TV Being Redefined For Next Generation of Consumers

Never one to shy away from exposing the soft underbelly of the status quo, Advertising Age’s, Bob Garfield shook up the ad industry with his now famous “Chaos Scenario” article back in April of 2005 (a free registration may be required). It was a wake up call to traditional advertising and media that new media alternatives were rapidly transforming the marketing world and those that chose to come late to the party would suffer the consequences.

Now Garfield is not only predicting a chaos scenario, but also reporting on it in a new article (YouTube vs. Boob Tube) in Wired. In that article Garfield points out how the remarkable growth of YouTube and other consumer-generated media is inching the traditional television industry closer to losing the critical mass that has sustained it for so many years.

Traditional television is trying to respond to a rapidly changing environment with a host of new options, including offering shows online, but the transformative power is now mostly in the hands of consumers who were excluded from the process when the TV industry and Hollywood controlled all the content and the distribution channels (literally).

Consumer video content and amateur producers will never replace the talent, money, production values and ideas of major television studios or Hollywood. That is not the point. The point is the television oligopoly has cracks in its foundation, and that will have some profound effects for consumers and advertisers as new options become more ubiquitous and drive television advertising costs down.