TV, the Metaverse… and Books

Ever since attending NBCUniversal’s ONE22 developer conference this week where they made their case for how they’re ushering in the future of TV, entertainment, and advertising, I’ve wondered what it meant for all kinds of media traditional and emerging.

At the same time, I’m prepping a talk – my first solo address in-person since 2019 – for Magnet Global where I’ll be presenting to a room full of agency executives about the metaverse, or the metaverses, or the metaversi (it deserves some kind of “cactus / cacti” treatment).

The future of TV and the metaverse are tied to each other because they’re competing for the same resource: attention.’

And yes, we can all wind up watching TV in the metaverse. We can be lying back in our virtual water beds (if they’re virtual, they might as well be water beds, or those coin-operated vibrating beds at motels) while strapped into our headsets and haptic full-body suits as we stream reruns of ALF (a hit show you may recall from NBC back when being invaded by cat-eating alien species was considered family-friendly entertainment).

Amidst all this, I woke up from a nightmare this week about a dream where I was trying to explain some ad-tech analytics concept over Zoom and then tie that into Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. As soon as I woke up, I opened up PowerPoint to start sketching ideas for this still-unwritten column.

The role of attention in video has fascinated me for two decades. As video consumption started surging after YouTube’s launch more than 15 years ago, I thought we’d have hit the upper limit by now.

Consider how we process other forms of media. Audio can be played all the time while consuming pretty much any media besides video, and part of TikTok’s brilliance was incorporating music as a core part of the video production experience. We process images instantaneously; swipe-oriented dating apps love exploiting this skill of ours, and some limit how many swipes you get unless you subscribe. A friend tweeted this week that she got to the end of Bumble, and while I’m sure she read every word of every potential match’s profile, I have a feeling her image processing dexterity deserves most of the credit.

Our reading comprehension may have suffered some by the rise of rapid-fire text-heavy news feeds. Still, it’s possible that our ability to skim content and get the gist of a few lines of text has improved. Skimming may be worthless when reading Portnoy’s Complaint, though rapid reading and comprehension make the infinite scroll apps possible. We’re a pretty dumb species, but we’re too smart for our own good.

Video requires more attention. Or at least, it seemed to. In 2005, I might have sounded somewhat intelligent to say you can’t watch a slew of mobile videos while watching TV. Today, I’d be verbally pelted with a barrage of “OK, Boomer!” remarks if I suggested anything similar. I’d imagine most Boomers now are probably used to streaming a Netflix show late at night in the background while working or playing on their phone or laptop.

The metaverse requires even higher demands on attention. And as some see it as a new internet entirely, within the metaverse, you can engage with video, audio, books, games, emails, phone calls, and whatever else strikes you. You can refer to it as an MLM, or a multilayered metaverse — and the reference to marketing schemes is intentional, given some of the scam artists plying their trade (that’s hardly unique to metaversi).

If we were plotting this on a chart, there was something else missing — and for a while, it did have that ‘je ne sais quoi’ factor, given I didn’t know what it was. I settled in that morning haze on the term “snackable factor” to balance “attention load.” And then I created a couple of very ugly, work-in-progress diagrams that you see below. Rather than polish them up or even fully flesh them out, I’m sharing them as is:

David

• The AdForum PHNX Awards 2022 are accepting entries. I even get to judge them this year, so let me judge you. Submit entries now.
• Matt Rosenberg: How to Sell Agency to Agents by Adam Conner of Dedicated.ai
• Five Things I Learned at SXSW 2022 by Aaron Strout
• CTV Advertisers Are Betting QR Codes Aren’t Just a Fad by Catherine Perloff of Adweek

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InSync.AI
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