New media have brought us a new age of miracles. A complete unknown, a Susan Boyle, can sing a song on a TV talent show and awake an international heroine. Fame hasn’t spread so swiftly since the early 15th century, when Joan of Arc was an anonymous peasant one day and leader of the French army approximately the next.
But where does this leave the merchant without a great story—let’s say the grocer who wants to tell shoppers that this weekend’s loss leader is two bags of carrots for the price of one? It used to be he’d buy an ad in the Thursday paper, and if one housewife mentioned the carrots to her neighbor that was viral enough for him: he didn’t need his two-for-one offer to become tomorrow’s talk of two continents.
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Old-school marketers must find the changing media landscape as wrenching as old-school journalists do. They must long for old-fashioned TV programs that audiences sat at home and watched as they were aired, commercials and all. They must mourn the vanishing environment of the printed page that ads and stories blissfully cohabit, each enhancing the other in the eyes of readers.
This is getting us to the good news in Franks’s book. Because the digitalized media universe is so overwhelming, she believes people will flock to media brands they trust to screen out dreck and pass along quality. And Franks believes they will pay for this quality. HBO is one example; the New York Times is another. Its new pay wall has yet to definitively prove itself, but subscribers across the country already pay a fortune to have the Times delivered to their door.
Second, when she says quality is the new scarcity, I wonder if she’s defining scarcity by the best yardstick. Her idea is that quality content is scarce (and thus should be a source of profits) because the digital pipeline is so far from full. But this pipeline is infinite and insatiable. Quality content looks a lot less scarce when measured by the capacity of the public to consume it. There are only so many hours in the day, and we need to eat, sleep, and—if we’re lucky—work. What if the next great HBO series is one series more than anyone has time to watch?
