As the media and technology industries collide, we find ourselves using two sets of terminology to describe a common experience. To the technology industry, networks are anywhere and to media companies, content is everywhere. Technologists talk about users, programmers about viewers and audience, and marketers about consumers.

A few days ago, Emily Green posted on Media’s Anywhere Future and brought up a couple of ideas worthy of further discussion. In an anywhere (and everywhere) media environment, we talk often about brands as static entities: marketers that invest in advertising as part of a way to build an abstract concept that we call “brand.” Emily talks about brands in this way in her post, and she alludes to something that she calls a “threaded media experience.” She’s dead-on with the idea, and the media industry is abubble with the discussion of what they call cross platform. Advertisers refer to this same thing as cross media.

I’d like to take this a step further to say that technology is driving brands and media in co-opetition to define and monetize the cross-platform media experience.

Building on this, there are two ideas at hand. The first is the concept of media as brand which includes media brands as well as marketer-created media. The second is the often-overlooked business of media that speaks to cross-platform and cross-media experiences.

Technologists tend to think of media as static digital bits that ride across networks, but delivering Emily’s cross-platform, threaded media experience isn’t as easy as write once, publish many. The so-called digital content won’t be the same from one platform to another (television, internet, mobile, outdoor, out-of-home, retail, and so on and so forth), and the monetization models (subscriptions and advertising) will be very different as well. The real challenge will be to define this threaded media experience across platforms, brands and business models.

And even if you can deliver it, will it be profitable for media companies and network operators? Will it deliver the ROI that marketers demand?

Just take a look at the internet and digital media. Online publishers are making money by transitioning below-the-line marketing dollars from direct mail, print, local and other advertising budgets — but these new media are unable to sustain the same levels and quality of content production that we’ve seen in the print media. So newspapers are struggling, and we have bloggers instead. Puhleez!

Throw internet video into the media mix, and suddenly you’ll see the ad dollars flowing in that direction, though not to the same levels as with broadcast and cable television. Instead of family- and advertiser-friendly America’s Funniest Home Videos, we have YouTube which remains anathema to advertising dollars.

It’s the free-rider syndrome that I discussed in my last post. We think about how we’re going to take 30 Rock to three screens, but we don’t stop to think about what 30 Rock will look like if the broadcast advertising dollars dwindle and the “content” is monetized in a three-screen environment. We fail to consider how budgets, priorities and production values will play out in this cross-platform world:

• If the network operator demands a bigger piece of the ad revenues for mobile distribution, what will happen to audience reach?
• Will targeting deliver as promised? Or will re-targeting be the name of the game?
• Will social networks be more, or less, important in the future?
• How will media brands co-exist with advertiser brands?
• And how will the interplay between subscriptions and advertising vary between platforms?

To get an idea of what this threaded media experience may actually look like, take a peek at the American Pie Presents franchise. After two sequels with the original cast, American Pie shifted formula to a straight-to-DVD model. In comparison to the big-dollar productions American Pie 2 and American Wedding, the American Pie Presents properties have been low-cost, profitable productions that retain only one actor from the original movies — Eugene Levy. The lesson is that formulas will change along with production values and distribution. The franchise may exist, and the brand may persist, but it bears little resemblance to the media property many audiences know.

Production costs will clearly fall, but so will production values. We’ve seen this in the past as films have been turned into television shows, and characters have been spun off. Media brands are a continuous work-in-progress. And new business models present their own challenges.

The questions are many, and it’s going to take fifteen years — a full media generation — for content owners, network operators, technology companies and marketers to figure out the cross-platform experience. I know that many media executives are already asking the hard questions about new technologies and where they lead. Technology vision is a good thing to have, but for those tasked with making money from a converged media future, so is a healthy dose of skepticism.