Hollywood Mastered the Art of the Blockbuster. Here's Why Content Creators Need to Replicate That Success.

In this series, professionals predict the ideas and trends that will shape 2016. Read the posts here, then write your own (use #BigIdeas2016 in your piece).

One of the great challenges of our time is how to get a message across in a noisy world. There's too much content and not enough time. What's more, a handful of platforms like Facebook sit between virtually all creators and their consumers. They gobble up most of our time and have an outsized impact on what we see, hear, and read.

To learn more about what works, over the course of 2015 I have interviewed dozens of journalists, influencers and marketers on Content Convergence, my CBS Radio podcast. What's more, I have also visited with dozens of clients and media execs who are facing this issue daily as well as with the platforms that are helping to build algorithms that aim to alleviate it.

What I've come to learn is that there are really only three pathways to content in a digital realm:

• Direct: you go straight to the source of content itself or indirectly via a curator like Flipboard, iTunes, Netflix or an opt-in platform like email or a mobile push alert
• Search: you find it via Google, Yahoo or Bing keywords 
• Social: it finds you via the lens of your friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

For many many years the only way to discover content was via the direct means. However, in the 2000s with the rise of Google, things began to change. This accelerated even further this decade with the rise of social media.

As a result, more and more content creators have fundamentally changed what, how and where they publish. This has helped to ensure some to be highly visible on these platforms and reach an optimal number of eyeballs. Success became mastering a game that combined content, distributed publishing, analytics and optimization.

The Huffington Post, Business Insider and Buzzfeed are three relatively new players in media that mastered the science of scaling attention. All three know how to create journalistic content that either answers questions on Google, elevates people's identity on social media or both.

Most of the experts I interviewed on my podcast are, related, doubling down on social as a means of scaling discovery. And why not? The conventional wisdom is that today this is the best, maybe even the only way, to cultivate an audience in an era of infinite supply but limited demand — time and attention. You must optimize for the platforms, they say.

That's certainly true. As direct visits to most sites have waned.

However, I see another way forward as well. And this is what I hope to really learn more about in 2016.

Even in this age of ubiquity, I've observed there remain many blockbuster content franchises that people continue to seek out directly. Most of these are not created in newsrooms or even by brands. Rather, they are hatched by the entertainment industry. The book Blockbusters by Anita Elberse opened my eyes to this a couple of years ago.

Star Wars, Frozen, The Avengers, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Call of Duty, The Hunger Games are all powerful content franchises. All have incredible followings. People can't wait for the next installment. They don't need to be optimized for search and social. Even given ubiquitous options, millions of people still go direct to them. Some are even binged on.

While most content franchises are based in the world of entertainment (and often have multimillion-dollar marketing budgets to boot), I believe the same concept can apply equally in business as well as content becomes the primary kernel of virtually all marketing programs.

The same is already true in journalism where I have noticed a renewed emphasis on "enterprise journalism" — reporting that takes a lot of time and effort to craft. The Serial podcast is poised to become a major digital content franchise. This shows that creating sustainable content franchises is not solely about having resources.

Creating and cultivating content franchises is easier said than done though. Creativity and great storytelling alone are not be enough. Though they are certainly prerequisites.

Rather, I think the answer lies in mastering the laws of supply and demand in a digital realm.

My thesis is that a blockbuster digital content franchise (one where each installment builds on the prior) requires that content creators take the care and time to make something so high quality that:

• It fulfills an often unexpressed need that a large cohort of people have
• It can be serialized into an archipelago of content
• It is unavailable anywhere else

This last point is key and it can't be overlooked. Content that is high value that is scarce — either because of the talent or the assets involved — maybe what's required to command a direct-engaged audience.

Pockets of Hollywood have mastered this to the tune of billions of dollars. My hope is to dive deeper into this topic in 2016 and share what I can learn. That's my big idea for the new year.