Design & Culture in The Age of Digital Consumption?
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
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.