PHD Perspectives: The 4-D Media Experience - Ed Castillo - MediaBizBloggers

Inspired by the sight of the two laptops on my desk, I recently had what you might call a "4-D" media experience. On one screen, the C-SPAN feed of the Sotomayor hearings. On the other, TweetDeck, following #sotomayor.

To my right there was traditional, rich-video content (delivering the three 'dimensions' we are accustomed to: Sight, sound and duration). To my left was public sentiment, delivered in real-time.

While I could use this column to discuss the scary but interesting dynamics of anonymously authored mico-blog entries (see Godwin's Law; it was eye-opening to see cascading, divergent opinions fly with each statement she made), I'm more interested in the blurring of traditional and user-generated content that is accounting for more and more of my content experiences (and yours as well, I assume).

My Sotomayor hearings experience is an unusual, explicit example of a 4-D media experience, but they happen all the time, in less obvious ways: Watching a two-minute YouTube clip, but spending twenty minutes reading through the adjacent "flame-war" of comments, jumping blog-to-blog as you take in various assessments of a given issue, appreciating three versions of a song back-to-back, viewing different mash-up videos supporting each version, etc. At every turn we are invited to interact with content; we can comment on it, forward it with comments, rate it, re-edit it, add annotation to it, classify it with tags, propagate it in social networks, curate it on our own Tumblr pages, etc.

I call this content "4-D" because it carries with it metadata that impact my experience (e.g., He thought that was "the smartest talk he'd ever heard!?"). One's experience of a particular video, song, posting, etc. actually is limited, expanded, sharpened, contextualized, informed…mediatedby the user-generated data attached to it. And brands that take advantage of these metadata for research, and/or to push a given agenda will have discovered a powerful tool.

Need to strengthen a particular brand association (say, 'creative people use Macs')? Publicizing a user-group discussion of film editors or music producers discussing their use of Final Cut Pro and/or Pro Tools on their G5s is probably more meaningful (and certainly less expensive) than a new, targeted TV spot.

These 4-D content experiences sit at the intersection of two powerful forces: our desire to editorialize conspicuously on issues, and the media 2.0 technologies that facilitate and propagate this editorializing. This socio-technical phenomenon is one of the driving forces behind several "blurs" (which PHD discusses at length in the book 'Media Agency 2014': PHD on the Future of the Media Agency):

· TV and Online: Your next TV will likely incorporate a hard-drive, an Intel chip and an Ethernet cable (so you can add your metadata to video content and pass them on).

· Mobile phones and the PC: As data throughput increases and mobile marketing goes from being a niche channel to being a high-reach and highly-segmented channel, more user-generated, metadata-rich content will be available on our phones.

· Entertainment and Advertising: The metadata of 4-D content quickly turns entertainment into advertising; what was merely "funny" before can become "that funny thing associated with so-and-so's brand" with the addition of 4-D metadata.

· Publisher and Consumer: This is self-evident; the very definition of 4-D metadata.

As someone who tends to watch TV with a laptop computer at the ready (it's nice to be able to look-up unfamiliar words or references), I've had many 4-D content experiences without being conscious of them. The Sotomayor experience was different; it made me realize that what some call "multi-tasking" can actually be a qualitatively unique, rich-content experience. When entertainment (or information) is mediated by opinion, the original content changes in powerful ways; ways critical to the central task of marketing, which is to introduce, strengthen or disrupt associations.

Ed Castillo, SVP, Director of Account Planning at PHD Media, a Division of Omnicom. You can follow Ed @xandnotx

Read all Ed’s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at PHD Perspectives - MediaBizBloggers.