brought to us by Unilever and Sprint. As I mentioned before, it’s another win-win scenario where moms sharing stories in the context of the brand site are rewarded in a lottery-kind of way by having one story picked at a time for a professionally produced Webisode, complete with all-expense paid trip to see your story brought to life on the set.

Just recently, PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay spent a year to expensively discover via neuromarketing that creating and promoting your own programming is more valuable to the brand than what networks can currently deliver in the spot model.

Only In A Woman’s World is essentially Sex In The City cartoon style. Created with the Internet’s circular narrative in mind, at awomansworld.com, users can watch small episodes, create e-cards, build custom avatars (called “Be one of the girls”), play games, download all manner of images, and share any/all of it. Again, the complete loop of entertainment and interaction in the context of the brand.

What struck me most about the content of the show is the setting. Setting is very important and meaningful to the experience of the viewer, both contextually (where does this take place) and subtextually (what does this place mean). You’ll see that all the settings are intimated with the barest of props. Mostly, every setting is a white backdrop. Why? Because the setting of the series is in the brand. The regular appearance of Frito-lay products is also key to show how important context is. Using product placement, Frito-lay is getting an even better value in terms of exposure than the TV spot buy.

Here’s the killer: they’ve leveraged the television model to show ads that are just teasers for the Website. Buying 90 seconds at a time, they’re going ahead without television to create the same model that launched the Simpsons on the Tracy Ullman Show: sponsoring small clips and asking you to take the next step in learning about the brand through this entertainment that replicates your own social circle.

Will networks learn in time?

Just a feeling, but it seems like television has about 3 years to shift away from the spot-buy and adopt a model where sponsors are buying into the complete context of social discourse in the peer group and programming together, within the context of the network’s brand umbrella. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before brands begin funding this ecosystem themselves, and pave the way to a new golden age of communications.

Related posts:

1. The Coming Up Next Economy
2. How to Approach Social Media? Pretend it’s 1949
3. APIs: Start Slant-Drilling the Social Web
4. The Brand Cause: Focusing Social Media Strategy