The self-fulfilling prophesy

Over the next while, I want to dig into the industry a little bit. Where it was, where it is and where things might be headed. I want to set the scene by talking about that word "content" which we've all somewhat reluctantly embraced. But even before that post, I want to talk about something that has been happening for the last ten years or so without actually talking about what has been happening for the last ten years or so.

Let's go back further...

2008. The crash. Are you old enough to remember that well? In Ireland, there was one particular morning that I'll never forget. It was the day the bank collapse became a very real possibility. If the banks went down, the whole structure might fall and we could lose all of our savings, everything wiped out... if we hadn't already withdrawn our money by that point.

But the real danger? Panic. If everyone rushed to pull out their money, the very act of doing so would make that collapse inevitable.

We weren't the cause of that crash of course and there were very real problems behind it, but the story, the fear and our reaction to that story could, in just a single morning, turn a possibility into a reality. It would have been a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I think about that a lot when I hear about shifts in the media landscape. Our industry is full of “accepted truths”. It always has been. It's that old adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing - that out of context sound bite from a Kidscreen talk on an issue that's actually very nuanced and complicated that comes back home and sticks. For example, one from early in my career is: girls age out of animation early and move on to live action.

We took it as fact. And really, it was. Kind of.

Development, distribution, project focus, entire programming strategies were shaped around that fact. And in general, with a few exceptions, animation beyond preschool was largely aimed at boys and there weren't really homes for much else.

Of course, the result was that it meant girls simply weren’t being offered much in animation. Meanwhile homes like Disney Channel were delivering a full buffet of live-action content made just for them. So why wouldn’t girls drift away? They had been abandoned by animation while treated so well in live-action. This accepted truth trained a generation of girls that animation wasn't really for them.

And so the prophesy fulfilled itself.

Of course, anime caught fire outside of Japan and, even before that, we got some creators (and homes) brave enough to break out of that pattern and, you know what? Turns out a lot of girls love animation. Who knew?

So did girls actually age out of animation or did we take that as fact (or even just see it as a risk) and so we made it happen?

We are in tumultuous times, no doubt about it. Everything has changed and it's not done yet. Buckle up and get used to uncertainty, folks. But one thing I would really advise everyone watch out for is the difference between an actual truth and a self-fulfilling prophesy. Especially when it comes to a shifting audience, the "follow the audience to where they are" approach at the risk of abandoning the audience where they actually turned up for us, which has been a common theme over the last decade. As an industry, we risk making the prophesy real.

And if I'm being a little more blunt, there are people who burned working business models to the ground because of perceived risk of a shift in viewing habits that they actually then made happen and now they wonder where things all went wrong.

Here's the truth: things change.

Audiences evolve.

That’s natural.

It’s not always bad. But before we react, before the collapse panic, we need to ask ourselves a few things:

Are we responding to an inevitable reality? Or are we creating it?

Are we following the audiences? Or abandoning them?

What might happen if we instead invited people to where we are, offering something great, instead of chasing them somewhere we just can’t compete or they don't want us?

The future is not written yet. But it can be lost by believing it already is.