In 2022, the media coverage certainly took a negative turn. I’m no exception. What started as me pondering “worst case scenarios” at the beginning of March shifted to believing that literally every force buffeting the entertainment industry got worse. (I’ll have a piece on that for the Ankler at the start of the New Year.)
Yikes!
So it’s time for some positivity. Indeed, I think I have a simple recommendation that nearly every company in entertainment (or adjacent to it) could implement, and if they did, could massively improve (dare I say double?) their productivity.
While “disruption” is the most overused word of the 21st century so far, I truly think this will be the most disruptive trend of the 2020s. Very smart people will soon be adopting today’s recommendation.
And it’s my gift to paying subscribers as the year ends. Have a Happy Holidays and Wonderful New Year! We’ll be back next year with tons (and I mean tons) of new content.
An Analogy About A Robot Making Socks
Imagine a fully-automated machine that makes socks. A whole variety of socks: men’s ankle high jogging socks; little kids licensed socks; women’s low-cut dress socks. This machine gets programmed with its deliverables each morning, but its controllers can send updates throughout the day. The catch is that after checking for updates, the machine takes five minutes to reboot before it can start making socks again.
So how often should the machine check its update queue?
The answer is obvious: as rarely as possible!
Sure, every so often, the sock robot will get an urgent request, but as long as the urgent socks simply need to be made by the end of the day, you’d check the queue as rarely as possible. The machine should not check every five minutes. It would spend half it’s time rebooting! Even every half-hour seems like a waste. Hourly might be too much. Call it every 90-120 minutes, right?
To be obvious, you are this robot.
The rest of this post is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so please subscribe.
We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you’d like to read more about why you should subscribe, please read these posts about the Streaming Ratings Report, why it matters, why you need it, and why we cover streaming ratings best.
