Flow Conference 2008: What We're All Thinking/Watching

One last thought on something that Joshua Green said at my roundtable at this year's Flow Conference: the visibility of ratings, of what we believe to be popular, is part of nation-building and imagined community building through mass media. If we see that American Idol is a highly rated program, then we’ll watch it to be part of that cultural zeitgeist and we’ll believe it to be a reflection (for better or worse, inclusively or exclusively) of what it means to be American. It occurs to me that the numbers are so much more important to all of us as viewers trying to understand what our culture is and how it thinks and what our places are in it now than they were in the past precisely because there are millions of media options today that we can all share with one another.

50 years ago, there were three networks, 5 to 20 radio stations per market, and a handful of movies at the theater at a given time. If you wanted to get an idea of what America was thinking, what its passions were, how it felt about an external threat or its future or its past, you had limited resources from which to draw from. The three networks gave you an idea of what your fellow citizens were thinking (nevermind the fact that they probably didn’t arrive on those thoughts on their own and that the cultural preoccupations on display were the preoccupations of coastal elites or what those elites imagined the public might be thinking or wanting). We had a shared consciousness. It was a shared consciousness that was forced upon us, but a shared one nonetheless.

Today, with the wealth of outlets and content available to the individual (working on some hard data w/ Russ Neuman to back this up), there is no de facto shared consciousness. That is, it is not dictated by the limits of technology and communications infrastructure and economy in the way that it was 50 years ago. And yet we still want to know what our fellow citizens (or fellow humans all over the planet) are thinking about. How do we know what they’re thinking about? Ratings. That represents the need for accurate ratings, not from the advertisers, the networks, or the creators, but from us, the viewers. Now more than ever, in a world where there is no de facto shared consciousness, we look to the ratings as a way to tell us what others are thinking and where we stand in that larger community.

Flow Conference 2008: Thoughts on Media Metrics

After a day at the Flow conference, I’m reminded of how good this conversational round-table format can be. The Narrative Franchises panel was amazing: 40 or 50 people in the room, some of which were experts in the field who probably knew more and thought more deeply about the this phenomenon than anyone else on the planet, and instead of just throwing out self-indulgent tangents about their ultra-specific area of interest (as often happens at academic gatherings), they were contributing information or viewpoints that were totally relevant to the discussion, fleshing out the picture we had a franchises with examples, considering exceptions to rules and considering whether they constituted the re-write of those rules. I got the feeling we were building a larger understanding of the phenomenon than any of us came in with. It reminded me of the kind of collaboration that I thought could only happen online.

Media metrics (the most famous of which is Nielsen TV ratings) are to be thought of as currency, like money, or degrees on a thermometer. They provide a universal, transferable, singular standard by which we measure the value of something.

What creators really want to know is: what combination of textual characteristics and audience characteristics lead to more people buying an advertised product within that text and/or paying for the text itself? Whether or not certain people choose to watch a show or see a movie at a given time is an imperfect measure of that. The perfect measure would: not just measure whether or not someone was tuned in, but what was going on in their heads (look to transportation measures for this). It would also measure whether they viewed something at any given time (look to Tivo data for this). It would also measure the degree to which they talked about the content with their friends (look to optimedia’s measurements of buzz, or searches like Technorati that could tell you what people are blogging about, but also take valence into account). It would take into account previous viewing and purchasing experience. It would take into account characteristics of the text itself. Its not an infinite number of things you need to quantify and combine into some sort of quotient or scale, but its more multifarious than we thought it was before, or had the ability to measure before.

One of the dilemmas confronting researchers, ad people, and producers/networks will be whether or not they go with a census (in which case they're bound to lose a lot of the aforementioned nuance) or a sample (in which case you might not get the generalizability you desire). Maybe a flexible system like YouTube, where the stakes are lower, ad money-wise, will evolve new metrics quicker. They’ll weed out the ones that don’t tell you anything new about viewers and their desires and habits, but new tools for gauging that will evolve. Insight is just the beginning of that.