Broadcasting vs. Narrowcasting
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
A few days ago, I received the following email from a reader of this blog:
I have an idea for a blog entry that I would love to hear your views on, and I think it would be valuable to others who read your blog as well, with respect to furthering one’s professional career. It’s really about credibility in the small vs. credibility in the large. Credibility in the small is about having credibility with the key folks driving a particular industry who may be unknown but have huge influence with their respective execs. Credibility in the large is about being “known” (i.e. being known in the Siggraph crowd). Some folks have both, and that’s where you want to be. Optimizing for credibility in the large is what many folks do, and there are steps one can take (writing books, presenting at Siggraph, writing blogs, etc). Alternatively, getting credibility in the small is much much harder, and more valuable in the long run. Nevertheless to win business deals, in my experience often time you end up dealing with folks that don’t understand either the problems or the solutions. Thus they ignore the solution because for the most part they don’t understand it, and fall back to “credibility in the large” (i.e. name recognition). I’d love to hear your thoughts on it in your blog.
There are many things to chew on within this email, and perhaps it’s a bad idea to try and address them while jet-lagged in Brisbane (having recently traveled from Jerusalem via Los Angeles), but I’ll give it a shot. What we’re talking about here is the difference between professional “broadcasting” vs. “narrowcasting”. Broadcasting in this context refers to engaging in public venues of speaking and publishing (books, blogs, articles) that cast a wide net. Professional credibility is based primarily upon substantive content, but also upon “the cult of personality” and the implicit validation that comes from speaking in certain venues and/or publishing under certain auspices. With a little research, experience, and an engaging style of delivery, one can become an “authority” on a subject in relatively short order. The question is, what is your motivation and your goal? Is it simply to be “known” and “respected”, or is there a business purpose to the broadcasting? More on this in a moment.
Narrowcasting, by contrast, is a focused engagement with another individual (or select group of individuals) in an exclusive professional context - a private lunch or a board meeting, for example. High altitude is not necessary (ie. – a business dinner between two rank-and-file TDs qualifies), but the further up the food chain you narrowcast, the more impactful the potential result. Everyone in Hollywood knows the value of “taking a meeting” or “doing lunch” with the “right” person, even if they’ve never had the opportunity. 
Those who focus their energies on narrowcasting are often those who you would never recognize at a conference such as Siggraph. In fact, they might be unlikely to even attend such a venue, unless it were to speak and run.
And here, of course, is where the two models mix. Most of the “movers and shakers” in our industry engage in both approaches. Furthermore, they understand when each is appropriate, and when it is not. For example, in my younger days, I was given to impassioned speeches at company meetings on any given topic: “broadcasting”, if you will. One day, a kindly executive called me into her office and said, “Kevin, you have an undeniable skill. You have a great feel for the pulse of the group, and are able to frame and convey arguments in a colorful and compelling manner. And you’re not afraid to speak up. But you’re also burning a lot of fuel: you don’t always need to address perceived problems so publicly. In fact, those with the most power almost never air their issues in public, because they know how to get things done quietly and effectively behind closed doors. So, you need to ask yourself: do you want to be confrontational or do you want to be effective?”
I thought about this a lot, and although it took some time to fully apply the principle, I understood the point. I also understood through experience how sometimes a good old-fashioned “broadcast” shake-up was just what the doctor ordered to break an impasse and get folks back to a productive “narrowcast” (strikes can serve this purpose, for example, where previous narrowcasting has failed). This may sound like a tangent, but ultimately both broadcasting and narrowcasting are tools for getting what we WANT - which brings us back to the point of motivations and goals.
A clear sense of what one is trying to achieve professionally is essential for the effective application and balance of broadcasting and narrowcasting. The reader mentions “credibility”… but “credibility” to what end? Ego cultivation? Career cultivation? Vocation cultivation? (More on the difference between “career” and “vocation” in a future blog entry.) If your goal is to win business deals, you may indeed find that broadcasting scores the invitations to productively narrowcast. More than one consulting opportunity has come my way from an executive or producer who handed me their card after one of my seminars, with an invitation to arrange a meeting. But when you’re in that meeting - when you’re narrowcasting - you better be damn sure of who your target is and what’s important to them… which brings us to the reader’s comment about those who “don’t understand either the problems or the solutions”. This is a bit vague, but could be interpreted to mean those who “don’t get it”: those whose only choice is to “broadcast” because they don’t understand their prospective clients/partners, and/or fail to establish a productive niche of any kind.
There’s much more to go into here, and I’m fading fast, so we’ll have to pick this one up at another time. G’day, mates! 
