The Warshaw Curve

BIG MEDIA & THE "NEW PARTICIPATORY JOURNALISM" (with Apologies to Dick Schaap & George Plimpton)

In the 1960s, a small number of absurdly gifted writers began to change the definition of journalism.  Using literary techniques found more frequently in novels than the New York Times. Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin, Hunter Thompson and George Plimpton were at the forefront of what quickly became called "New Journalism."

"Participatory Journalism" was a key element of New Journalism, and it developed in two forms out of the minds and typewriters of Plimpton and Schaap:  Plimpton was the author turned participant, who wrote about his often humbling experiences in magazine articles and books like "Paper Lion" and "Out of My League," while Schaap turned participants into authors, in books like "Instant Replay," which he co-wrote with the Green Bay Packers Jerry Kramer.  Both Plimpton and Schaap brought readers inside the locker room, the huddle and, at their best, into the mind of the athlete.  The result was "Up Close and Personal" in print, before Roone brought it to television.

Big Media & the "New Participatory Journalism"
Today, in the era of DIY media, where everyone has a camera and iMovie, and is publicly living their lives online, media companies can leverage their scale and resources to enable large numbers of participants at events to participate in their event coverage.

Rather than just have a single "special guest contributor" — which is Big Media's style and something that, if it isn't already, will soon feel like a quaint concept — media companies should be opening up their event coverage to as many participants as possible.

For example, prior to the SxSW Music Festival, at Blender.com we contacted bands and musicians and asked them to video their experiences and then submit their own reports for our Event Blog. The result was a collection of video snapshots and reports from these participants that provides a better picture of the lives of indie bands at their musical Super Bowl than anything else I've seen or read.

EXHIBIT-A:  this tremendous, short video report created by the band, "Produce O."

We received dozens of videos, all snapshots filed by the bands and musicians attending the SxSW Festival. 

And, get this: those band-made videos were viewed over 15-million times. (That's not a typo.) 

We're talking dozens of homemade A Hard Day's Night's (a film with one of the all-time great opening sequences: three minutes of pure magic).

(Again) Think Quilt, Not Blanket . . . and Sell It
Event coverage for Big Media is no longer about blanket coverage, instead it's about putting together quilted coverage from it's own and from outside soruces: It's about stitching together moments, fragments, video snapshots and commentary — creating an evolving scrapbook for an audience that doesn't just tolerate but has an appetite for low production values (the left-hand side of The Curve) and incomplete productions — and publishing them in real time for an audience that isn't looking for the whole story in a single narrative.

It's an audience that with regard to video is happy with fragments in the form of quick scenes, and in print online with pictures, short comments and links.  And it's an audience that loves new media's New Participatory Journalism.

Which means advertisers will like it, too.

APPLE STUMBLES ON THE CURVE

As mentioned in previous posts ("Other Sectors Following The Curve?"), a few contributors have used The Curve to look at the the consumer electronics market. That makes sense if you think of the various low-end vs. high-end, cheap vs. premium, electronic products that you can choose between when making purchase decisions: inexpensive digital cameras (vs. high-end Nikon and Canon consumer SLR's), earbuds (vs. Bose headphones), generic laptops (vs. MacBooks) and, as already mentioned, cheap cell phones (vs. iPhones, BlackBerry's and other PDA's).

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Apple, of course, mostly hangs out around the high-end of the curve (the far-right): premium products at premium prices. And what makes Apple products truly premium? Apple's overlooked secret is that it's not just the hardware and the software inside their devices. It's also the service that surrounds them.

If you own an Apple product, you know that whenever you have a problem you can get on the phone and talk to someone at Apple support who actually knows about their products, and your problems.

Think about that statement and it's two parts: (1) Apple service folks know their products (we'll get into that in a second) and (2) Apple service folks know your problems. First, let's talk about that last part:

The political statement of the last 100 years that most resonates with Americans today is not, "The only thing we have to fear...". Nor is it "Ask not what your country...". Nor is it one of my family's favorites: "I did not have sex with that woman...". Nope. The political statement that most resonates with Americans today is: "I feel your pain." That's what we want to hear!

And Apple, like Bill Clinton, feels your pain.

Think about their commercials:

Yeah, they're funny. But interestingly their message isn't, "Look how much fun you can have with an Apple!" or "Look at the creative stuff you can make with a Mac." They tried selling with that message years ago, and it couldn't even get them 4% market share.

Since 2006 their message has been:

"Man, we know that using a computer is a hair-hurting, murderous bitch of an ordeal, full of stuff that makes no sense to you or anyone else. But don't worry! We feel your pain.

"We feel the fire raging between your ears AND we can put it out." And they say it with a smile. And they do put it out. And they heal your pain with product (hardware and software) and service. Real service. Go into any Apple store, or call their support number, and they will work with you till your problem is solved.

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REAL GENIUS?

It's a strategy that's got a bit of genius to it — without requiring real geniuses to execute it.

Because even though they call them "Geniuses" at the Apple stores, you hardly have to be a genius to work there. You can't be an idiot, but you don't have to have gone to MIT or Cal Tech or Princeton.

That's because the amount of stuff you need to know isn't enormous — because Apple's product line isn't enormous!

Look around the store: a ton of the stuff is third-party product, about which the sales staff's knowledge is hardly encyclopedic.  Apple's held to a fairly limited number of product lines, and many of the products in those lines share a great deal of functionality (and key strokes!); consequently, as soon as their customers learn how to use one Apple product, the easier it is for them to learn another.  Same thing with Apple software: many of their programs share similarities in their approaches to managing media — iTunes, iWeb, iPhoto, all of them share similarities in look and feel, user-interface, and even if they don't share the same, exact functionalities, well, then they share metaphorical functionalities (and key strokes!).  And that's what makes learning on a Mac so much easier than learning Windows based products.

With no disrespect to any of the great folks working at the Apple stores: you don't have to be a bloody "Genius" to learn that limited an amount of stuff — especially when you're surrounded by co-workers who are learning the same limited amount of stuff. Still, because Apple employees actually know their products, well, that makes them seem like geniuses.

But if you ask me, a real genius would be the poor bastard working at Best Buy or Circuit City who actually knew what he was selling.

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Real genius is someone who still knows how to help you even when they're confronted by a dizzying display of dozens of different products by dozens of different manufacturers, none of which works like the others—even if they do the same task!—and all of which are iterative and, therefore, constantly changing and being rolled out on schedules that have nothing to do with one another.

And — this time with no disrespect to any of the great folks working at those electronics chains — more often than not, Circuit City isn't exactly hiring geniuses.

They don't feel your pain.

They are your pain.

Which is what makes Apple's latest stumble so strange.

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APPLE'S STUMBLE:  MOBILE ME  (or "BLANK ME!" — where "Blank" isn't "Mobile")

Apple, the company whose secret sauce contains an overdose of service, recently released along with their new iPhone a whole new line of web-based applications called "MobileMe." And, as demoed smashingly by Steve Jobs and team, it's the cool kids' equivalent of an iPhone with a blackberry and exchange server. Only better.

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Except it's not better. Since the day they've rolled it out, it hasn't worked.

Apple doesn't feel your pain with MobileMe.

Apple is your pain.

And when was the last time that happened?

And what's amazing is that they haven't just stumbled over product. They've stumbled big-time over service.

Heck, today's tech consumers understand that new products have problems (even when the word "Beta" isn't slapped on them like some short-hand legal disclaimer). But customers don't understand why no one at Apple support or in the stores or on their MobileMe chat seems to really know what's wrong with their product. And worse, Apple isn't acknowledging that they've got a problem. (The support people on the phone, actually, will vent their frustrations to you — if you coax them nicely — but Cupertino's corporate communication certainly isn't owning up to the problem.)

And it's been over two weeks since the fire in the head first began.

(And, strangely, the press has given them a free pass, so far.)

But trust me, it will be interesting to watch what happens over the next few weeks: A premium product that isn't working, without premium service? (Sort of like owning a Jaguar sports car in the 1980s.)

That's Apple's rare bad experience at the high-end of The Curve.

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A PRACTICAL SUGGESTION

As I mentioned at the end of the post before last ("Content is No Longer King"):

Being able to create high-quality content is a big advantage, but it's not the endgame. On the web it's less and less about creating and more and more about Aggregating ... Curating ... Annotating ... and Facilitating.  That's a big reason why the little guys are now jumping over the big guys like Jack Russell Terriers on a hunt, and in heat.

That said, the Big Guys do have a bunch of advantages.

Before we get to the advantages Big Media enjoys — and how they can create new editorial products that can be monetized, based on those advantages — let's review the current state of their affairs:

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DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

The internet with it's ever evolving set of features and utilities has made it incredibly easy to aggregate content and information, and the inevitable result is that rather than create new content, most individuals have gone meta — the web is filling up with content about content, news about news, remarks about remarks, reviews about reviews — simply because it's far easier and faster to comment than to create. It's far easier to simply link, rate and rant, than produce original content.  So, almost all what individuals are producing, and a good chunk of what is now being consumed, is happening down on the left-hand side of The Curve.

To be clear: I'm not saying bloggers are lazy by nature, I'm just saying the web makes some things incredibly easy.  And it takes a lot of resources to do more than just comment and link.

So, the Big Guys are dying a death by a thousand cuts — make that a google's worth — in no small part because they're still doing the heavy lifting, e.g. they're creating news reports, episodic television shows and feature films, and spending lots of money to do it — while everyone and their mother is using Big Media's highly produced materials as grist for their own home brew mills. 

And, unfortunately for Big Media, the audience would just as soon read meta content, just as soon read coverage about the coverage than read the actual coverage itself; or, if it's video, the audience often would rather see the raw and unfiltered videos, rather than the produced, filtered and packaged coverage.

In short: the gatekeepers have lost their gates, and now they're getting nibbled to death by millions of little guys down on the left-side of The Curve, each one a nasty little blade cutting away at the Big Boy's audience.

Death by a google's worth of cuts.

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“HOW DO WE GET THOSE LITTLE BLADES WORKING FOR US?”

That’s the question the Big Guys are finally starting to ask themselves:

How can Big Media get the blades — especially the blades of the blogisphere — to work for them? 

CONTENT IS NO LONGER KING (continued)

Once again, let me say right off the top: I'm not bashing content.

Heck, I've devoted the last 25 years of my life to it — back when it was just called "writing" and "programming," and stuff like that. 

Content is still key.

But too many media companies are failing to make the most of their content, ironically because they've put it on a thrown and value it too highly, as I wrote below.  And at the same time, they continue to undervalue the importance of utilities.  The latter is now the most important factor for the success of media properties on the web: features and functionalities that get people to your content, get your content out to people, and let people do things with it.

Justin Kim, a terrific, on-the-edge indie marketer has an interesting take on this.  Here's some of it:

I think the never-ending quest for the killer app has resulted in the development of a ton of cool little tools. Like mitochondria, maybe one day they can come together with other apps to form an evolved interface.

...it's all about creating the best platform for serving content — be it RSS, aggregation, peer-to-peer, voting, whichever's clever.  And easiest to get your quick fix.  Different methods work better for different kinds of content.

 All things considered, ease of use and providing the quickest access to the desired content is a recipe for a platform with stickiness. It's not just the content that gets people to come back. Just as most successful shows eventually become syndicated, the same content is almost always available elsewhere. Or at least a knockoff version. The winning platform is the one that works the best for the user.

On my personal scale:  Usability > Content > Interactivity > Popularity.

Justin's scale is an interesting one.  Especially when you try to figure out why so many people — especially in the younger, instant gratification generations — watch one piece of content over another, simply because it's easier to get to.

More on the above, and other thoughts from JK at  www.blogoriety.com

CONTENT IS NO LONGER KING

And I'm not just saying that because I'm about a decade sick of the old cliché.

Content is still key, but the king's crown now belongs to Utilities (features and functionalities).

To help prove the point, here are two interesting items that were put together by one of the fastest minds I know (Mr. Russell-Foltz Smith).  They're eye-openers for anyone trying to reach that rather elusive male 18-34 demo:

(Click-on graphics to enlarge.)

Eye-opening not only in terms of where the traffic's going but also in terms of where the advertising dollars are going, too.

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SO, WHERE DOEST ALL THIS PUT THE FORMER KING, CONTENT?

Like I said up top, it's still key — it's just not the big Kahuna, anymore.

In almost all cases, content is still the means by which that elusive thing called "brand" is best expressed — it's the voice, the look, the tone for a media property.  But while that once was enough for content to keep its crown, now on the web content is the wrapping around the new king: utilities.  Content is the label, it's the billboard, it's the promo, it's the sign on the door.  But it ain't the house, no more.

What percentage of the time do you think people are spending on Facebook and MySpace ingesting "content"?   That's not what's driving them there, or driving them around and around the sites once they get there.  They're showing up and sticking around for activities (i.e. utilities).

Social-networking is not about content, it's about activities — and those activities are the result of compelling features and functionalities.

"AN EARLY CLUE TO THE NEW DIRECTION?"

When thinking about trends my mind always wanders to one of my favorite scenes from the Beatles' first feature film, "A Hard Days Night" (1964).

Here's the set-up for this brief, absolute gem of a scene that's all about trends and the people who spot and market them:

Just hours before the Beatles are to perform live on British television, Ringo is nowhere to be found.  John, Paul and George split up to look for him, and along the way each Beatle has his own brief encounter of a strange kind.  George's fate is to become an accidental one-man focus group for a trend-master:

CONSUMER GOODS & "THE CURVE"

Some more folks are beginning to look at "The Curve" as a lens through which to observe consumer consumption in more than just the media space.

Makes sense, as the cost of production and distribution drop, and goods become mass produced commodities in many more areas than just entertainment.

Much more about it on the LEADSExplorer website, which has multiple entries on the matter.  The first of which points out:

Similarities with Infant Mortality and Burn-in distributions

- An infant mortality period with a decreasing failure rate
- Followed by a normal life period (”useful life”) with a low, relatively constant failure rate
- Concluding with a wear-out period that exhibits an increasing failure rate.

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These curves are called Weibull distributions.  Used in Operation Research for addressing production and operational problems.

If you would tweak the parameters you could produce a curve very similar to the Warshaw curve, as there are enough parameters to play with.

So far for the maths.

Other examples of Warshaw curve

Low-End content:
- Flickr or Stock.XCHNG (high quality!)
- Blogs
- Free amateur adult content
- Product white paper of company

Medium content:
- Sony ImageStation has been closed - business model was: “paying” by receiving emails from Sony
- Newspapers, industry magazines with registrations allowing them to email the readers.
- Adult content portal websites linking to many other websites.
- White paper syndications: registration required

High-End content:
- Getty Images
- Newspapers with subscriptions
- Paid adult content
- Paid white papers and market surveys by research organizations: Forrester, IDC, Gartner, Jupiter, Ovum, Bloor, …

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AGAIN, MORE FROM THIS POST AND A FOLLOW-UP POST THAT DIVES DEEPER CAN BE FOUND ON LEADSExplorer.  

OTHER SECTORS FOLLOWING THE CURVE?

Adam Park recently applied the High-End/Low-End/No Middle paradigm of The Curve to the marketing and consumption of consumer products in the consumer electronics sector. It's an area that I've been talking about with some of my clients, but had yet to write about.

As Adam notes on his blog:

If you chart the customer distribution compared to price, you get a bell curve that looks quite like the one below:

 

Flipping the Bell Curve

Problem is that the bell curve is losing touch with the reality. Take cell phones or mobile devices for instance. You can now get a phone for free with subscription to a mobile carrier’s services. If you choose to do so, you can also get a premium phone that will cost you more than 500 bucks in some cases. What’s wrong with this picture? It ain’t no bell curve any more.

 

Now you need a different persepctive altogether! You need to flip the bell curve to meet a new curve: the Warshaw curve.

In the Warshaw curve era, the consumer distribution looks more like two hills and a valley in between. This means that there’ll be (a) land of free; (b) valley of mediocre; and (c) highland of premium.

(More of Adam's observations can be found here.)

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SLINGING THE CURVE

Here at CES in Las Vegas, Sling Media is showing off their new "SlingCatcher" — the reverse cousin of their Slingbox.

While the SlingBox let's you watch your home TV on your computer — even if you're on the other side of the globe — the SlingCatcher lets you play anything from your computer on your TV.

Now you can watch all of your favorite clips on the big screen, whether they're stored locally on your laptop or anywhere on the web.  We're talking the ability to watch YouTube clips on your flat-screen TV.  (That means more content consumption from the left-side of The Curve!  A bit more on that in a second.)

So, along with "What you want, when you want, and where you want," now you can add: "how you want it" (i.e. on the big screen or the small screen).

Here's a video clip of the SlingCatcher in action:   

As Daisy Whitney of TVWeek points out in her comment to this post, I originally neglected to mention that the SlingCatcher combined with the SlingProjector lets users "Sling" TV-to-TV, as well as Web-to-TV.

Along with giving users the ability to watch their bedroom TiVo and their laptop on their living room TV, it also lets them watch their home media on TV sets located outside of the home...further decreasing the desire to ever read a book again, or rent a movie from the local Blockbuster near their country house.

Bottom line for the individual content consumer:

More viewing of webclips (left-side of the curve!) and more viewing of episodes of their favorite shows like "House" (the right-side of the curve!) and less of the mid-level content — the stuff that falls out of the middle of the Curve in the post-DVR world. 

Steve Bryant's Hollywood Reporter / "Reel Pop" Blog

Steve Bryant,who writes Hollywood Reporter's terrific "Reel Pop" blog has some interesting observations and supporting statistics re The Curve.  (Thanks, Steve.)

THE WARSHAW CURVE ?

(If you've already read this post, just skip to the UPDATE at the BOTTOM.)

What is the Warshaw Curve?  (Or, perhaps more to the point: Why?)

Well, the modestly named Warshaw Curve is two things:

First, it's a pattern of content consumption.  More specifically, it's the contrast between two different patterns of video content consumption: a contrast between how all of us used to consume video content in the fading world of scheduled "traditional media," and how more and more of us now enjoy video in the ever-growing, on-demand and interactive world.

It's a concept I started noodling around with a couple of months ago, and recently started showing to a few friends who work in various corners of the media industry. 

(Usually I'd tentatively bring it up at the end of a conversation about something else entirely, I would draw the curves on the back of a piece of paper or napkin, sketchily put forth the idea and ask my companions for their thoughts.  During one particularly fruitful conversation, Andrew Heyward dubbed it, "The Warshaw Curve."  And, honestly, who am I to argue with Mr. Heyward?)

Below is the curve for TV News and Entertainment.

              (Click on the images to enlarge them.)

So, what's the significance of the Curve? 

I'm still noodling with that — but almost all the folks I've showed it to agree that, unlike Gertrude Stein's opinion of the city of Oakland, there's at least some there, there.  Or, more to the point, in the words of Stephen Stills: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

But the pattern is real, and I do think it tells us something about the direction in which content consumption is heading — and that has a good deal of significance for content producers, programmers and distributors. 

(I'll posit some of the details in future posts.)

Which finally brings us to the second thing that is "The Warshaw Curve"; i.e. this blog: 

More than just a place to post my musings on the curve, this blog is a place where I hope others will post their responses, thoughts and challenges. A place to think collaboratively along some of the tangents of the curve.  It's also a place where I'll be posting some examples of other trends that I've been encountering, and even some interviews with folks who work and play on various slopes along the curve.

So, here goes nothing.

Or, just maybe, something...............?

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UPDATE: "Disruptive Selection"

In May of 2009, I peaked over the shoulder of my 15 year-old biology (and "House") obsessed daughter as she was studying evolution, and I discovered the below:



(Click on the images to enlarge them.)

The curve on the bottom-right looks pretty familiar, doesn't it?

Makes sense that The Warshaw Curve, which is about the effect of disruptive technologies — like video on demand, YouTube, et al — would match up with what biologists refer to as the curve for "Disruptive Selection."