Media In Our Image

Veronica

Most people do not realize that women outnumber men in every age group on social networking sites around the world and they spend significantly more time on these sites than men do. Social media is having a transformative effect on traditional business models in every media industry, including publishing, TV, radio, film, music, and games. I am convinced that the growing influence of social media will help dismantle some of the silly and demeaning stereotypes that characterize media and advertising globally. In particular, I think that social media may help free us from the absurd assumptions we, as a society, have about gender.

Traditional media—which makes its living giving audiences what they seem to desire—has provided us with a surprisingly distorted mirror of our lives, and especially our gender. Most media businesses today use rigid segmentation methods in order to understand their audience. These methods are driven by classic demographics, which sum up human beings with a handful of restrictive labels based on how much money we make, the color of our skin, and our age and gender.

When marketers use demographics, they assume that certain demographics predict certain interests, which can predict a certain kind of purchasing behavior. Demographic-based marketing rose to dominance because it was too expensive to figure out people’s actual interests, which is the marketer’s holy grail because interests are much more closely aligned with purchasing behavior than any demographic model ever could be. But, because marketers, advertisers, and media companies could not reliably track the specific interests of individual members of very large audiences, these companies made a lot of assumptions about what people in certain demographic categories enjoy and want to buy.

The consequences of this business model are quite profound. Most of our popular culture is based upon assumptions about the interests of certain high-value demographic categories. The content that we hear on the radio, read in magazines, and see on screens large and small has been carefully crafted to deliver certain demographics to advertisers. The presumptions made about demographic preferences—what women want, what Hispanics like, what poor people prefer—comprise the underlying DNA of global popular culture.

I have studied the impact of demographics on advertising and media for several years. After focusing my attention on social media, I discovered the outsized role that women play in what many industry analysts acknowledge to be the most revolutionary technological development since the invention of the printing press. Digital media, and especially social media, allows audience members to talk among themselves, to critique, remix, and redistribute content on an unprecedented scale. Of course participants in social networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used to understand them, but now those categories mean even less than they did before. Geography and national boundaries are easily surmounted obstacles in our quest to network and converse with people who share our interests. And demographic categories often play no part in those conversations. In short, digital networks allow us to opt out of our demographic categories, which are often virtually invisible online . . . and easily fudged as we go about constructing our own unique online identities.

Traditional media companies are desperate to understand these online communities because they realize that the future mass audience will be online and networked. That is the future. But one reason that the music, TV, and film industries are having a hard time understanding and monetizing these audiences is because they are still looking at them (that is, us) through the lens of demographics. Why? Because that is how ad rates are still determined.

But this will soon change. If you look at how people aggregate online, you do not find people clustering around age, gender, and income categories. What you find instead are “taste communities,” heterogeneous groups of people who coalesce around the things they care about, which can range from serious political causes to pet toys. These audiences are ad hoc; they shift among sites, across link trails, they enter various walled gardens and then report back...