It was the biggest of times. It was the smallest of times.
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You have to wonder… What was it like to like in the Spring of the year 1454.
I’m guessing the nattering nabobs (incorrectly attributed to Spiro T. Agnew, I’ll correctly attribute it to Cesar Romero as The Joker in the cheesy 60s Batman show) spent most of their time pontificating about Pope Calixtus III’s reign and the incivility transitioning from the Hundred Years War to the War of the Roses.
There was no broadcast radio. No podcasts. Not even a decent amplifier to get some mileage out of that talk. Their media was one-to-one. Oral history stuff.
Meanwhile, they probably ignored a bigger, far more impactful story. Johannes Gutenberg’s new one-to-many media machine, The Printing Press. “Moving type transforms book production.” You have to love a headline for the ages that writes itself.
Today, “The Press” ranks second for medieval ideas that changed the world. Because the tech changed how we communicate and distribute ideas. And you just have to know some wiseacre got shares in Gutt’s startup and his biggest contribution was, “Hey, Johannes, drop the ‘The.’ Yeah, just go with ‘Press.’ It has a better mouth feel.”
Here we are… 25 score and seventy years later… we are living at the cusp of an evolutionary media metamorphosis. We’ve outgrown our long-tailed vestigial analog media. Radio. Television. Cable (don’t kid yourself, cable can’t know who’s watching. therefore, it can’t target ads, so it’s analog. note to self, write that story, a box is not a cube). Podcasting (if you can’t distribute your own media, you’re not digital). Print. Companies, heck, entire industries, are getting whipped out.
We’re moved from mass media to social media and we’re on our way to mass personal media. When we don’t insinuate AI into every conversation, it intrudes. We’re looking at a media future powered entirely by machines running on Nvidia chips.
Vast seismic shifts topple the tectonic plates of media to create windows to new vistas and we talk about the same old same olds.
This year, I’ve read 73 stories on the 37 ways you can spice up email subject lines. We’re in the 97th consecutive month that Google has head-faked us about deprecating cookies. Nineteen stories on why Buzzfeed failed. Eleven stories on why some French company bought Gizmodo. 8293 times I’ve seen someone slag Elon Musk for Twitter or Starlink. 283 reasons why programmatic ads on the open web are bad for business. Thirteen days into June, and 293 occurrences of the phrase, “made for advertising” in my LinkedIn feed. Fifty-three lousy things Google’s Analytic dashboard, GA4, takes credit for everything.
It’s all one big small “potatoe,” Dan Quayle. Because scribes talk about the recent past, we re-get what happened yesterday and Big-Co talking points parroted dutifully.
Call me a “cockeyed optimistic,” Julia Louis-Dreyfus (on Seinfeld who later starred as Veep in Veep), but I think there’s more here. More big stories to tell. More big questions to ask about the philosophical changes in what we consume. Where and when. We should communicate ideas that can jumpstart new industries.
Instead and very sadly, tight-fisted ad behemoths control the narrative.
We don’t get choose *our* own adventure games created on the fly by AI for a group of us wandering through a virtual world. We get how can we use current privacy-circumventing ad targeting technology to put even more creepy ads near content regurgitated by an AI.
We can’t choose the camera angle to watch an NFL game the way we want. Nope. We get virtual ads splashed across the real spaces where real players play. Because it’s easier to superimpose ads in the cameras and feed them into the transmission.
We aren’t getting new mass personal media. We aren’t talking about ways to transform media to change the way we communicate and distribute ideas and, by extension, the world.
We get this new tagline that Perplexity will, “Cater to the world’s curiosity.” Oh so sad. How many MBA-led focus groups did an agency need to come up with that? No. Wait. How many MBA-led focus group outputs scraped by agencies and sent through an AI chatbot did it take to come up with that?
We live in generationally significant media times. And, the best we can do is drop the “The” from the latest Joker movie. We’re nattering nabobs sidled up to the world’s biggest ocean and happy doing bouyancy-assisted laps in a kiddie pool.
Happy Father’s Day.