It's Now Your Value

This great article from the New York Times inspired me to learn more about the concepts of content and value as applied to the entertainment world.

Value and content were once the same thing. After all, if television said it was good for us, surely it was, right? But as most of us realize, things have changed - and so too have the concepts of value and content.

In the past, the very people who determined content were often the same people establishing what our values would be. They did this by telling us that their content was valuable. We had no choice. They even set the time we needed to watch or pay attention. This has changed profoundly.
Executives worry constantly about content for their new media platforms, and I realize how the executive mindset has not changed. The progressively emerging reality shows that  people will be willing to pay for value as opposed to prioritizing content. Content is simply not necessarily valuable anymore! This is nothing new! But our current media context reveals the lies we have to buy into.

 

Were I one of those executives, I would stop worrying so much about content and I go back to the fundamentals of figuring out what people really care about today. With this new mindset, eventually, the conversation would lead to art, to stories, to meaning, to offering your public something that truly matters for 3 reasons: it touches them, it can be shared, it can be recommended.