Plenty of thunder and lighting across the mediascape lately, with BuzzFeed News shuttering, VICE declaring bankruptcy and Hollywood writers on strike for basic necessities while their bosses enjoy obscene compensation.
Mark Kreidler for Capital & Main:
The studios have historically disdained their content creators, one reason why unionization among the industry’s writers goes back more than a century. As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, Irving Thalberg, who helped create MGM Studios and became its head producer at the age of 26 in 1925, once said, “What’s all this business about being a writer? It’s just putting one word after another.”
It’s almost impossible for the younger whippersnappers to understand how 36 years ago, kids like myself could have been racing home on a bike to witness the birth of a fourth television network. Al Bundy, a mediocre shoe salesman emotionally abusive to his wife and incapable of relating to his kids, was panacea to American men in need a new proxy to express emotion after Archie Bunker’s chair was shipped to the Smithsonian.
The world I grew up in had limits, hushed voices, mocked the different and feared what challenged them. The toughest question asked of people was, “Where’s the beef?” Yet our world was never so colorless or limited as that TV dial insisted. Observe the multiverse of gloriously strange, funny, unhinged, based, beautiful voices around us now and you might wonder how anyone could ever be misled into believing the human experience was limited to two crummy flavors.
So how can media companies have this incredible, vibrant creative community to draw from, yet continually arrive at bad outcomes — dull content that lets us down?
This is a sprawling octopus of a story to wrap your arms around, so let me help you out with some act breaks today.
ACT I: The Curse of the Page Views
I’m going to let you all in on a dirty secret — take any quantitative digital analytics you see in the wild with a truckload of salt.
Let’s start with a primitive but easy-to-understand data point as our measuring stick, “the page view” (though we could just as easily walk through this with Nielsen ratings, or streaming measurement, etc.).
You wouldn’t be faulted for thinking this business would be straightforward — for example, someone clicks on a page, that registers as one view. If that person shares it with a friend, who also clicks on it, now there’s two views.
A frequent acronym used a lot around here is GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out. So when discussing any data output, shift thy eyes to the input. The lines of code meant to capture data are fungible. Who in the organization monitors and maintains this code? How are any anomalies communicated to the product team? Does the organization even still have dedicated engineering teams?
Those lines of code compete with every ad tech and embed jammed inside. You don’t always need a new phone -- sometime that screen is sluggish under the strain of junk code. From the BBC:
Ads are responsible for making webpages slow to a crawl, suggests analysis of the most popular one million websites.
About 60% of the total loading time of a page was caused by scripts that place adverts or analyse what users do, he found.
If an organization doesn’t have dedicated data engineers working with a product team and QA to keep this stuff operational, there’s no way to know what actual flaws exist in the data. This isn’t “set it and forget it” kind of stuff.
Even if the code were flawless, consider then if the reader views this page in a private browser, or is using an outdated browser at a local library. Complications are legion and technology won’t stand still. You fix yesterday’s bug while tomorrow’s is being written.
There’s always going to be flaws in the data, it only matters to what degree and the weight it plays in your decision-making.
Let’s look at a few instructive examples:
Remember when your local TV news station couldn’t publish enough mugshot slideshows? Even though the people in those galleries frequently had charges dropped, or were never charged at all? That didn’t stop police from making them available for the local news who were all too eager to be of “public service.”
The Columbia Journalism Review explains the true business rationale, from 2018:
During a conference call with employees in the Lee Enterprises newspaper chain ... an editor at the Times of Northwest Indiana explained a secret behind her paper’s online traffic boom. Mugshots, she shared in a presentation, had been a “game-changer” for the paper, which includes collections of booking photos below its crime stories and standalone galleries of recent arrestees.
For some local newsrooms, mugshots—which are often public records, and easy to obtain from local law enforcement—remain a staple, even as others turn away from them. …
North Carolina’s Salisbury Post runs a “Mugshot Monday” feature, which it launched after the paper ceased publishing its Monday and Saturday editions, to provide web content that wouldn’t fill the next day’s print news hole.
“It usually is the most popular thing on the website for that particular day,” says Editor Elizabeth Cook.
People clicked on mugshots, keep giving ‘em mugshots -- whatever damage it may cause is someone else’s problem, right?
Disgusting as all that was, there’s actually a business disconnect happening here. The content creators assume the metric of success are page views, and that more page views equals a positive outcome. They don’t consider the low quality of that view, or how each mindless click through a gallery would cycle low-value banner ad impressions (that may not even be in view). For the sales team, this content was essentially worthless.
Same kind of thing happened a decade ago when one conservative weirdo in a fedora referred more traffic to news sites than all social media combined. Before newsrooms tried “going viral,” there was The Drudge Report. PBS News Hour explains:
The Drudge Report outranks social media when it comes to driving news traffic to top Web sites, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
In a comprehensive examination of online traffic data provided by Nielsen, Pew found that only “three sites ever account for more than 10 percent of the traffic to any [major news Web site]: Google (search and news combined), the Drudge Report and Yahoo (search and news combined).”
Back then a Drudge link equaled monster traffic. But would that spike get monetized? You can’t plan for a lightning bolt. Any premium banner ads being served would likely have been throttled to prevent burning through the entire ad spend (which may need to run for weeks). So you’re left to house ads and filler — pennies on the dollar. And 98% of that traffic wasn’t coming back tomorrow when the sugar rush is over and traffic is back to normal.
Let me clue you in here on the only true gain -- the digital manager can visualize that record-smashing page view data into a nifty e-mail for the boss, who then forwards it upstairs to executives, and from there it spreads until everyone in the organization feels sufficiently good they’re winning that day (along with a little extra nothing in their paycheck that week).
I did call that a gain. One must manage up.
Like I said at the top, here I’m using page views but we could easily be using any data set relied on to do your job for you help you make informed decisions. Data can be a big old liar sometimes, and being popular for a hot minute does not a business make.
So with that healthy skepticism of the quality of the data in our pocket, and the perils of clout chasing…
ACT II: Cowardly Executives Have Mid Data and Zero Guts
That’s right, led by industry juggernaut Netflix, creative executives continue to lean into data to decide what stories get told. From Business Insider:
For those who haven't done creative deals with Netflix, its armies of data scientists and technologists have taken on an almost mythic power, purportedly spinning audience data into clear-cut decisions about creative projects.
But the process is much more complicated than that. According to three former Netflix executives who spoke to Insider, as well as others who've done deals there, the streamer's reliance on data is both a potent weapon and a "flawed science."
Hey, I used that word in the headline!
"Sometimes it was helpful and sometimes it was totally useless," this exec said of Netflix's analytics. "If something is really unique or a risk, they're not going to say, 'Go with God,' or 'Take that risk.' They'll say, 'Our data does not support [it]."
Now’s a good time to remind people that data can’t predict future trends, it can only plot existing ones.
Here’s legendary music producer Rick Rubin in a recent interview for 60 Minutes explaining a simple truth to He Who I Shall Remain Cross With:
Rick Rubin: “The audience comes last. … The audience doesn’t know what they want. The audience only knows what’s come before.”
Data is there to support the savvy executive, not limit them. History is filled with examples where young voices were handed the reins and given the chance to make something new.
Disney Studios enjoyed massive success under Chief Creative Officer Alan Horn, a highly-respected figure in Hollywood who retired in 2021.
Alan Horn will retire as chief creative officer of Disney Studios Content, capping a successful nearly decade-long run at the Walt Disney Company. It was one that saw Horn stabilize the film operation after a tumultuous period when Rich Ross took the reins for three tumultuous years. Under Horn, Disney successfully integrated Marvel’s film operations, rebooted the “Star Wars” film franchise after buying Lucasfilm in 2012, and maintained its dominance in the animation space.
Now try to name three Disney films since 2022 out of the 20 that were released. Lightyear flopped, the Tom Hanks live-action Pinocchio was called a cursed abomination, Disenchanted was a fairy fail, and apparently the only people interested seeing Strange World are renegade schoolchildren in Florida.
I’ll bet on paper these projects all appeared like good ideas. This content is like “X,” and “Y” did well with the demographic we want to reach, and there’s already a built-in audience as evidenced by “Z.”
Richard Feynman would be laughing at how scientific this all was.
Being able to confidently fill in the blanks of an equation may aid in a creative project’s success, but it’s no guarantee. More important, you don’t need data at all — you simply need to believe in the pitch and the artist.
Incidentally, Alan Horn is now consulting at Warner Bros. Discovery. Nice pickup.
One more great example is producer and writer Damon Lindelof, well-known for his work on LOST, The Leftovers and Watchmen. Rather than create a new series himself, he sought out Tara Hernandez and helped her co-create Mrs. Davis (Peacock), a bonkers show about a nun on a global quest to find the Holy Grail so she can save humanity from a helpful artificial intelligence that only wants us to be happy.
(My bias shows, this is my favorite series of the year)
Anyone who understands writing know it’s about character choices, and here Damon makes one I think more should emulate — from Vulture:
“Tara is unequivocally the boss. That was very clear on both our sides from the jump. …
“I want to make it very clear that I don’t distinguish myself from those [abusive] showrunners. I was one of the people that you’re describing. If you were in the writers’ room on Lost — I can’t speak for all the writers in the room, but I know that for many of them, their mental health was not prioritized. There was toxic, misogynistic, even racist language in those rooms because I allowed it to happen. …
“All I can tell you is that I became aware of that behavior and tried to iterate forward. There’s a finite amount of microphones in this job, and you have to put down the mic and let someone else pick it up. You can use your experience to offer some guidance in terms of the mistakes that you made, but more importantly, it’s not too late for me to learn. I’m now the oldest person in the room by five or six years, and the youngers, they definitely do prioritize work-life balance and mental health.”
Honestly, sometimes you forget what inward-reflection and accountability looks like. Bravo, Damon — you broke your loop. There’s a lot more in that Vulture link about the non-typical voices in the writer’s room worth checking out.
Maybe the next indelible moments won’t be found in an Excel spreadsheet or some data visualization dashboard. Those moments live in someone’s heart, and the business of creation needs to shift toward elevating voices instead of being prisoner to some flawed data set incapable of predicting what people will want, resulting in outcomes functionally equivalent to those old mugshot slideshows.
Hey, at least you can’t fault the executive for a bad outcome, right? They Just did what the algorithm told them to do.
Whew, okay. I think that about covers everything, but I feel like I’m forgetting something...
ACT III: A Brief History of Ad Sales and Why We’re Trapped in This Nightmare
Right, the money. I’ll be quick as I can.
The thing about the television advertising business in its glory days, there wasn’t a lot of selling necessary. Remember that bit about having only three channels? Folk in the sales department didn’t sell things, they answered the phone. The real skill was in increasing your share of the client’s business, hard work you can only do over cocktails and steak dinners to strengthen the relationship.
People worry if there’s a living wage, people will stay home and not work. Hey, we used to pay TV ad salesmen to leave the house and not work.
Obviously, the good times came to a crashing halt with hundreds of cable channels, digital media, and finally social media in the wake gobbling everything up once all those martinis and oysters made everyone’s reflexes sluggish.
Here’s where “making the advertising client happy” had it’s day, and your favorite websites were plastered with intrusive homepage takeovers, expanding ads, and whatever new IAB advertising standards the industry was hoping to adopt that year.
The money of significance was still tied to broadcast, though — not digital. Any money there was often token, or a component of a larger buy. Streaming has turned out to be an entirely different animal, and it’s costing these companies money. They don’t like that.
To give you a personal example, I’m old enough to have worked for a TV station that had over a 50% profit margin. That means for every buck you put into the business, you got more than two bucks back. That’s a helluva investment.
Those days are long gone.
Make no mistake, the ad tiers Netflix are trying to introduce are not for the benefit of consumers in need of lower-cost options, they’re for the ad sales teams to place inventory without having to radically change how any of this has worked for decades.
Let’s check in with Digiday and see how Netflix is doing with that whole ad business that was going to allow them to book a billion dollars in ad sales:
Earlier this year, it emerged that Netflix was exploring potentially adjusting its ad strategy after what can be considered a tricky start to the advertising business.
Sources said outcomes could include the streaming service overhauling its relationship with Microsoft, which has powered Netflix’s ad tech. Sources familiar with Netflix’s early conversations suggested they were a precursor to the streaming giant eventually building or buying its own ad tech.
Such developments can be seen as a tacit admission that things did not go as planned in the early phases of the Netflix-Microsoft partnership. After all, the streaming giant had to issue rebates to advertisers after its initial campaigns failed to live up to earlier expectations.
Allow me to level-set here — you’re looking at an industry in sweaty, desperate panic.
Don’t believe me? I’ll show you.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone after that all this Elon Musk tasked NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino with getting the business side of his flailing Twitter in order, since getting back the advertisers Elon drove away would be helpful.
In her job interview with Elon at an event a few weeks ago, pay attention to this key part starting at at 22:57:
Linda Yaccarino: “In the middle should be advertising opportunity, that sounds like a great opportunity. I can talk about my brand, I can get my customers to communicate, and then they can also buy stuff. That sounds pretty good, right?”
Elon Musk: “You'll be able to buy things just directly on Twitter. One click -- boom, done.”
Linda Yaccarino: “But they need to feel that there is an opportunity for them to influence what you’re building — that vision.”
Notice there? These are two people talking about very, very different things.
Linda Yaccarino: “It’s more of an open feedback loop for the advertising experts in this room to help develop Twitter into a place where they will be excited about spending more money. Product development and content moderation — that’s what the influence is.” ...
Elon Musk: “It’s totally cool to say you want to have your advertising appear in certain places in Twitter, and not other places. But it is not cool to say what Twitter will do.
”And if that means losing advertising dollars, we lose it. But freedom of speech is paramount.”
Yeah, this is a recipe for disaster here. It’s clear what Linda wants — she wants to be able to go to advertising clients and demonstrate Twitter will tailor the product and user experience to best serve their ad client needs. Elon shuts the door on her emphatically.
Advertising clients appear to be running low on authentic approaches to reach younger audiences who, believe it or not, have not grown up anticipating a Super Bowl :30 spot. They think your ads suck.
(I’m going to spare you by not even going to get into all the junk data that gets passed around on this end. Suffice to say, GIGO all the way.)
So yeah, I think that about wraps it up. This is why all the content is so dull — cowardly executives are scared of getting fired if they stick their necks out without some junk data point to support it, and the ad sales teams can’t figure out how to pay for any of this awesome content while still holding onto their obscene bonuses and three-martini lunches.
Gee, it’s a mystery why we keep ending up with these bad results.
Support writers and follow all the awesome DailyKos coverage of the #WGAstrike.
Tax Musk. Fund the Arts. Get a different result.
Okay, I’m through. See you in the comments.