What is an embarrassment of niches?

The modern media landscape is no longer an aggregate of mass-appeal content for a monolithic mass audience. It is now a diverse field of specific appetites sated by content specific to those appetites. We no longer live in a world where everyone can be counted on to watch the evening news with Walter Cronkite or 'All in the Family' in prime time.

There are now as many kinds of content and platforms carrying it as there are tastes among the population, available on demand, on that screen in our house called a television, or a computer, or a laptop, or a tablet, or a smart phone.

I first heard the term "embarrassment of niches" used by Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News at a speech he gave back in 2003. It stuck with me and continues to be a good model for thinking about the variety of media content, formats, and vehicles available. America and her audiences can scratch any content itch. Each and every one of us can be anywhere other than where we are, consuming nearly any kind of content we wish, by simply reaching into our pockets and pulling out a mini-supercomputer with a high-resolution screen. Bearing with content in which one may or may not have a particular interest to get to that content in which one does have particular interest is no longer necessary. We can now turn to myriad media and find, on command, an indulgence of our interests, whims, or confirmation of our biases.

What to do about this landscape of microaudiences and content singularities?

The way to look at the subject is two-fold. There’s the view as a mediaologist and the view as a media ecologist. Both would come to the same or similar conclusions, but both have different applications for them. The former is concerned with the impact on media as a tool for marketing and what the impact, in turn, is on satisfying business objectives. The latter is concerned with the impact on society as a whole. Both matter, perhaps now more than ever.

When I first heard the term "embarrassment of niches" I saw it as a positive development where diversity of interests and identities would manifest and help us all actualize as better selves. Myriad media vehicles and multi-channel usage would mean a panoply of media platforms all enjoying some level of simultaneous deep commitment on the part of their audiences, fuller lives being lived by more meaningful engagement with content from which we derived knowledge and meaning.

Time and research has shown, however, that the human attention span is more like a plum: with every slice, you lose some juice, until there's no juice left at all. Not only can humans only pay attention to a few things at any given moment limiting the quality of their attention, their attention spans might be getting shorter in the absolute. A non-peer reviewed study conducted by Microsoft back in 2015 concluded that humans have experienced a 30% decrease in attention from 2000 to 2015 and now rests at 8.25 seconds on average. Note that this was a study done on advertising, not content in general, and likely says less about our attention spans and more about our multitasking. That said, this might hold for something like "accidental attention” but not for “intentional attention.” The former pertaining to ads, crap on Facebook, the news snippets you scroll past on your Google launch page; the latter is binge watching 4 seasons of “Narcos” in a week’s time.

Something else that is now true that wasn't when the term "embarrassment of niches" was first coined is platform consolidation. At one point, we thought we'd have computers, TVs, radios, magazines, newspapers, etc. Not now. Now there's really just two channels. There’s mobile and there’s TV. Mobile can take us down a lot of rabbit holes, but the “channel” is practically just one: social. One can assert multi-vehicle usage in that channel but it all boils down to one channel on one platform. Some might say it’ll all be mobile, but I think it depends on how a consumer wants to resolve the tension of the content consumption trade-off: quality of experience vs. convenience of experience. As the friction goes down on mobile and TV in getting at what you want, how you want it, the quality of the experience will be one of format (big screen, little screen; surround sound, 4k?),

The number of vehicles has never been more numerous. But does this still signify an embarrassment of niches as much as it does simply a deluge of content in general, where the niche is incidental to the volume rather than the cause of it? And not all of those vehicles serve as carriage for the marketer. This is one of the challenges to stacking the niches as it were to yield the reach necessary to impact business objectives requiring scale. This is more a challenge to TV/video content than pure digital content, where the challenge of myriad vehicles is addressed with automated discovery, analysis, implementation, and execution. That of course has led to its own host of problems -- lack of transparency and ensuing fraud, problems with data hygiene, media weight waste -- and I would argue does not yield the kind of quality scale needed.

The mediaologist looks at these conditions and asks, how can I leverage these conditions on behalf of my client’s business objectives? Assuming brand over direct response objectives — or even “brand response” objectives — how do I construct a communication plan that achieves salient, noticeable, emotional relevance while building and enforcing memory structure in a constant, far-reaching way? As a mediaologist, I am forced to revisit a realization that has kicked around in my head for a while: maybe digital just isn’t that good for advertising. Marketing, perhaps, but advertising as it has worked; not so much. Certainly, this isn’t completely and always the case. I still make a living doing it for clients, but more and more I find it continues to be an anemic tool for the project of advertising qua advertising and better at finding and reinforcing message, such as it is, with those that are already in the marketer's sphere of reach and influence. More and more the use case for advertising is diminishing. More and more I wonderi, is advertising to marketing what newspapers are to media?

The media ecologist looks at this and wonders what the effects are of the deluge of content on the social fabric as a whole. What is the logical conclusion of a society living in a bubble bath of confirmation bias? Interesting to think that the technology, the data, the algorithms, made the bubbles bigger than I’d have ever imagined them being, and have served as a kind of Hogwarts Sorting Hat all its own. When I first thought of an embarrassment of niches some years ago, I thought people would seek out their preferences proactively, being involved and deliberate -- and deliberative -- about their world and the media that's shaping it. Pre-social media, it didn’t occur to me that the technology, data, and algorithms would turn us all into more passive receptors, less interested in engagement, learning, or even entertainment, and more simply seeking distraction from whatever we are and wherever it is we find ourselves.

The business challenges to reaching potential customers and insinuating a value proposition into their field of attention are significant. Models for how to reach out and touch someone are so hardwired into the marketplace fabric, it is nearly impossible to imagine something else. But something else it is going to have to be.

The cultural challenges are even more significant. Recent developments concerning truth, fact, foreign meddling with media to influence elections, fake news, identity politics and tribalism, and an always-on memesphere that takes important issues requiring complicated nuance and trades them for simple bluntness is arguably creating the conditions for cultural anarchy and an end to civitas.

It's time to believe that asking questions about media, about its role in business and its role in our culture, is one of the most important acts we can perform as citizens of our community, our nation, and our world.