I'd like to welcome back Professor Judy Franks. Professor Franks has visited this MOOC to discuss how the media landscape is shaping marketing today. Her book, Media: From Chaos to Clarity presents Five Global Truths that we have been using as a helpful compass for navigating a messy media world during this course. Professor Franks is here today to talk about the second edition of her book that she released at the end of 2018. Professor Franks, welcome back to the MOOC. Judy, what makes the second edition of Media: From Chaos to Clarity different from a typical second edition that updates a few facts and figures from the first edition? Randy, the media world had radically changed since I published the first edition back in 2011. Consequently, it was important that I take a step back and challenge everything that I thought was true. We needed more time and frankly more chaos to unfold to figure out if the Five Global Truths that I presented in the first edition were true or if they would succumb to chaos themselves. If I went into this with any form of bias, it was possible that I would miss what was truly going on in the marketplace. Further, with the rise of marketing automation and big data that really took off since I published the first edition, I had to consider what we were seeing from the perspective of machine learning. It's critical that we train the machines with the right ideas because machines are only as smart as we are. So it became critical to rethink just about everything. Judy, before we get into the details of the second edition, could you offer a quick summary of the first edition of Media: From Chaos to Clarity for those who may not have read the book? Sure Randy. If I were to summarize the key findings from the first edition of the book, I'd focus on four key insights. First, the media world of the 20th century used to function like this giant Newtonian machine. Media channels were truly distinct from each other. They all functioned in a certain way and once you figured out the laws of media effects, you could develop media message delivery strategies with high levels of certainty, enter digital media and all that changed. All of a sudden, the media world became much more relative. It's as if the media had transition from Newton's order to Einstein's chaos. Chaos is a tricky thing. On one hand, chaos is completely necessary for organisms to thrive. But on the other hand, human beings really dislike chaos. We prefer predictability and order especially when money is involved. So in order to navigate chaos, we were going to need a new compass and that's where the Five Global Truths come into play. Each truth serves as a vector on the compass to help us travel through chaos and to better understand the profound changes that we were seeing in the landscape. Finally, the book presented a new energy formula that I call C3 for harnessing the potential of this messy media world. In this new world order, content is the most important C in the mix. If you have great content we're sharing, consumers which happen to be the second C will accelerate their content far and wide. The third C being channels, the media themselves actually have lost importance in this whole process. We give media channels way too much credit in a story. So how are the Five Global Truths holding up? What new insights about the Five Global Truths can you share with us? Actually, all Five Global Truths are relevant today. In fact, there are even more pronounced today than they were when I first conceived of them. So let's go through what I've seen for each of those five. Convergence. When I first thought of convergence, I envisioned a screen democracy that would lead to what I'll call video everywhere. That is certainly true. However, convergence has gone much further than I had ever imagined. Now literally, every communications form whether it be video, audio, text, or pictures has merged onto every digital screen. When we look at symbiosis as we expected, new is creating a renaissance for old. In both editions of the book, I spend a fair amount of time talking about television. Television is alive and well and thriving over the Internet. In fact, many call this the second golden age of television. When we look at circuits actually, this global truth has proven to be the most interesting. In the second edition, I talk about marketers attempt to gain the system with strategies such as paid influencer marketing which frankly is an oxymoron. But despite marketers attempt to take control, circuits remain open and in the hands of consumers. The forth global truth being brands, this is interesting in that transmedia branding has been the slowest to emerge of all the truths, yet, the most powerful media brands out there such as Disney are building businesses onto new channels successfully. Finally, when we look at the fifth global truth, economics, we have more proof every day that high-quality content drives all the economic value of the media ecosystem. Distribution cost remain under pressure while premium content can command just about any price. The media landscape continues to progress in line with the Five Global Truths. What about the media and marketing industry? How well are we navigating chaos? Randy, we're seeing progress in some areas and we're falling behind in others. So I'd like to share five lessons with you today. Lesson 1, I've learned since the first edition of the book that there's a big difference between media and the media business. There's something called the law of suppression of radical potential, and in essence what that means is that media companies need to slow down technological progress until they can figure out a way to make a profitable business model around these advancements. So frankly, consumers are traveling through chaos faster the media companies can. The second lesson that I've learned is that clickbait is undermining the potential of content economics. Hopefully by the time I published the third edition of Media: From Chaos to Clarity, the regulators will step in and we won't be dealing with clickbait in the future. Lesson 3, the marketing and advertising industry needs to re-bundle. The specialty agencies were created for silos that no longer exist because we are now experiencing convergence. We are seeing some pockets of marketing and media services coming back together but not fast enough. Lesson 4, media audience measurement frankly is heading in the wrong direction. As more marketers walk away from common currency and decide to use their own first-party data, we are losing a common view of where audiences are traveling in this new media landscape. Finally, Lesson 5, marketing automation relies on who is training the machine. If people feed machines with old thinking that is leftover from the Newtonian media era, we're going to wind up stocking consumers as opposed to embracing the Five Global Truths. What does the future hold? Randy, I'll be happy to report back on the future with the third edition of Media: From Chaos to Clarity in about five years. Five years is a good amount of time to ensure that we don't react to small occurrences or blips in the media landscape and that we remain focused on the big picture. But meanwhile, with the Five Global Truths as your guide, you can go forth and harness the potential of this messy media world.
