Evolving entertainment landscape
The world of Entertainment is constantly evolving but right now feels like a moment in time where a couple of major shifts are aligning to mark the beginning of a new era; the end of ‘peak TV’ combined with a maturing of the social media into algorithmically driven personalised entertainment.
People are (for the most part, subconsciously) honing new strategies for making decisions about what to watch. Consumption of long-form ‘TV style’ content appears to be narrowing; shows that are ‘winners’ win the attention of everyone and then benefit from being spoken about; creating a virtuous word-of mouth cycle.
In Social, there is a general understanding and acceptance of the role the finely tuned algorithms on platforms are playing – and as the relevance of content continues to increase (and the social platform landscape continues to evolve) a willingness of people to pay for access (often in the form of low cost, recurring subscriptions).
From a Platform perspective, we’re continuing to see emergence of new players and the morphing of established ones. The rise of Community Platforms is a nod to the next phase of ‘Community driven’ social while the migration of YouTube to the TV is a demonstration of the continued blurring of lines between screens.
And of course this creates major implications for marketers in this space; namely entertainment marketers need to think about creating communications that work at three levels.
They’ll need to work with the algorithms that drive visibility in Platform, embrace the people driven shift to Community relevance and still maintain a sense of broader cultural heft to not only create a sense that a show or film is everywhere but that people are talking about it.
