Design & Culture in The Age of Digital Consumption?
The creative battle to impress in times of over-consumption of Entertainment & media
Entertainment & media — movies, audio, and digital platforms — have grown exponentially, since the last decade. To penetrate and impress audiences through an overload of media consumption, advertisers/marketers, writers, designers and filmmakers are taking drastic measures to stand out. Increasingly, this steers them away from creative instinct to a dependence on the subjective interpretation of data and statistics.
Why have we become so hard to impress?
The current quality of content is the highest it’s ever been. The budgets of on demand tv series and films are commensurate with what was recently considered, high-level Hollywood budgets.As a result, the eye of the ‘average’ viewer is now trained to detect and expect high (Hollywood-like) quality. This makes most audiences less accepting to anything of lower quality. The expectation and demand for high quality content has leaped exponentially.
Anything you create will be measured against a new quality bar.; The quality of your header video for a website will be measured against the quality of Blade Runner 2049. Your video editorial content piece will be measured against Netflix’ Chef’s Kitchen. Your “futuristic” app interface will be measured against the quality of Ghost in The Shell.
New content will be measured against its own highest form of published media.
All forms of narrative content face the same challenges. Writing, layout designs, typography, photography, a YouTubers logo sting, anything. A lot is out there, a lot is seen by many. New content is measured against its own highest form of published media.
Modern reactions of digital advertising & media
The ‘new formats of advertising’ are highly influenced by interpretations of data and statistics. For instance, advertisers (and so also content creators) are instructed to reveal the message of the films/animations within 5 seconds without sound. This belief is perpetuated by Facebook, Instagram, banner ads, etc making endless efforts to push something in your face, with only a few seconds at most to digest. — But what’s the quality in 5 sec if there’s no further engagement? If anything, you are just making disposable media faster, not less disposable.
For your story/message to land, get people engaged with interesting, relevant and/or well-crafted material.
Bucking the 5sec trend in advertising is ‘NOWNESS’, a platform with high quality stories (mostly video), where the average length of video is 4:30 min. On this platform, 60% of users finish entire video’s. This means high engagement with the message. Brands often make use of this by sponsoring / co-creating beautiful video’s with filmmakers on the platform. This is a collective win for both the viewer and the brand.To create awareness beyond the platform to the film, NOWNESS drops shorter edits of the films on social platforms like Facebook.
High interest or high reach?
By following certain rules and patterns based on data & statistics, you can expand the reach of your content in the earliest stage. However, to spread your content (design, film, writing, other) in the early stage, means to create something which is easily acceptable and comprehensive to all audiences. This will likely dilute the strength of the content’s tone and character which can keep the impact on interest at a minimum.
Purple zone — A wide reach spreading all the way out, which can be quickly measured through impressions and statistics. Not always bad, as it can be useful for established products / brands that don’t need to impress, but rather to directly inform and/or utilise.
Pink zone — Less wide reach, but mainly concentrated on giving more to a specific audience. Useful to impress with high engagement of a specific group, create culture and ignite organic reach through the core group. Since this potential organic reach is driven by the emotional reaction of people, the results are hard to measure on short term.
Ignite organic reach through the core interest group.
Embrace the creative melt-pot
One of the developments which I see as a great benefit, is the blend of diverse media types.
Viewers have increasingly high quality standards and access to technology. We can’t make any type of media or content less important than the other. The quality of online (interactive) films must simply be as high as broadcast material. Photography quality on websites must be as high as a glossy, coffee table book.
There is no excuse for treating your content one medium as less important than on another
By blending formats and content and media, we can make better content. Not shorter content. Write better copy, not shorter. Let forms of design evolve, not standardise. Allow it all to blend together and reach strong levels of engageable storytelling.
To sum up…
In reaction to being spoiled with on-demand high-quality content, messages are getting shorter, words are getting simpler, visual communication is getting more direct. But people are not getting dumber (believe it or not). If anything, they are more trained to perceive high quality content which leads to a stronger sense of self-curation where they deposit their attention.
For your story/message to get across, you will need to get people engaged with interesting, relevant and/or very well-crafted material (and a bit of creative trust).
(obviously I am not talking about messages from your local grocery store about diaper discount deals, but here you go).
A big thank you to tobin nageotte for fine tuning this article.
About me
I am a Designer / Art Director, currently based in Amsterdam. With more than 10 years of experience in Advertising and Media as a designer and/or art director I have worked on a ton of projects in all scales, budgets and goals, which continuously lead to questions around reach and interest; An on-going battle of creative trust in designers vs interpretation of data and statistic from day one.
