The “Publish, then Filter” Model and what it Means for Marketeers

The Gutenberg revolution made publishing on a wide scale possible. The Gutenberg model is: “filter, then publish”. Book publishers had to do two things: produce books, and filter manuscripts for those they believed would sell. If they wouldn’t do the second part of their job they would print copies of book that don’t sell and loose their shirt.

Other media – newspapers, radio, television, cinema – use the same model for the same reasons: it’s impossible to print or produce/broadcast every possible manuscript or idea. The “filter, then publish” model is dictated by the social properties of the media.

The post-Gutenberg revolution changed the social properties of publishing and because of that change a new model has become the norm: “publish, then filter”. The difference between these two models is dramatic as the diagram shows. The only important question to ask here is: do you believe the “filter, then publish” model will ever prevail again? In other terms, do you think the post-Gutenberg revolution is permanent, or just a fad?

It’s not just “the media” that are struggling because of the “publish, then filter” model. Marketeers have also felt the earth shift under their feet for two reasons:

1. The Internet, unlike any other medium, caries any kind of content imaginable: text, video, audio, IM tweets, blogs, forums, telephone calls, video conferencing calls, VPN connections, … . The list is literally endless because there are new forms of communication and collaboration (which are forms of publishing) invented every day. This doesn’t make any sense: “Can you send me that video by fax?” This does: “I’ll put that video on my (Facebook) wall.”
2. Since the Internet doesn’t discriminate between forms of content people can filter any kind of content they like, including banners, videos made by marketeers, blogs full of ads, … anything they choose to filter out. In the post-Gutenberg world people – the eyeballs – have not just some power but all the power because they operate their own filters.

The post-Gutenberg world is simple: people are in full control, for the first time. They can choose from a wild, wild variety of content in all kinds of formats. And the question becomes: why would they pick yours? But that’s not the problem marketeers are facing. The absolutely toughest, most devastating part for marketeers about the post-Gutenberg world is that it’s a no-factory zone. Marketeers are used of being ignored to a large degree. It’s the tiny response they get which matters to them. In the post-Gutenberg world most marketeers see that tiny response shrink gradually towards zero, not so much because advertisements have lost their power, but because people aren’t interested anymore to hear from factories. People are interested most of all in other people.

Factories are the institutions that since the industrial revolution have segregated people: workers vs farmers, laborers vs educated workers, everybody else vs engineers, poor vs rich, … . Those differences matter less and less, at least to the classic target audiences of marketeers. Factories have been so defining for our society and the societies of our ancestors because they determine to a larger extend the relationships we have with each other (she’s a VP, he’s my boss, she works for …). As the importance of factories in our relationships is gradually fading away so is the attention we pay to content from factories (which is always fabricated, and that’s not a joke).

The obvious question is: why? Why is the importance of factories fading? And the answer is simple: because we’re very, very bored that the relationships we have are overwhelmingly determined by factories. We value unmitigated person-to-person relationships more than anything else. The parties that’s are king in helping to shape those unmitigated relationships between ourselves and the people we want to meet will win to an extend and by a factor we can hardly imagine today.

(i) inspired by Clay Shirky.