Just as the function of the human immune system is to detect (and repel) anything "not us", so too is a media market's intrinsic consumption function.
Don't think it is as simplistic as an evolutionary "us" and "them" bifurcation?
Politically incorrect? In early February, a BBDO survey of American TV viewers confirmed that blacks, now with numerous programming choices of Afro-American casts and culture, clearly choose these over white alternatives.
And vice versa. The top 10 shows in each racial category mutually excluded nine of the top 10 in the other. The sole exception, CSI, while first in white households, was 10th in black households (and FYI, attracts less than three per cent of South Korean viewers).
Given a choice, when production quality is comparable, media consumers gravitate toward that which they identify with, ie, "us".
Such choice is the bane of holding audiences "captive." The former de jure or de facto monopolies of China's CCTV and the three original US networks are paradigm examples.
Increases in local video, aural, and print production and publications are in part a backlash to what once was, as American media authority Neal Gabler posits, the very attraction of American content: vulgarity. Last month he wrote that "American shows that have travelled best around the globe ... (were those) that reinforced the stereotype of American vulgarity."
The alternative of high quality local production values coupled with an apparent allergic reaction to American cultural values means not only less appetite for American media fare (whether programmes, music, magazines or ads), but also as the Next Gen study opined, a corresponding drop in appetite for American products and services.
Like media content, this decline will also be in lockstep as local quality alternatives develop. The study offered little hope for a speedy recovery: "even more negative portrayals of Americans and their way of life lie ahead."
The time is gone when deregulation, costs, novelty, West-envy and especially high production values drove local Asian content providers to turn to the West. Higher production values simply outweighed lower, locally produced content. The cultural cost, as well as the complex socio-political attraction, was vulgarity. It was form over substance. No longer!
While some genres and mediums will be less affected, such as documentary, cinema and animation, most American (Western) fare may be on its way to becoming the weakest link in media's virtuous circle. I could even envision Kritika Kongsompong calling it such, and expelling it from the stage, except that this Western game show of the same name, has itself been expelled by an Asian cultural immune system as not being "us" (in this case Thai), and is no longer on the air. I can also envision other losers: American/Western content providers, advertisers, marketers and ad agencies. The winners: their local Asian opposite numbers.