Media Dojo

The last couple of interviews I’ve done with ooyala and Tumri have me thinking that we’re getting closer to a Just-in-Time World for media and marketing. By that, I mean that the action (the ability to profit disproportionately) is moving to how fast and how well you can customize a content experience or an ad at the margin. It used to be that leverage was all about aggregating eyeballs. No argument there in terms of creating an efficient media buy for a big advertiser. Scale has its advantages and always will.

But as we’ve found in other industries like automotive or consumer electronics, scale only makes you a player. Soon enough, you get a disruptive force like Toyota saying that you can customize the hell out of your car and we’ll build it, and ship it to your dealer in a week or less. That’s where scale takes on a whole new meaning. It’s no longer only the ability to spit out more units at a lower per unit cost. Scale becomes a game where the trick is how fast you can orchestrate a massive ecosystem to deliver an individualized experience.

I’m not saying we’re there today with media and advertising. But some of the building blocks have been put in place. Cloud infrastructures are becoming the assembly lines for a new breed of media and marketing disruptor. Whether it’s Tumri blowing up display ads into objects that are then re-assembled on the fly based on impression data. Or ooyala seeding video streams with a slew of clickable elements, the game is shifting. Like it or not, principles of e-commerce are being injected into media and advertising just like retail, travel, real estate, automotive, and financial services.

The advantages of scale will never go away. But how those advantages get re-distributed along the value chain and which new players control them, ah, now there’s an interesting question.

Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks. I’m banging out a 5-6min screencast called “When Media Acts like Software” to take a first stab at the idea of a JIT world for media and advertising. It’ll be a first rev so it’ll eventually join my 8th grade class picture at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. But that’s often the only way to learn. Just F*ckin’ Doo It as Nike would say had it started in New Jersey.

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