As Mobile Age Arrives, Media is Clueless

(MoneyWatch)  Top-line: There are going to be five billion mobile units worldwide by 2012, according to Informa Telecoms & Media's Global Mobile Forecasts, and nobody in media yet has a clue how to achieve a balance between content and advertising that could provide a sustainable business model over this huge new channel.

That's not a surprise. The relationship between the content side and the advertising side of media companies has long alternated between extreme polarity and uncomfortable synthesis.

Newspapers represented one extreme, where journalists and ad salesmen were likely to despise one another, if they ever even met. They moved in different circles, drank in different bars, and were separated by a fiction called the "church-state" line that served neither group, but kept them under the thumb of senior management, where, ever so conveniently, no such line ever existed.

The situation in magazines was a bit more complex. But with media calendars, special issues, promotional parties, etc., any ambitious editor or salesperson paying attention soon learned that the road to career advancement was to play nice with their opposites.

Tipping one another "informally" about upcoming content themes or key new accounts sealed the back-rubbing nature of many of successful pairings between the types of media executives who rose through the ranks like unidentical twins.

These folks moved in similar circles, drank at the same bars, and agreed to ignore the "church-state" line fiction for their mutual betterment, and the success of their companies.

TV?

Anyone old enough to remember the '50s will recall that future investigative reporting icon, Mike Wallace, shilling for a cigarette sponsor in ways that would never have been tolerated, at least publicly, by "60 Minutes" in later decades. (Ironically, or perhaps not, it was the tobacco industry's residual influence that in the late 1990's cost "60 Minutes" and Wallace a substantial piece of their lofty reputations, as well as a breach between the old journalist and his favorite producer, Lowell Bergman. See "The Insider.")

Fast forward to our era. Not very long before I got to HotWired, in 1995, the bright upstarts there invented the "banner ad" unit that originally provided advertisers a mechanism to reach the early adopters of Web 1.0.

In our current media environment, companies of all stripes are frantically trying to find ways to create ad widgets that can produce revenue in the giant social networking and bookmarking sites that have defined Web 2.0.

There may never be a Web 3.0, I started thinking recently. Maybe this is as good as it gets. Maybe none of our intense efforts to figure out how to balance content and advertising on websites will amount to a business plan for anybody.

As the entire world moves to mobile, that represents the next frontier for the ongoing struggle to find a way for the two vital sides of mediaa to co-exist and sustain one another going forward.

The problem is the real estate is getting smaller, and the need for a solution is growing greater.