The Perfect Media Storm... The Brothers Einstein - MediaBizBloggers

By The Brothers Einstein Archives
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George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against laity. Case in point: a financial industry whose instruments and technologies defy description – even and especially by those who would seek to regulate them or otherwise hold them accountable. The first two weeks of the current financial crisis have been punctuated by talking-head experts (the priest class of any profession) whose remarks have all been prefaced by the same no-one-really-knows-what’s-going-on refrain. Not exactly what you want to hear from industry top experts, newscasters and lawmakers who just a few weeks earlier were all selling or profiteering from the exact same financial instruments that they suddenly can’t seem to understand.

How is the above scenario even remotely possible in the age of digital accountability? How is it possible that the only way to explain what happens nowadays is with the post-crisis and often post-perpwalk deployment of forensic accountants (the 21st-century equivalent of historians)? Time and again, the lofty promise of digital accountability has proven to be little more than a high-tech shell game: a license to obfuscate, deal and steal on an unfathomable scale. It happened with the burst of the dot com bubble in the spring of 2000, it happened again with the digitally-driven scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia and Tyco, and it’s happening right now in the American financial markets.

I only mention the above because the very same digital technology and mentality that drives Wall Street drives the media industry as well. Indeed, the very largest technology players – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – have themselves become the largest and most influential media franchises on the planet. Meanwhile, the major media agencies like MediaCom, OMD, MindShare, Starcom and Zenith are in business almost exclusively to arbitrage and somehow translate tens of billions of daily ad impressions into stockholder share value. Central to both the financial and media industries is a tragically blind and thoroughly inebriated faith in the digital technologies of scale and efficiency. Drunk on our own digital prowess, we’ve convinced ourselves that scale and efficiency are the highest forms of human endeavor and expression (a bureaucratic sentiment embraced by every major fascist since the early 20th century). Truly, we’ve become what Thoreau once described as tools of our tools. Nowadays, however, we call it something else: ROI.

The same perfect-storm winds that toppled Wall Street giants are blowing at gale force throughout the media industry today – in part because the digital technology that drives both industries is identical, and in part because the technologists themselves are increasingly identical as well. Instead of pushing near-worthless derivatives through the financial pipeline, thousands of suddenly displaced Wall Street bean counters will find new jobs in the still-expanding media industry, where they will be asked to push near-worthless media inventory instead. The transition is naturally seamless because the financial guys and the media guys – MBAs all – are the same basic guys at different stages of their careers (not unlike the scoundrels of Wall Street, Bank Street and their shameful Congressional counterparts). Beneath it all, however, the skill set is the same, the alchemy is the same, and the driving mythology of digital accountability – aka ROI – is the same.

The storm warnings in the media industry couldn’t be clearer: arcane and byzantine stealth technologies that almost no one can explain, perpetually eroding performance across all media channels (new and old alike), tens of billions of non-negotiated daily impressions, a thoroughly arrogant and opaque industry leadership with little or no expressed regard for anything other than their own careers, and scandalous government officials who a) peddle their influence in exchange for millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the media industry each year, then b) repay the industry with regulation eradication and billions of dollars of entitlement media buys each and every campaign season. Sound familiar?

Business as usual for the media industry is simply not an option, not when media industry approval ratings already hover somewhere between those of Congress and child molesters, and especially not when such massive demand-side addictions like oil, credit, pharmaceuticals (drugs) and entertainment are at work across all levels of American society. We need to intervene on ourselves, to interrupt what is clearly pervasive, self-destructive behavior if we expect to save our own industry and avoid the hot seat at the very next round of Congressional hearings. We need to reclaim control of the media and advertising industries from the legions of technocrats consumed by bits and bytes and the corrosive tyranny of ROI. No more can we afford to talk exclusively in terms of what we cando; rather, we need to start talking about what we shoulddo.

The only environment more toxic than the one we live in is the one between our ears, thanks in no small measure to an out-of-control media industry whose only operating perspective is borrowed from the corrupt, over-leveraged play books of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It’s time for this industry to start investing in its future with some serious consideration and deliberation about how we intend to green the media commons – and restore a sense of proportion and decency in the process. Or we can sit back and await the next round of Congressional subpoenas…

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