Amuse Yourselves

Sorry about being away for 2 days – duty calls, kids – not that I don’t feel as if I have an obligation to you! In any event, as I was flying about I started to think about the differences between how entertainment used to work when we were kids and how it works now.  It’s a lot more than the differences between lean back and lean forward.  It’s changed not only the nature of how we consume things but what those things are.

“Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel” was sound advice offered by Mark Twain.  Inherent in that is the notion of gatekeepers – he who controlled the press controlled information.  In news, editors chose what we read or heard and we responded to whatever information they distributed.  Same thing with entertainment – you watched TV or listened to the radio and the gatekeepers who controlled the programs or their distribution kept us amused.

Not any more.  Look at YouTube.  Everyone has a means to distribute their programming globally.   And it’s not “a means” – there are lots of them.  We amuse ourselves now.  In a weird way, it’s exactly how people of my generation played as we grew up.   We made up our own games in an unstructured way and amused ourselves.   Our children tend to be supervised and play games that are highly-organized.  Who knew that media, a bastion in the iron grip of a few would become the purview of everyone?

There are the obvious implications for those in the media business but the same changes are affecting your business since the odds are your business used the old media to market itself.  How are you playing with the other kids now?  Are you ready to deal with everyone owning a printing press or a TV station?  If you’re not, what are you doing to get there?