Amazon Kindle's Blog

Available only to Kindle customers, one month in advance of its print publication, we're pleased to offer Bob Garfield's The Chaos Scenario. The co-host of NPR's All Things Considered and a columnist for Advertising Age, Garfield forecasts the end of the old mass media model and the rise of a new digital replacement. Garfield dropped by the Kindle Daily to offer insight on the digital revolution and wienerschnitzels:

 

God rest your soul, Bill Mays, and God forgive me for turning your untimely death into a cheap news hook...but could there be a more fitting metaphor for the Death of Advertising As We've Always Know It?

Rhetorical question. The answer is "No, there could be no more fitting metaphor." Nor could there be a more convenient episode for launching a book on the collapse of the mass media/mass marketing symbiosis that has been so magnificently self-sustaining for nearly 400 years. Which is happening, right before our eyes. Newspapers are going belly-up one after another. The recording industry barely exists anymore. TV networks and broadcast stations are on the brink. The advertising industry is in a panic. All because the digital revolution has yielded audience fragmentation, ad avoidance and an exponentially growing glut of supply.

For all of mass media, it's all over but the shouting. For all of mass marketing, now that Billy Mays is gone, it's all over including the shouting.

This isn't a mid-course correction, or even a sea change. It is a genuine revolution, like the Industrial Revolution, only with more apps. Much of it, most of it, is fantastic. (For instance, I'm told you can now store and read whole books on an electronic gizmo the size of a wienerschnitzel.) But millions of lives will be turned upside down, and all of us will lose a media/entertainment culture we've depended on for nearly four centuries. So, now what?

Also a rhetorical question. The answer is, obviously, get out your wienerschnitzel and download The Chaos Scenario, so that you can learn the path forward. The whole point of the book is that, in the rubble of mass media. Shouting to the audience is useless, because the audience is paying you no mind. It is time for marketers, media, government, businesses and everyone hitherto known as The Man, at long last, to shut up and listen.