The Media Native: Getting Restless!

A new series of blogs about the broadcast industry, narrated by David Brennan…

As I prepare to hang up my Thinkbox hat (the career hat I’m most proud of, given the significant achievements over the past five years, under the relentless stewardship of Tess Alps) and write my first opinion piece for MediaTel, I thought I’d treat it as a maiden speech in the Houses of Parliament (which I can just about see from my office window) and take this one opportunity to make a shameless plug for a subject close to my heart; in this case, the name of my new consultancy business!

I decided to call it Media Native, when I discovered that I was born just a few days after the launch of commercial television in my part of the world. That happy accident of birth has probably shaped many of my views on the importance and evolution of the media industry, as TV has always been there since my dad brought home an old black & white Bush TV set before I was able to walk.

So, in the same way that the ‘digital natives’ consist of anybody who was born since the internet first became a part of our lives, I feel I belong to the earlier generation of ‘media natives’ who have lived through a pluralistic and commercialised media environment for all of our formative years.

A couple of years ago, this would have been tantamount to me admitting I just ‘didn’t get it’ as far as new media developments were concerned. We media natives were tainted by age and experience; we couldn’t open our minds to the revolution that was going on under our noses. We were unqualified to pass opinion on the latest Web 2.0 trend or to accurately forecast how such trends would evolve.

In fact, the whole idea of evolution was somewhat quaint to all those who could see a perfect digital future which would be unrecognisable to us less enlightened souls.

Then something began to change. All of the confident predictions of the death of all we’d thought to be immutable – the 30 second spot, the schedule, television itself – started to unravel. It had taken so long because most of those predictions were based on looking several years into the future (in fact in almost every case I can think of, it was five years!) and so it took at least that amount of time for them to be either forgotten or very occasionally corrected.

Suddenly, phrases such as eco-system, channel integration, media-meshing and through-the-line marketing suggested a much more complementary future where the old and the new happily (and for many advertisers, effectively) co-exist.

Of course, this is no different to the impact of new media opportunities throughout the whole of the last century. The best example is cinema. Now, I’m old enough to have witnessed ‘the death of cinema’ at least four times, following the advent of television, the VCR, the DVD and now online access to content.

As my fellow media natives will testify, cinema is far from dead; indeed, it is being bolstered by the very technologies that were meant to kill it, which in turn has allowed it to invest in its future through both content (digital technologies such as CGI have transformed the storytelling power of the big screen) and the context (most cinema experiences now are far superior to the ‘fleapits’ I regularly visited as a teenager).

So, I’m using my maiden column to come out and admit it – I am a media native and I’m proud of it! I don’t automatically discount the new – in fact, like my erstwhile Thinkbox colleagues, I’m a big fan of new technology – but I am able to see it in the context of a wider media perspective, which in turn allows me to understand the potential impact on consumers’ lives, and not just the hour a day or so that they spend online.

As online technologies become more enmeshed in our lives, we need to understand the impact in terms of consumers’ lives overall. For example, many of the benefits online brings have resulted in providing consumers with more ‘free time’ than they ever had before – no more queuing in banks or post offices, no more trips to the supermarket – and it is what they do with that free time that has been behind much of the growth in our media time over the past few years.

To see things in that wider perspective, one has to have context, and that is where us media natives have a distinct advantage over those who can only see change through a very narrow lens.