Allow Digital Age media to thrive
New forms of advertising and communication should be formalised, legitimised and regulated.
What you need to know:
- No single company, or even government, can go up against Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google or Netflix.
- On top of being unbelievably wealthy, these tech giants are well prepared and have the power of superpowers behind them.
A crazy teacher who taught us Decision Analysis posed an interesting scenario to illustrate a point. You live on the 40th floor of a skyscraper; you wake up in the morning and get ready for work. But you must decide how you will get down to the street.
You can take the stairs, the lift or jump out of the window. Each is a legitimate choice, depending on the outcome you desire. Certainly, if consequence is of no consequence — ha! — and the important thing is speed and economy of energy, never mind that you will arrive in the form of human paste, then the window is a good option. If you are misogynist and are after tearing tendons and taxing your heart, then the stairs are attractive. And so on.
The decision people must make when it comes to dinner time nowadays is not as dire as those above but the range of options — cook, hang out at the neighbours’ hoping to catch free chapati, drive out and dine out or, more likely, Glovo, UberEats, JumiaFood, the neighbourhood rider will deliver your food from the kibanda and so on — reflects the dramatic change in consumer behaviour and choice.
Other than the rider, the rest of your options are digital: An app, on your phone, powered by data. To state the obvious, if we were all scanned and uploaded online like Johnny Depp in Transcendence, we couldn’t be more digital. We communicate, date, cheat, bank, shop, dine, fall in debt, gamble, con, fight and rig elections in the digital universe, which, for our purposes, is mobile, but that’s a story for another day.
Digital advertising
Why this is remarkable is that it’s happening in a society that, by most standards, is technologically backward. Since all that consumption is now digital, taking place online — this is a familiar argument from the PwC stream of Outlook reports on entertainment, media and advertising — if you want to influence buying behaviour, where will you advertise? Outdoor? That is why advertising, and the ad shilling, are barrelling into each other at the door en route to the digital universe and pockets of American tech monopolies.
Kenya is a huge entertainment, media and advertising market in Africa, estimated to be bigger than Nigeria and second only to South Africa in the next three years. The tragedy is that the biggest segment of the industry, the one with the turbo-charged growth, digital advertising, is sucking money out of domestic players’ pockets. And all forms of traditional media, including TV, are forecast to decline. Decline, it appears, is a technological inevitability. So what the hell do we do?
No single company, or even government, can go up against Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google or Netflix. Plantation companies used to order coups from the CIA in South America for crying out loud. On top of being unbelievably wealthy, these tech giants are well prepared and have the power of superpowers behind them.
Yet the media sector is vital to growth, preserving democracy and citizens’ rights and surviving as distinct cultures and systems. For them to survive and play that role, the government must stop fighting the media, to use ugly political language. It must come round from trying to bankrupt the media to enabling and supporting their survival and development.
Secondly, African regulators should form a continental coalition, which can negotiate with tech firms and external actors to preserve and grow local entertainment, media and advertising companies.
New forms of communication
Traditionally, we’ve had local assembly, local manufacturing and tech transfer. We need to figure out a digital equivalent.
Thirdly, regulators and governments must enable the growth areas in digital: Movie, and other video, streaming, local digital advertising, gaming, activities around data — its trading, analysis, storage — podcasting, content generation and so forth. Definitely, in the next three years, no institution should be teaching traditional media in their native form. I think curricular should be no more than 10 craft skills and the rest digital skills.
Finally, new forms of advertising and communication — influencers, bloggers and social media operators of all shades — should be formalised, legitimised and regulated. These are institutions of the Digital Age. At the turn of the last century, if you had suggested that the movies or photography were an art form, you would have been laughed out of town. But we have to recognise that these new forms will replace media institutions as we know them, whether in a corporate or individual context. But they will not be productive if they are bandit operations, subject to exploitation and manipulation by malign actors.
Traditional and emerging corporate media institutions can retain a critical role in content creation. And that is why I believe that, from a regulation and policy point of view, it makes no sense at all to bankrupt and bury them. Many times, there are larger interests, way beyond the self and the immediate. At the Nation, we often say that our digital project is a cathedral; we build it without the expectation that we will ever worship in it. But our children and their children will.
And that is the decision the government and its regulators have to make too.
