A look at emerging trends in content. This is the latest version which was delivered at Content Strategy Philly, May 24th, 2016. Premiered at Content Camp + PodCamp Philly on September 19th, 2015.

1. Seven Lessons from the Future
of Content
We’re in This Together Now

2. David Dylan Thomas
Senior Content Strategist,
EPAM
@movie_pundit

3. #FutureOfContent

4. In 1999, I shot a
feature film.
It took 3 years to finish, cost over
$10,000 to complete, and only made it
into two film festivals (one of which I had
to pay for).

5. In 2013 I shot a web
series.
It took two years, cost me nothing*, and
was distributed on two global platforms.

6. *My biggest
“expense” was a nice
laptop for editing.
(Which I probably would have bought
anyway.)

7. Lesson One
Tools are cheap. Time is expensive.

8. This is an editing bay.
This is a camera and an editing bay.This is a camera.

9. The means of production are
now sunk costs.

11. Specialization is cheap

12. I made no money on either
project.
In fact I lost quite a bit on the first one.

13. Time is the last enemy standing.
You used to need money to get into the game. Now you need money to devote real time to it.

14. So how do we make that
happen?

15. Lesson Two
Redistribution of risk changes everything.

20. Spoken Reasons has over 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube.
If only 5% of them agreed to give him $1 a month, he’d make over $1 million a year.

21. “The era of the media barons and gatekeepers
will, from a wider perspective, appear to be a
weird anomaly, an off-period in the conversation
between artist and audience.”
John Paxton

25. Collaborative Fact-Checking

26. Lesson Three
We are going to continually redefine “success”.

27. “If I wanted to maximize dollars, this
is not what I’d be doing with my
time.”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt on HitRecord

28. It’s Wall Street’s fault.
A generation has learned to not trust money.

29. What if we could have a creative middle class?
Cost of living now drives the marketplace.

30. Creation and distribution are easier than ever.
Monetization is still hard.

31. Lesson Four
The content is the last thing we’ll make our money on.

33. Other ways to make money.
• Teach
• Live events
• Concerts
• Speaking engagements
• Crowdsourced patronage
• Schwag (until 3D printing takes that away from us)

34. Except when we do make money off it.

35. A diversity of gatekeepers?
The new paradigm may not make it easier to make money, but it might make it more
equitable.

36. Why things might get better.
• Lower production/distribution costs mean fewer people to satisfy
means fewer racists/sexists/homophobes to satisfy.
• Lower production/distribution costs means a greater potential
diversity of voices allowed to tell their story.
• That’s the theory, anyway…

38. The Authenticity of Mobile
Low Fidelity = The Voice of the People

39. Lesson Five
Content looks a lot more like Toyota.

42. We no longer have to produce
22 episodes “just cause.”
Content can grow or shrink (or be funded or marketed to) the size that is appropriate
for the content and the audience.

43. Look at what’s happened to…
• The album
• The television season
• The web series
• The podcast
• The novel
• The comic
• The blog post

44. The collapsing of forms.
Is there really any difference between a movie, a tv show, and a web series? Does it matter?

46. Human-centered Design for Content
We’re no longer building for the manufacturer.

47. Freed from arbitrary constraints, we’re finding that we really like
short, controlled bursts of entertainment.
Sometimes all at once.

48. This has implications
• Time gets weird
• Time-shifting social viewing
• We start to understand things as being part of a greater whole
(including ourselves)
• Business models change to value the long tail catalogue and not the
instant, current hit.

50. There is no new normal for content
(shorter, longer, etc.), there is only
what resonates and what does not.
And the bar for how many people it needs to resonate with is often very low (and
always tied to how expensive the content was to produce).

51. It’s all ball bearings these days!

54. And yet…
Certain things remain true. Like, we still want schedules.

55. Lesson Six
We’re in this together now.

59. Content as Platform
Vine Inception!!!

61. Advice to content strategists…
Study fan culture

62. Read Your Henry Jenkins
Start with “Convergence Culture” and “Spreadable Media”

63. There is an explosion of content about content.
While broad-ranging publications have been marginalized, hyper specific content has
proliferated.

64. Tumblr-based recaps
We use culture as the language for talking about culture.

65. Sherlocked Development

66. I challenge any company right now to
co-create their content strategy with
their customers.

67. Lesson Seven
In the future, many things will stay exactly the same.

68. What is the 6th highest-grossing
film of all time internationally?

72. We’re a big country, we want
everything.

73. The future of big companies will be
the same as it’s always been —
hedging their bets.

74. A few parting notes…

75. Games are the future of everything
Not just as a medium, but as a way of understanding the world.

76. I am NOT talking about gamification…
• I’m talking about tagging reality.
• Content as a property of physical things.
• (Internet of Things)
• Games have been doing this for years.
• Also, games are the original content-as-platform.
• Game narratives versus movie narratives
• Also, people are making tons of content simply by playing games.

78. We’ve passed the “browse” event horizon
There is too much content to browse it all. We must now search, sort, filter, and recommend.

79. We live in an infinite stream of content…
…and see a snapshot made just for us.

80. Our identities are tied up with our fandom.
What we like becomes a proxy for what we’re like.

81. As a result, Consumption Management becomes a new industry.
Help me consume better.

82. Why does this matter?
&maybetheywontkillyou

83. Questions?

84. Thanks!
David Dylan Thomas
@movie_pundit