Has the death of traditional media arrived? NOT.
Though the pundits would have you believe social media is replacing everything from websites, to marketing, to garden hoses, well, the proof is in the pudding. It's not. And you know what? It may NEVER.
Don't get me wrong, as a social native – ha, take that "digital natives" – I strongly believe in the power and place for social media. It's not however, replacing anything.
This article provides at least some proof of that, which leads me to the real topic of this post, the death of traditional media.
In 1994 when I first started to dive into digital, the pundits described a world where there would be no more paper, no TV, no radio, no movies shown in a movie theater. Certainly, there is and there has been a lot of moves in this direction. But just a striking, there have been moves by the businesses who've made money in those spaces for more years than digital has evolved.
Newspapers are making money digitally. Television is reinventing itself as I write this by making itself social, available digitally after the fact, and mobilly enabled (is mobilly even a word?) Radio has embraced and expanded its reach digitally – just look at what NPR has done.
What the pundits almost always miss is the consumer behavior piece of this. This article is about Television, so let's focus on that.
Every demographic watches television. Certainly, there are different ways to consume it and engage in it, and that is where the generations differ. However, even Millenials are eating TV up as they watch Walking Dead and tweet about it using program supplied hashtags in real time on their mobile devices.
It's easy for me to write this as I did not make the predictions (though I did predict AOL would die and look at what they've done to stay alive!) But as we watch this all play out, and evidenced by my AOL prediction, it is obvious that as much as we'd love to believe that traditional media and marketing will die, that it will not. It will evolve as consumers find ways to utilize it that even the pundits cannot predict.
What do you think?