9th January 2023

In the digital world we live in, we throttle down the highway of life with the wind blowing through our hair and our patience trailing far behind us.

We work, earn, and shop rapidly expecting instant delivery of the things we want. When the dentist's account was snail-mailed post session and we had to wait until the Tuesday evening time slot to watch The Simpsons, life was slower and we all had the grace of time on our side. Today we don’t. We do everything digitally and we watch whatever we want whenever we want to.

The necessity of immediate information is here, we want content when and where we want it and we are not prepared to wait.  Information is easily and quickly accessed, but now we invest less time in it. Where does that leave content creators and the media and entertainment industry?  Consumer habits are now forcing them to produce Fast-Moving Consumer Content in a do-or-die situation.  Instant Gratification is making Turbo-charged content creation obligatory.

All About Instant Gratification

It doesn’t end with that immediate dopamine “hit”: We want to enjoy great content all the time, but it irritates us to even think about where it comes from, with hypermediacy (instead of immediacy) becoming a major concept.  The instant nature of speed-dating, the global news and online shopping were once exciting and new, now we expect it all to happen instantly.  

Data has shown that mobile searches related to same-day shipping have grown over 120% since 2015, shoppers won't even wait a few days for their order to arrive. For every second of delay in a site’s load time, conversions fall by 12%. We are used to information at our fingertips, but there is so much of it we don’t (or can’t) process like we used to. It's too much for us, so now we only take in small snippets of only what we immediately need and discard the rest. 

Infoxication and our dwindling attention span intertwine with our need for instant gratification.  So much so, that according to a study 56% of news articles are shared without ever being clicked and read. The Science Post published a block of “lorem ipsum” text under a frightening headline: “Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.”  The Science Post article had been shared 194.4k times as of the time of writing.   

Fake news has arisen as a terrible consequence of these new habits, where a powerful title means shares, and the accuracy of the detail only gets noticed once the article is halfway around the world, causing great confusion and opening up the valuable supply of information as we know it to fowl play. 

Fast-Moving-Consumer Content and ROI

The world of FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) was a world unto its own at its inception.  Much changed from having to grow your own vegetables, to be able to purchase Asian sauce instantly wherever you were in the world, and this change was only over a few decades. From this, we spun the term, Fast-moving-consumer-content and it’s no different.  Its rapid onset, global nature and speed are what define it.  

Fast-moving-consumer content is created, consumed, and shared quickly and, like the stir-fry that you need Asian sauce for, the process is on repeat. The ROI on it is as great as stir-fry too, as once your content hits the global stage, you are achieving reach not known before, at a very small cost. Common examples of fast-moving consumer content are online news content, blog posts, tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn updates, G+ posts, infographics, photographs and audio.  But the true Oyster Sauce of Fast-moving-consumer content is video. 

Short-form video or micro-content is what boosts the ROI due to the high levels of engagement it generates. The short-form video has the highest (30%) ROI of any social media marketing strategy 59.9% of customers say a video being too long would deter them from watching it and 73% of consumers prefer to watch a short video to learn about a service or product.

How has information immediacy come about so quickly?

There is no uniquely correct answer, but we can look at the example of TikTok.  The infinite scrolling of a global youth is powered by an advanced algorithm particularly good at choosing what content the viewer would like, which fits in with our new norm well. Instant gratification, information immediacy and hypermediacy are all tied up in a bow for business to reach their consumers in the way they want, or should we say in the way they have become.  Tik-Tok is reported to be the fastest-growing social media platform in 2022, with other video form platforms close behind. Since Tik-Tok was acquired by the popular Chinese platform Douyin in 2018,  it has increased its first-time installs by almost 400 per cent year-over-year, reaching 656 million new users in 2021.  Thus proving the formula works, and it works well. 

In a race, you want to drive the fastest car

It seems as if there is no way back, so how do Media and Entertainment companies adapt to these new realities? The evolution of consumer habits needs a change in the way we communicate with our consumers. We need to cater to the new way they are, otherwise, we will lose touch with them and lose their business. Therefore, the question lies in how we can create the best quality Fast-moving-consumer-content in the most cost-effective way to retain our audience's attention. There are a few options:

• Outsource content creation

• Hire a suitably qualified content creation team internally

• DIY your content creation

The first two are expensive and the third option was historically a headache. With the advent of cloud-based software and the added functionality advances in technology have provided, you can now easily and cost-effectively DIY your content creation. But to take it to the next level, it’s a good idea to have some help with professional software solutions

One of those is, (surprise!), Knox Media Hub. Our cloud-based media toolkit includes powerful features to clip and edit the videos, and also transcoding, closed captioning, and automatable delivery. and more. A 100% cloud, complete media toolkit that makes video creation, management, and distribution faster than ever.

With the centralization of workflows and the optimization of the media supply chain, KMH lets companies create clips and small pieces of content easily from current assets, and enables better ways to connect with audiences in the new world of information immediacy. Monetising content has never been this easy.

A fast farewell 

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Speed is irrelevant if you are going in the wrong direction”.  So as the fast-paced digitally enabled world flashes past us, we must not lose focus and go off course.  Ensuring that we put out quality content is still imperative, even if it is micro-content, it must still be interesting, informative and relevant.  We are here to entertain and delight, to offer value to our customers and to do the best we can.  Stay on course, even if it's a super-charged fast one!

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