It’s time to take a deep breath and stop all the hand wringing about the demise of TV, as a content and advertising medium, and the ascendancy of digital, as TV’s replacement. It hasn’t happened and is unlikely to occur like the “sky-is-falling” advocates claim it will. A good place to start is THE MEDIACENTER’s August 2016 Online Newsletter.

When you’re “King of the Hill,” challengers, pretenders and wannabes come at you from all sides. For “traditional” TV, it started with videocassettes and videodiscs, then cable and satellite, DVD/Blu-Ray, game consoles, the DVR, PCs, smartphones and tablets, and now streaming media services: Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube and an ever growing list of even newer players.

As much media coverage and hype e-commerce receives, its 2013 revenue total of $262.3 billion was still only 5.8 percent of total US retail sales, which was $4.533 trillion. Although e-commerce sales will increase 87 percent from 2013 to 2018, it will account for just less than 9 percent of all US retail sales, forecasted to reach $5.552 trillion.

As is often the case, it is difficult to evaluate properly the big events and latest trends in our lives because we find ourselves in the middle of the history being written. Social media certainly qualifies. Its global reach and nearly universal appeal has reduced most geographic borders to mere imaginary lines on a map. It has provided billions of individuals with a forum to share their lives,

As with all other advertising media, out-of-home is just as vulnerable to and enhanced by technology. According to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA), 2015 revenues increased 4.6% to a total of $7.3 billion, a significant improvement over 2014’s weak numbers.

Consuming in a World of Contrasts It appears many (if not most) Americans are living one life with two contrasting mindsets. Understanding these mindsets is the first step in understanding how consumers are evolving and creating challenges and opportunities to retailers.

Benign metaphors, such as landscape and universe, have been used to describe today’s media. As we advance further into the 21st century, “media jungle” may be a better metaphor, however.  Although there are more media consumers, the competition has become so fierce for them that it is truly the survival of the fittest.

The Trends 2015 Special Report from THE MEDIACENTER focused on the “New Consumer.” These are the consumers who want to have significant influence over companies’ current products and services and those they are developing as well as how, when and where those companies communicate and interact with them.

The Baby Boomers were much heralded; their children, Generation X, were somewhat ignored by comparison; and Generation Y, the Millennials, have been discussed and dissected for most of the last 10 years and continue to be probed and closely scrutinized under the microscope of marketing research.

The news media, including newspapers and news magazines, are often criticized for printing only the bad news. If they printed editions with coverage of their own industry, then they wouldn’t have much choice but to print the bad news because the good news for print media is difficult to find. There are a few sparks of life, however, and more so in magazines than newspapers, as the conversion from the physical to the digital version of print media continues albeit slowly.

Quite likely, the dominance of sports in modern American culture is only exceeded by the biggest non-athletic competition, politics. Kantar Media’s report on total US advertising expenditures for 2014 – a 0.7-percent increase to $141.2 billion – supports this conclusion, as it stated the increase was attributable to the Winter Olympics, World Cup and the mid-term elections. According to Kantar

The Most Profound Change, Positive, meaningful change can seem to take forever, and then, during a single moment, we collectively take a giant leap across the divide., A spacecraft’s encounter with Pluto. The US Supreme Court rules that same-sex marriage is constitutional

When the history of the last 50 years is studied and analyzed hundreds of year from now, it is likely to be recognized as the first epoch of equality. Seemingly every day, stereotypes and biases about gender, age, race and sexual orientation are being rejected and being replaced by genuine efforts to treat everyone equally. Often, lost among all these seismic changes is the major transformation of the role of men.

The Founding Fathers were quite progressive for their time when they declared that all “men (and women) are created equal.” Living in the 18th century, it’s not surprising that they didn’t take the next step and realize that although all are equal, all are also different. Since then, especially during the late 20th century and the first decade and a half of the 21st century, people have come to understand that inclusiveness, or societal diversity, is a strength.

Today’s Media Map is as complex and dynamic as the map of the Earth – the winds of change erode the high points, the fastest-flowing channels can be reduced to a trickle or disappear entirely and unpredictable forces can suddenly and dramatically alter the landscape.