Lesson for Digital Content - Don’t just remodel, rebuild.
I’m just now catching up on my reading post CES and wanted to point out an interesting dialogue that happened back in December between digital content guru Jonathan Mendez and the New York Times Magazine’s Virginia Heffernan started an interesting dialogue around whether the new mode of digital interaction required new types of content - rather than just a simple re-use/re-model/re-purpose approach of merely distributing "old" content in a "new" channel.
Personally, I think Heffernan is right - the Internet / digital is a new medium and requires new forms of story telling.
"We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it. This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms."
While I agree, I don’t believe that means that everything we know now (content-wise) is irrelevant. Just as the soap opera made the leap from radio to TV, there will be content artifacts that retain value in the digital genre.
Mendez doesn’t really disagree with Heffernan, but pulls in some concern on the business side of content—the future of advertising platforms
“My fear comes from what I hear entrepreneurs say to me about new technologies. Things like it has to be ‘easy for agencies to understand’ or they want to be ‘selling what people are buying.’ Bullsxxt! [my edit]
I think that everyone would agree that there’s still a lot of experimentation that needs to be done around both entertainment and advertising content. The good news is that “digital†gives us tremendous data about what people are doing—and therefore value—in both the entertainment and advertising experience. We just can’t let that get us into analysis/paralysis mode and lose sight of the goal of the experimentation – of turning digital into a sustainable, compelling platform for new forms of story telling.
Posted by Scott Brown at 01:50PM PST
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