Learning From Craigslist: Who Are Mass Media’s True Customers?

The cover story of the most recent issue of Wired addresses how Craigslist rose to dominate classified listings, in spite of (or perhaps because of) how little it has changed, and the quirkiness of the business. The real customer experience lesson though, can be found in a follow-on blog post written by the story’s author, Gary Wolf.

In it, he muses, “Why, given the site’s notorious shortcomings, has nobody ever succeeded in taking business away from it?” He writes about how many local newspapers have tried to embrace local listings, such as the Bakersfield Californian. When you look at their apartment-for-rent page, you immediately see the problem — the classified listings are sandwiched between giant banner ads and overwhelming navigation options.

And this speaks to the fundamental issue facing the mass media today — it doesn’t know who its customer is.

If you don’t work in mass media, you might be forgiven if you think that you — the reader, the watcher, the audience member — are the customer. When you work in mass media, you know that readers, watchers, and audience members are really the products, being served up to mass media’s actual customers, the advertisers. So for decades, improving the “customer experience” meant doing what’s best for advertisers, whether or not it was best for the audience. And so you get sites like the Bakersfield Californian, with giant banner ads dwarfing the social media content. If there were no Craigslist, the audience would put up with it. But there is a Craigslist. And on Craigslist, you really are the customer. Even with its shortcomings, the site has only one audience in mind. And so customers click away from the confused businesses, and direct their attention to those who endeavor to serve them.

And because the audience can now so easily choose a competitor, mass media will be forced to shift its orientation and embrace the audience as the true customer, or they’ll go out of business. This doesn’t mean they will stop having advertisers, but it does mean that those advertisers will be of lower priority. The prime example of this is Google. Google’s success is due to an obsession with delivering the best search experience for its users. Advertising on Google has always been subservient to that mission. If Google’s market cap is any indicator, this approach works. And advertisers don’t seem to mind being a lower priority. The obvious secret here is that what’s best for the audience is also what’s actually best for advertisers — at least the smart ones.

So how will mass media actually engage their audiences, instead of trying to shove “advertiser-friendly” crap down their throats? Their first step should be to listen to their customers. I don’t mean research methods such as focus groups, or surveys that ask about preferences. Those only reinforce existing assumptions. I mean observing and talking to customers as they engage with media. Adaptive Path has worked with a range of mass media clients (broadcast and print), and it is always a revelation for them to hear and watch what their customers actually do, because it forces them to reconsider how they engage them. In our book Subject to Change, we tell the story of a national news media service that, after witnessing actual audience behavior, had t-shirts printed up for the internal team that read, “We are not the target audience.”

Coming out of that research, mass media will undoubtedly find that they need a strong multichannel approach to best address their customers’ desires. Research will point out how the audience engages TV, web, and print in different ways, and how these channels can be orchestrated to deliver a holistic experience greater than the sum of its parts. I’m not a super sports guy, but from what I’ve gathered, ESPN has done this quite well. Everyone knows of their leading TV coverage; they’ve also got their glossy magazine and a website filled with interactive tools and games that sports fans love, and other media such as podcasts and blogs.

It seems so simple, but given how entrenched mass media are in their ways, making this shift from focusing on the advertiser to focusing on the audience will be difficult. But if they don’t, they’ll go the way of Craigslist’s competition.