Media & the Future of E-Commerce

1. Media from Past to Present

In the grand scheme of world history, “leisure” is a fairly new concept that arose in the mid 19th century. In economic terms, we could spend time working to generate an income, or we could spend time giving up that income on leisure. At the time, leisure included activities such as reading, going to see a play, spending time with friends, sleeping, etc. Prior to electricity, none of these options truly competed against one another: One could only read so late, local theaters were still scarce, and the news only came once a day. So, naturally, when television arrived in 1927, it dominated.

Yet Hollywood wasn’t the only industry wanting to benefit from the new medium. Every brand looked for the chance of reaching the millions of American sitting in front of their TV set. U.S. watchmaker Bulova was the first brand to ever air a commercial on July 1, 1941 — right before the beginning of a baseball game in New York between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies — a spot that cost the company a mere $9. By the late 1950s, along with the democratization of colored TVs, the advertising industry grew into a money-making behemoth. The co-dependence of content-makers and advertisers fueled over $10B in ad-revenue by 1980. By 2010, over 280M Americans were spending an average of 5 hours a day watching TV — the industry had finally peaked.

In 2019, the scenery has entirely changed. While TV isn’t going away anytime soon, it has lost its prevalence. For the first time, we’re offered a never ending amount of leisure options, as a result of which our attention span has dangerously decreased. Human attention is finite, which is why the “attention economy” has never been more talked about. There have never been more applications available a mere swipe away from one another on our phones. We have YouTube, Tik Tok, Snapchat, Instagram… and mobile games like Fortnite and Candy Crush voraciously competing against one another to retain our attention. In other words, Big Tech is taking time away from television as a traditional form of entertainment.

We used to wonder “What to watch?” Now, we wonder “Whether to watch?” For millennials or Gen Z, the answer is to play a game or to refresh our social media accounts. And why not? Hollywood isn’t the only industry offering enticing narratives to obsessively follow anymore — digital content creators, mobile games (think League of Legends or Episode), and social media more broadly, offer great narratives to follow as well. Even better — a mobile game today never truly ends, a social media feed can keep getting refreshed — these alternative forms of entertainment have become more interactive and more immersive than ever before.

2. Gaming as a new form of television

The gaming industry boasts similar characteristics that ensured the mass appeal of TV, a thriving ad-tech industry, an abundance of content, frictionless discovery, and intense competition driving better content.

Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have reigned over gaming for nearly two decades selling games with hefty price tags ranging from $40 to $60. But with Apple and Google now becoming the 4th and 5th largest gaming platforms on mobile, it has never been easier to develop and publish a game. In that way, it has also never been cheaper to play them.

With hundreds of thousands of games published every year, competition to acquire, retain, and monetize players has never been so high. In part, this is leading developers to surpass themselves thereby creating better and more addictive content. Perhaps even more importantly, gaming historically required skills and full attention. Gamers needed to spend hours playing to level up. Today, mobile gaming can be played half mindedly as is watching television. Other spaces such as esports lets users enjoy professional play at any time. Live streamers enable you to play without ever using a controller — in fact, recorded video games are YouTube’s most watched clips.

Where gaming surpasses television is in the characteristics of its content. Television’s main challenge is its finite length. TV shows and movies all come to an end. Additional series are costly to produce. A consumer might re-watch some content, but few do, and often times only once. This isn’t true for gaming. Gaming is built on a never ending stream of content — levels, badges, side missions, etc. And additional programming builds on prior investment meaning costs aren’t as high as in television.

3. A new frontier for Brands

Perhaps for the first time in the history of advertising brands are offered the perfect medium to integrate. Mobile games are a fun, controlled environment in which players are at their most relaxed. Products can be paired with great narratives, adrenaline filled moments, and beautiful avatars. Unlike social media, in which brands have no ability to tell whether their ads might land between controversial posts, mobile games have become safe heavens for advertisers.

Mobile gaming also offer brands’ most coveted demographics: millennial women who make up 64% of casual gamers. A largely underserved, yet highly coveted part of the market, millennial women play on average 45 minutes a day and spend time online shopping about 3 hours a week. By integrating gameplay, brands have the opportunity to reconcile the benefits of game mechanics with brand discovery. Of course, integrating games at scale is no small feet. Partnerships still require never ending back and forth between publishers to brands and complex business negotiations. Yet, the technology to automate the process is under works. And while some of it is still in the experiential stages for marketers, there is a vast opportunity for marketing teams to capitalize on this growing platform.