Engaging The Avocado And Digital Salad

Michael Hedges March 24, 2014 Follow on Twitter

Information by sound byte has long been a fixture of the news business. The sound byte has been replaced with the video byte, in turn replaced with the text byte and now the data byte. As with the old parable of the sound of a tree falling in an empty forest, information is lost, we presume, with nobody there to hear it. Information is now shrunk to metaphor.

Media conferences – and all other trade shows – fill seats with followers eager for a remarkable sound byte, a clever take-away, a kabob to be shared at the next meeting. There were a few of these at the Guardian Changing Media Summit in London last week. None will be remembered – or repeated – more than Tesco CEO Phillip Clarke’s “today’s avocado is the tablet computer.”

Like the happy green fruit, nobody knew they wanted a tablet until it arrived. Tesco is the world’s second most profitable general merchandise retailer, after WalMart, and stocks avocados, tablets and just about everything else. “One of the greatest achievements of supermarkets has been to make products accessible,” he said. “In the past it might have been the avocado.”

Tesco has it’s own tablet brand, the Hudl, and video on demand service, Blinkbox. The path of great convergence leads to entertainment. “It is a powerful way of engaging with customers,” said Mr. Clarke.

Engaging with consumers – always a hot topic – has a pleasant sound, slightly retro, like having a conversation. New media devices have made this special, as purveyors of old media have found. Times were simpler when publishers told people what they needed to know and, more importantly, people agreed. Those days are gone except, perhaps, where the message doesn’t get through. People in Turkey jumped on Twitter last week to prove that Twitter couldn’t be banned.

“In the past if you wanted to read or listen or watch you actually had a device, a format, that was specific to that medium,” said Circa co-founder Ben Huh at the Changing Media Summit. “Each device had it's own compartmentalised usage. Today that has radically shifted. Every device can do pretty much everything.” Circa is a year-old “mobile-first” news platform.

Digital media natives, seizing their ascendancy, view the new mobile devices – smartphones, tablets, et.al. – as transcendent. Newer devices will always arrive leading to new “rules of the game.” Native formats, he said, are “scalable methods of presenting content that take advantage of the unique benefits of a new device.”

In other words, real-time news delivery is a native format for mobile devices. The idea was invented at CNN – “Show process,” said Ted Turner – when mobile phones were the size of automobiles. Now every news portal worth their salt posts real-time developments in major stories.

People engage with content that attracts their interest. In the old days, editors used intuition or guessed. New media’s collection of big data from users trumps the guesswork. Through your favorite search engine or social network query avocado right now. Recipes for guacamole will arrive soon.

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