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9 Conclusions – The End of the Digital Beginning

Chapter 9, titled “Conclusions – The End of the Digital Beginning,” offers a pattern recognition analysis based on the previous chapters. It draws conclusions about the current and future state of the media industry and discusses the implications for strategic management and future research, particularly in terms of research themes and methodologies.

The subtitle of this book is ‘Theory to Practice’, but it could just as easily be ‘Fro Concepts to Cases’. This final chapter seeks to move from the theory, concepts and ases that have formed the core substance of this book so far to look at the implications of its contents for practice. It therefore shifts from descriptive to prescriptive, and highlights a number of key issues that the analysis here raises for
anagers in the media and those researching the field.

Eight years on since the first edition of this book, how has the task of strategy in the edia changed? The task of this concluding chapter is pattern recognition, one of ifting through the analysis of concepts and cases in the previous pages, of triangulating theory and practice, to identify the core common themes concerning trategic management in the media. Many of the central themes identified in the last olume are still relevant, but a number of important new ones have emerged to top the agenda.

Digital and converged are the new normal
When the first edition was written, there was a clear distinction between ‘mass’
nd ‘new’ media. The majority of media were ‘mass’, and while the shape of things to come was becoming clear, new media activities were still often an extension of tandard business. Today, convergence as predicted a decade ago has come to pass, digital technologies are central to content creation, distribution and consumption.
What was once an add-on to the core business is now part of the core business. Certain media products and performers can still command mass media attention (Game of Thrones, Adele, FIFA world cup finals), but mass audiences are increasingly to be found on the social networks rather than in front of the television, indeed in some senses the social networks are the new mass media.

Ascendency of tech
The fact that digital and converged are the new normal reflects the commanding ole technology now plays in the media industries. The sector is now firmly linked
to the technology industry, to the social media platforms, and to telecoms providers. These industries will continue to drive innovation, and shape the models for content nd its delivery, and for how organisations are built and run.

A central challenge for the media now is to ‘re-view’ technology, to accept it has oved from a facilitating factor to the motor of change, and that is integral to ontent, creativity and strategy. It lies at the heart of performance-defining core ompetencies. Technological awareness and capabilities need to be infused throughout the organisation, from the newsroom to the boardroom, and the skills
equired range from digital story-telling and data analytics to building relationships ith digital distribution platforms and creating the right technology infrastructure.
And, as discussed in the pages of this book, the ascendency of technology will have knock-on effects on the shape of organisations, on content creation processes, on ultural values and on leadership roles.

Strategic leverage from autonomy
Autonomy is another recurring theme. There is a reason why tech giants like Googl nd Facebook, and also some of the newer successful creative organisations, like BuzzFeed and Pixar, have small autonomous groups as a basic organisational building block. Autonomy is first among equals of all the organisational elements that further creativity, as discussed in Chapter 5. The ability to synthesise utonomous small group creativity with the marketing and distribution capability of
large sophisticated organisation is a consistent trait that distinguishes strong performers in the field – companies like Home Box Office, BBC News,The Economist, Schibsted, and Axel Springer. This means cutting bureaucratic sinews. As Jeremy Isaacs, Founding Chairman of Channel Four, once put it, creative people eed the space to be creative. But as discussed in Chapter 5, that autonomy needs to be carefully calibrated, and small groups operating autonomously still need to be
ell linked to the rest of the organisation to ensure knowledge and learning can be transferred and creative potential fully exploited.

Change is still a constant, and becoming faster and more complex
When the first edition of this book was written, the first common element affecting trategic management in the media industry was the permanent presence of change, nd this is still an important theme. Indeed, change is one of the key themes in this ntire book. The contours, sectors and boundaries of the media industry are increasingly hard to disentangle due to the extraordinary level of change that has taken place over the last 20 years. The industry is in a state of permanent and peedy evolution as technology innovations create new platforms, formats and onsumption methods, and consumer behaviour evolves in response. These shifts re fundamental and irreversible.

The scope of the challenge this presents is significant. Toffler’s (1970) change typology provides insights into why. First, the pace of change is accelerating – developments are following another with increasing rapidity. This can be seen in ll sectors but television illustrates it particularly well. For decades major shifts ccurred every decade or so: black and white television developed in the 1950s, olour television in the 1960s, the VCR and cable television in the 1970s and 1980s. However, since the 1990s the industry has had to contend with a series of apid innovations – digital television, HD television, on-demand and catch-up ervices, and streaming services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. Second, the ‘novelty ratio’ is rising, meaning that the change brings new elements into the television eco-system – the convergence of social media services with broadcast television, the entry of tech giants such as Apple, Google and Amazon into sector business models and value chains. These products and services are new, hard to lassify and therefore hard for established organisations with established ompetencies and assumptions to respond to. Third, the change is diverse in that hanges of different types are occurring simultaneously and therefore the range of possible outcomes is very wide, which complicates strategic decision-making, specially since responses inevitable require expensive bets on emerging technologies. The result is upheaval and uncertainty, an environment rife with developments that theorists would term discontinuous or transformational: existing tructures are being destabilised and business models undermined, and a new industry ecology is emerging which is populated by new actors from outside the traditional industry.

This sounds bleakly challenging but, when viewed historically, the media industries re surprisingly resilient. In the 1920s the music industry was almost destroyed by the advent of radio. The film industry hit crisis in the 1940s when television became a mass consumer product. The music industry was rocked by digital downloading and internet file-sharing. But these sectors are still in business,

lthough they have adjusted their business models and broadened the scope of evenue streams.

The scope, velocity and convoluted nature of environmental change have had a assive impact on content strategies. Content has always been supremely npredictable. Demand is uncertain, success is random, and there are no guarantees bout what products will capture the public’s imagination. The traditional
esponse, as discussed in this book, was the ‘mud against the wall’ formula: invest in high volumes of new products hoping some will spark random interest.
Essentially, a portfolio of products – books, CDs, films, etc. – are made available n the market, and the media company would wait to see what sells. An malgamation of the factors, including digitalisation, globalisation, new distribution platforms, increasingly powerful agents and consolidation, resulted in n alternative approach, the blockbuster or hit model, which was an aggressive focus on the few products judged to have the best likelihood of success. It has had
idespread ramifications. The classic media industry became increasingly hit- and tar-driven, and costs for talent and marketing escalated as a result. Now, while both these strategies are still in place, new models are emerging that combine the
ide variety of content typical of a ‘mud against the wall’ formula with a huge oncentration of audience attention characteristic of the hit model. This is made possible by another combination, the ceaseless innovation in digital media formats paired with the potential for viral distribution offered by social media networks.

Reconciling dualities
As discussed above, in current media markets, an apparently random piece of ontent (say BuzzFeed’s Watermelon video) can suddenly ‘go viral’, and thus the hit model and the ‘mud against the wall’ approaches are in some cases combining.
In management theory terms this is known as reconciling a duality. Dualities arise hen opposing priorities exist that need to be balanced because even if they appear ontradictory they are in fact complementary (Bahrami, 1992; Sanchez-Runde and Pettigrew, 2003). Reconciling these opposing forces represents a huge management hallenge because as priorities they are equally valid.

Dualities comprise a recurring theme in this review of strategic management in the edia. An obvious duality concerning media products, one that has been mentioned
in this book but is also cited often by practitioners and scholars, is the tension between creative and business imperatives. Hirsch (1972) sees this as the fundamental driver of all strategic choices in the cultural industries. Lampel et al. (2000) identify a sub-facet of this ‘ur-dilemma’: that is, in addition to reconciling rtistic expression with business imperatives, media organisations need to create products that are novel but still recognisably belong to a specific category, which
eans they are therefore likely to find a market.

The tension between artistic and commercial imperatives is a central force in many edia organisations. But in the current environment, arguments can be made for a econd ‘core dilemma’. This relates to issues of strategy and organisation rather than content, and concerns reconciling the need to innovateandoptimise, which is xpressed in the need for diversityandharmonisation, for autonomyand entralisation.

Because audiences are fragmenting, demand is fickle and attention spans are hrinking, media firms need to be able to depart from standard product formats and xperiment with new content concepts, addressing new market niches or using merging technologies. As we have seen, this type of creative output flourishes in nvironments that offer autonomy, flexibility, creative freedom and the opportunity to develop independent sub-cultures, and where roles are loosely defined, eporting mechanisms are relaxed and there is scope for experimentation.

However, generating great content requires more than a steady stream of great ideas. In a highly competitive industry, great content also requires high levels of investment and expertise, particularly in terms of technology and marketing to reach its potential. This in turn mandates critical mass and mastery of the complexities of ross-media product management.

Creating an organisation that combines the free space for small groups to be

reative, unencumbered by bureaucracy, with the resources and infrastructure eeded to finance and support successful products represents a tremendous hallenge. Failure to master this duality is implicated in some high-profile leadership failures. Greg Dyke, as Director General of the BBC, made one pole of the spectrum his priority. He sought to make the BBC less bureaucratic and to educe the hierarchical and rigid processes that had been introduced by his predecessor and which Dyke believed were limiting creativity and depressing
orale. He strove to make the BBC more flexible, open and innovative, and mphasised the importance of imagination, involvement and personal mpowerment. He was successful in this task – creativity and audience esponsiveness increased and the workforce became markedly more enthused and
ommitted. However, the internal control processes that are necessary in a publicly funded organisation with strong social interest obligations were weakened. The furore over the broadcaster’s handling of the Iraq dossier affair highlighted how the BBC’s internal management processes had loosened in the Dyke era and led to his esignation.

Conversely, while CEO of Disney, Michael Eisner laid an operational emphasis on the other end of the spectrum. He favoured tight internal coordination and process ptimisation, and indeed was lauded for his synergistic management of Disney’s ontent assets. But these systems squeezed out creativity, leading to an unremitting eries of box office failures. Disney was left an organisation that could exploit reativity but not engender it.

A further duality is particularly apparent in Chapter 6 on culture and mindset. It oncerns the tension that arises from needing to distil a set of operating precepts that allow the members of an organisation to meet strategic goals in a complex nvironment, and which will simplify decision-making, reduce ambiguity and introduce stability, against the fact that the ongoing nature of that organisation hange means that even as they are learned they need to be challenged, revised and pdated.

Implications for media management research
As discussed in Chapter 1, the unusual way in which the discipline of media anagement has developed, and the range of researchers in it with theoretical
knowledge from outside management, means that research has applied a wide range f theories from economics, political science, media studies and mass ommunications and journalism, but fewer from the disciplines of management and rganisation. Much attention has been focused on exogenous changes (technology, egulation and consumption, for example) and relatively little on internal firm dynamics and how these impinge on performance outcomes.

The research that does exist into strategy tends to employ models from the rational chool. This has increased understanding, for example, of the structure and
dynamics of firms and their changing environment and of the strategic resources that ill lead to strategic advantage. A research priority for the future is to complement
insights from the application of rationalist approaches with those applying models from the adaptive school (relevant for unstable environments), and from interpretative schools (which concern how the higher-order aspects of firms influence performance).

In addition, there are streams of management research that are relevant but seldom pplied to the media but should perhaps be – business history, for example, becaus f the opportunities it offers for capturing learning from the past and seeing etrospective patterns. Theories on the management of professional service firms ight also be pertinent since they centre on the challenges of working with intellectual capital and a highly educated, independently minded workforce.

Research methods
With these conclusions in mind, recommendations can be made for research ethods. All stem from a central premise that researchers need to get ‘inside the
black box’ of media firms and gain deeper insights into the phenomena that guide behaviour and strategic outcomes in the media industries.

First, a contextualist orientation, that is one that places research within a broader frame that includes the organisation’s internal and external environments in the
idest sense, and particularly social, political, technological and historical influences, is important. Further, because environments, organisations and trategies are constructed rather than being natural objects, research needs to apture the perspective of the actors involved: we need to supplement studies on how structures and systems are materially changing with studies that provide insights into how these developments are perceived by those involved.

Processual approaches, which do not assume a linear relationship between formulation and implementation, but rather seek to understand the multiplicity of
on-rational elements that are called into play, would provide deeper understanding f how these changes take place. They can accommodate the intangible covert rganisational elements that are so important to the performance of media firms.

Finally, pluralism is necessary because both the industry and the changes taking place in it are complex phenomena. Time and again, the examples in this book sho that performance arises from constellations of factors – cognitions, unique strategic ssets, creative insights, collaborative leadership and other idiosyncratic ombinations of phenomena. Thus, the issues that influence strategy and performance in media firms are many and interwoven, and to investigate these we eed integrative methodologies that incorporate different perspectives, that allow ntities to be understood in their context, and the relationship between variables to be teased out and analysed. Multi-lens analysis, which involves applying a series
f theoretical lenses to data, is an option since it allows cross-disciplinary and ross-paradigm interpretation and can accommodate the untidy, idiosyncratic and dynamic interrelatedness of organisations and their strategic activities.

Conclusions to the conclusions
These are interesting times for the media industry, and interesting times in which to be writing a book on strategic management in the sector. This volume has tried to keep two goals in mind: to present a meaningful analysis of strategic concepts that re significant for the media industries, bearing in mind the enormous range of potential candidates, and to apply these using examples from the media industry in uch a way that their relevance is evident.

The media industry is at an extraordinary point of transition. Things that were happening slowly are now happening fast. We are at the end of the digital beginning: convergence is a reality, the mass paradigm is eroding, and the media industry is inexorably drawing closer to the technology sector.

This is a context that presents both enormous challenges and fascinating pportunities, for researchers and students in the media field as well as for those ngaged in strategic activities in media organisations. The strategic concepts and xamples covered in this book have been selected with this context in mind, and I hope they provide assistance and enlightenment to anyone involved with strategic
anagement in the media, whether from a theoretical or a practical standpoint.

Writing this second edition ofStrategic Management in the Mediahas allowed me to review anew the nature of the media industry and to reflect on the very profound hanges that have taken place in just eight years. It has shown how prescient industry observers were a decade ago, and also how hard it is for humans and rganisations to change, even when the need to adapt is evident and pressing. In the dapted words of David Bowie, it is indeed time to turn, to face, and embrace the hange.