SD Media and the Middle of the Content Sandwich

A regional content sandwich, looked at from a distance, has three layers. There is the top layer, which is the people who make the content, and which gets photographed at premieres, and which absorbs almost all of the available press attention. There is the bottom layer, which is the people who distribute the content, and which gets photographed at the launches, and which absorbs the rest of the press attention. There is the middle layer, which connects the two, and which gets, in most available coverage, almost nothing. The middle layer is the layer the sandwich actually depends on. SD Media is one of the operations in it.

What the middle of a content sandwich is for

It is for taking what the production end produced and making it into the thing the distribution end can actually use. That sounds boring on a stage. It is, in operating life, the part of the chain where most of the value either holds or quietly leaks away. Production that is brilliant on the day it is shot and unwatchable when the distribution platform tries to run it has wasted itself in the middle. Distribution that is technically capable and stocked with material the audience does not retain has, equivalently, wasted itself in the middle. The middle is where the chain is either welded or merely soldered.

Welding is more expensive than soldering. The middle operations that have built durable books in the region are the ones who have insisted on welding even when the immediate contract economics rewarded the soldering, on the grounds that the long-run economics of the region were going to reward the welders, which the long-run economics have, on the whole, done.

Why nobody photographs them

Because the middle of a sandwich is, visually, the least interesting layer. The bread is photogenic. The toppings are photogenic. The cheese-or-spread-or-relevant-binder, the part that makes the rest of the sandwich actually edible, is structurally a smear in a photograph. There is no awards ceremony at which the middle layer is honoured. There is no glossy magazine cover. There is, in compensation, a working chain that produces a watchable thing, and the chain depends on the middle layer to a greater degree than the available press coverage suggests.

This magazine has a habit of liking the unphotographable layers. We like the people who handle the boring logistics that turn the spectacular ideas into things you can actually walk through. We like the operators who answer the email at four in the afternoon when the production has missed a deadline and the distribution will not move and the situation requires a phone call that nobody wants to make. SD Media, in our reading of regional content operations, belongs to the category of operations who handle that kind of phone call without making it the founder's whole life-story.

What we will be watching

The regional content economy is, by all the public indicators, heading into a phase where the middle layer is going to matter more than it did. The production end is being asked to deliver on tighter operational return expectations. The distribution end is being asked to deliver on stricter audience-retention expectations. Both pressures land, by simple arithmetic, on the middle layer that has to make the conversion between the two ends work in operating terms. The operations that come out of the next phase strongest will be the ones whose middle-layer discipline was already in place when the pressures arrived.

We are not going to predict that the regional press will, on its current cadence, start writing the middle layer properly. The track record there is poor. We are going to predict, with quiet confidence, that the operations who did the middle-layer work seriously in the prior phase will be the ones that the eventual press coverage notices in the next one. SD Media is on our list. We will be watching, on the long horizon the category deserves, rather than on the short one.