Who has the most leverage in the media ecosystem?

If you said consumers, I believe you are correct.  Without an audience for your brand/content/site, it’s essentially worthless.  With billions of consumers in the world, the leverage lies within.

Media overall is going digital.  Television, print, radio, and OOH are all moving in this direction (some at a more rapid pace than others).

If you grow up emmersed in technology and digital media, you are considered a digital native.  According to Wikipedia, a digital native is a person who has grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet, mobile phones and MP3. A digital immigrant is an individual who grew up without digital technology and adopted it later. A digital native might refer to their new “camera”; a digital immigrant might refer to their new “digital camera”.

The future of the world will eventually be controlled by digital natives.  If you want to see how a digital native consumes media, take a peek at Fred Wilson’s recent posting about his children.

There are many interesting observations that Fred calls out, but one of the most interesting to me is that his children are device agnostic.  The future of media isn’t all online, in a magazine, on a television, on the radio, etc.  Content consumption should device agnostic and let the consumer decide where they want to engage with it.  Afterall, with billions of digital natives in the future, this will certainly play out.  One thing to also keep in mind:  television isn’t dead.  Television is evolving into people’s lifestyles contrary to when people had to create their lifestyle around television.

Just some food for thought on a Sunday.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Advertising & Marketing, Internet & Web X.0, Media & Entertainment, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.