For the sake of clarity, the use of the word “Machine” needs to be defined. Indeed, using some sort of machine – the digital video or still camera, the word processor etc, is the way in which we make most content today. When I use “Machine” here I refer to the process of content creation that removes a significant portion of human intervention in the process of production.
At the professional level, the use of electronic devices to produce content has not changed, fundamentally, in decades though many of the devices have. A digital camera, in the hands of a professional photographer, is used in much the same way as it was in 1970. The difference is cost, time and efficiency – the processing of film and the immediacy of preview has made the process more efficient but not really different. If our photographer from 1970 got his hands on a modern digital SLR, he would be right at home – interchangeable lenses, aperture and shutter control, light metering, TTL view etc. This is quite interesting when you consider how fundamentally different the two technologies are.
The reason for the similarity in the devices – the traditional SLR vs. The Digital SLR- has more to do with the users that it does the technology. If the Digital SLR were wildly different from film cameras professionals would have been slow to adopt. We see this in many introduced technologies where the early versions of the devices follow familiar antecedents.
Now that DSLR technology is in wide acceptance, we are beginning to see the evolution of digital capture devices. New cameras will record Geo locations of photos, META data will be more precise and expansive, in camera editing and color profiles will be more powerful, wireless transfer to cloud storage will make image handling seamless and the line between video capture and still will vanish. Eventually even multi lenses will disappear.
As we accept the differences that new technology brings to the devices we use, we must also acknowledge new industrial methods for producing content. To avoid the prohibitively high cost of content creation and the growing expectation users have of rich content experiences we must be prepared to experiment with Machine based methods like TalkMarket. The key here is to understand the realignment of expectations of certain kinds of content. This brings us back to the changing acceptance of the user.
Classical content creation systems are appropriate for the Class A presentation of products, but below that level this approach to production simply hinders the requirements we have today.
The traditional content acquisition model is not going away for the near future, but like so many other institutions it is, to a degree, diminished. Licensed, polished media will have to stand side by side with free, open source prosumer content and Machine produced content. Businesses who have to exploit massive amounts of content must adjust quickly to the new models.
Utility vs. Esthetic
The first, and possibly most difficult, task we must accomplish is to abandon our outdated notions of content and its purpose. All photos are not marketing. Marketing communication is not unidirectional, consumers do not just consume, videos are not television, content is a means to an end – not the end.
Photography in our business plays many roles and the most prominent of those roles has been to support our products and our brand. To that end we have engaged in the constant increase in the visual quality of our photography. This has resulted in helping Kohl’s achieve a higher place in brand prominence than discounters and other low-end stores. The parallel to this was a massive infrastructure investment to accommodate the growing demand of photography in the print explosion of the late 1980’s and 90’s.
When all visual content is viewed through a traditional marketing point of view, then the perfection of that content becomes paramount. If it cannot be perfect, then we will not do it. Unfortunately, that statement falls apart when visual content is viewed from an information transfer view.
Bluntly this: The customer will always favor the path of ease, clarity and efficiency. A short, medium quality video of a backpack being opened, exposed and a laptop slid inside with a voice telling us that it is water proof and padded is more powerful than a high resolution photo that tells me none of those.
Brand advocates exist for every successful brand. The voice of the individual user will be exploited more and more to support the brand. The quality and clarity of the voice (video tools, high speed internet, social publishing) is growing exponentially.
Obsolete marketers will continue to push glossy production over user-generated content as “non aspiration”, however, at the consumption level, socially shared advocacy is vastly more powerful. The challenge will be how to support such advocacy without advocate becoming more glossy sell-outs.
To apply computing metaphors to this situation we would say that the world we lived in, up until 10 years ago, was a “Read Only” content world. We produced content, in this case photography, for the consumer to experience. The last decade has introduced the “Read/Write” content world. We still create content to disseminate to our customers but our customers also create content and publish it sometimes about us and the content our customers create can have equal reach in the online world. We have to become better readers of content and republish that which supports our goals.
The content creation model is dead; long live the new content creation model. We have, perhaps, become so engrossed in our methods of content acquisition and creation that we have forgotten the goal. We may have to let some of our precious ownership go if our goal is to spread our word. George Lucas realized that allowing his public to freely engage in his copyrighted material he could turn movies into an intergenerational phenomenon.
We must embrace that the prosumer has introduced a new spectrum content requirements, expectations and rules of engagement. They understand it and own it. In retail we say that the customer is always right, it is time for us live up to that.
No comments:
Post a Comment