The Invisible Race to Fill the Content Vacuum

2021 has arrived, and though COVID vaccines are on their way, it’s an open secret by now that we can’t instantly inoculate ourselves from the rigors and realities of 2020. And while it’s (still) too soon to know precisely what long-term effect the pandemic will have on marketing mix and spend, McKinsey’s Q4 2020 research indicates that the digitization of customer interactions has been accelerated by at least 3 years in major world markets, and that the volume of remote work accelerated over 40x faster than was anticipated under pre-crisis assumptions.

Furthermore, as we turn the calendar into a new year, the number of people intent on traveling for work is declining. In Travel Again’s November 17-19 survey of U.S. business travelers, 39 percent of respondents said they would travel domestically in the next 90 days if asked to by their company, compared with 53 percent in October. By the same token, according to Bizzabo’s research, 66% of corporate event organizers say they anticipate budget cuts for virtual, in-person, and hybrid events going into 2021. Combine this with data from the same study indicating that three-fourths of companies have never hosted a hybrid event, and you have all the makings of a year of smile-and-nod Zoomfests with near-zero levels of sustained engagement. Sign up? Nah. Sign out.

As financial and epidemiological realities vastly constrained in-person events over the past year, “_FH” (work from home, learn from home, play from home, live from home…) opened our pocketbooks, calendars, and attention spans to media and entertainment like never before. In 2020, SVOD subscriptions grew 35% YoY in Q3 and 37% YoY in Q4, signaling that the compelling content libraries of Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO, and other subscription services had turned these platforms into indispensable parts of people’s lives. This hypergrowth was not an of-the-moment reality – as with workplace digitization, it represented the increasing acceleration of a trend, this one related to brand relevance – in Prophet’s 2019 Brand Relevance Index, 7 of the top 10 brands (Apple, Spotify, Disney, Amazon, Netflix, Pixar, and Pinterest) were completely devoted to, or sourcing significant growth from, digital media and content offerings.

While I can’t personally see into the future, I’ve seen enough of the past to identify when two trends are barreling toward each other, destined for a head-on collision. From one direction, there are massive declines in confidence and spending in travel and events, creating a vacuum of community, connection, and … compelling content. From the other, there are quickly-growing digital consumption models and rapidly-ascending entertainment platforms, providing convenience, connection, and – you guessed it – compelling content.

As Aristotle postulated, nature abhors a vacuum.

The vacuum currently occupied by the seemingly benign (but, on reflection, broken) road-warrior experiences we constructed using luggage, rideshares, airports, planes, and hotels (OMG, that’s so 2019!) will, in short order, be filled by those with the conviction and courage to compel their audiences in new ways, with new kinds of content, wrapped in new kinds of experiences. Just as every business has been competing with Amazon on convenience for years, and every company has (had?) been competing with Uber on personalization for years, every organization that’s serious about growth is – or will be – competing with Netflix, Disney, and Spotify on compelling content, deep engagement, and experience excellence for years to come.

In some ways, this is nothing more than the next wave of the consumerization of enterprise technology. In a world where we compelled our CIOs to swap BlackBerrys for iPhones, construct corporate Intranets inspired by the social feeds and feels of Facebook and Twitter, and buy cloud services more quickly than you can listen to most Lynyrd Skynyrd songs, why would it be unusual for the New Giants of Entertainment to force a reckoning around content quality and engagement in the enterprise?

Consider: Just as Apple became indispensable in the enterprise using the iPhone as a (possibly inadvertent) trojan horse, who’s to say that Netflix will be satisfied limiting its libraries to consumer entertainment use cases? In the next several years, maintaining its 25-30% annual growth rates will undoubtedly mean an augment to its existing revenue lines. To my mind, digital corporate events and experiences built around riveting, relevant, right-for-me content delivered to my home office on the device of my choice would not be a stretch for a company with a reported $19 billion content budget and with the likes of Kenya Barris and Shonda Rhimes on the payroll churning out hit after binge-worthy hit. If I’m Reed Hastings, I’m looking at Zoom’s stock, up 415% YoY as of the time of this writing, largely by virtue of enabling video-based meetings and document sharing during Year One of a global pandemic. If that’s what gets a 415% return, can you imagine the return on becoming the de facto Content, Event, and Experience Hub for the Next Economy?

Salesforce COO Bret Taylor estimated in December that the company’s 2020 Dreamforce keynote on Twitter was watched by 140 million people – an astounding 800x multiple over the 175,000 in-person attendes that witnessed it in downtown San Francisco in prior years. Think about that. For every 1 person that tuned into the Dreamforce keynote in 2019, 800 tuned in in 2020. It will be the start, or the continuation, of tens of thousands of meaningful relationships for the company for years and decades to come.

Netflix’s pursuit of this kind of opportunity is nothing more than a thought experiment, and even Salesforce can’t scale 800:1 personalization with its resources today. But it’s not about what Salesforce or Netflix can or can’t do. It’s about what any and every organization needs to do to meet people – not “consumers,” not “business travelers,” not “event attendees” – just people – (literally) where they are. There is an opportunity – nay, an obligation – to rethink not just events and experiences, but the entire way in which content is created, delivered, consumed, monetized, renewed. Those who can create ways to pull this off in ways that delight customers and disrupt competitors will be the ones that we can’t imagine living – or working –without.