The Content Crisis

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Another benefit of gathering all this information and a way of fighting the argument that all content will be based on the lowest common denominator in this scenario is for them to sell that information and donate the income from that to an experimentation pool. In much the same way, funds from Britain's National Lottery support art films and other projects that couldn't have found funding otherwise.

The Future of Advertising

Since I'm in the advertising business, I can't help but wonder what will happen to my industry in this scenario. The scary but exhilarating fact is that it changes everything. If consumers, not advertisers, pay for content then advertising becomes an elective, an additional revenue stream for content creators, not a necessity. This has some immediate and some long-term consequences.

If consumers have already paid for the content, then there's a limit to how much advertising they are willing to accept. As content creators still want to attract as big an audience as possible to get paid, they'll have to listen to consumers. Which most likely means that the traditional disruptive TV advertising as we know it is dead. It may be acceptable to advertise between shows, but that's it. Likely, content creators will also want to sign off on the advertising, to ensure it's good enough for their audience.

Online advertising as we know it today would be dead for sure. Consumers ignore it, publishers don't need it anymore, and the ad world is struggling to get it to work with any amount of efficiency, so we'd have to completely rethink how to engage a consumer online.

Print advertising wouldn't change. Basically, it would just go away. As content slowly migrates online, there's no way of saving print. Magazines and newspapers will eventually all be consumed on Kindle-like devices with color screens. There'll probably be some very contextual, highly targeted advertising, but that's it.

This scenario might not be a bad thing for the ad industry. It will wash away all the terrible advertising out there and force us to create things that people actually want to engage and interact with rather than the many repetitive product messages that are sadly still dominant today. It will force agencies and brands to think like content creators whose objectives are to garner happy eyeballs.

The other good news is that since content creators will still need to drive consumers to their content, ad agencies will have plenty to do. Brands will also still want to inform and educate about new and current products. It'll just be a very, very different kind of advertising from what we do today.

Sounds Great. Let's Do It!

This scenario will not happen tomorrow. Or even in the near future. The content creators need to accept that there is no quick and easy fix. Band-Aids are not going to cover up the fact that the current model is truly broken beyond repair. None of the solutions currently being discussed will fix it. Some big company will have to die before they realize that a complete reboot is necessary. Basically, the content industry needs its own Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers disasters before it'll be willing to contemplate anything as radical as this proposal.

The second hurdle is to get all these companies that have traditionally been competitors to collaborate and accept that a new entity, even though it will surely have representatives from all the content companies running it, will be in charge of distributing the funds derived from the content fees.

But the fact remains that even though Chris Anderson and others claim that "free" can be a business model, it doesn't work for the film industry. If film piracy reaches the level that almost destroyed the music industry, then it will no longer be a viable business to produce filmed entertainment. And unlike musicians who can tour, actors can't make a living doing live theater around the country. Also, we need to keep people like Michael Bay and James Cameron in business, or they'd end up as dictators of small nations somewhere. Yes, there'd still be money to be made in cinemas from spectacles like the upcoming Avatar in 3D, but the DVD and TV windows would effectively disappear, and that's where the true money is.

So when you think about it, is $20 a month really a big price to pay for saving movies, TV, music, magazines, and newspapers and getting rid of unwanted advertising in one fell swoop? It feels like a bargain to me.

Lars Bastholm is chief digital creative officer for Ogilvy North America.

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