An era of upheval: the dominant systems of broadcasting are scrambling. What is this new media that's popping up? Everyone seems to be gravitating towards it, "traditional media" giants are getting pushed out. Brands wonder how they'll have a lasting affect here; how can they stay in the discourse.
Worse yet, this new media is full of strange dynamics: New screen sizes? Alternating lines of resolution? New specialized technological jobs? Live audiences being broadcast? Unpredictable, regular people?
Of course, this isn't the dawning of the social Web, but the beginning of TV networks' full slate of programming sixty years ago: when there was enough critical mass to have four national networks, and the need arose to be able to fund the new technologies. Brands found how persuasive short demonstrations of their product were, and how dramatically they lifted sales.
In a great article posted this week, Let History Repeat Itself, Syracuse profesor Robert Thompson makes these associations brilliantly. Would Milton Berle chatting about Texaco with audience members be the same as paid blog posts today?
Even more to the point, brands in the golden age of television were ultimately responsible for funding technical development and quality programming. This allowed the technical development of television to contune advancing, as well as the narrative development, production quality, and dare I say: the user experience.
So as much as things change, they stay the same. Personalities from old media are helping drive new adoption, and brands have drastically new and dynamic ways to use lower technical barriers to bring people, perspectives, and personalities to demonstrate their products. And people creating new strategies for those brands, like me, need to know where we've been as a society using mass media, and how to combine the strategies from past eras into the better services for the ways technology and discourse can help people today.