Further to the post in this space earlier this week (“Chewing on media’s next wave”), is this item from EContentMag.com, by Kinley Levack, suggesting that vertical ad networks are coiled and ready for take-off. There are many thoughtful comments in this piece, courtesy mostly of the people at NetShelter Technology Media which has a network of 150 independent web publishers. Explains co-Founder and CEO, Peyman Nilforoush:
“We have a different kind of media model—our model is really taking that ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ idea and bringing it to media. In the old media model, you have editors who are well-known and produce influential content, and that’s essentially how expertise and information were distributed.”
Indeed. Essentially, old media was a smoke stack business. Think of it as factory media. Raw information materials came in from around the world, and content came out in neatly wrapped packages, delivered by truck and channel. New media is agrarian. Think of it as a garden in every back-yard, the produce of which growers throw in the back of the pick-up and bring to the local market every week (the vertical media network). The metaphor surely has legs in the context of our lives today: we could say new media is the equivalent of buying local. We could also say it is the equivalent of sustainable farming.
It’s not clear to me if Peyman Nilforoush is talking about media brands or brand advertisers when he says, “The core of it is, ‘OK, this is a totally new marketplace, so if I don’t harness it, what happens?’ If I’m not getting into this ecosystem and finding a way to integrate my brand, that means that I’m becoming less and less relevant every day because I’m playing it old school while my audience is being influenced by the wisdom of the crowds.” But it doesn’t matter, because his comment applies to both. It is the wise choice of the Food Network Family in our earlier post (see above) to decide to share its brand in order to create a marketplace, and the wise choice of marketers that decide to shop there.
