Mar

6

The Media Regeneration Game

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

The last two days at Digital Media Strategies (Kings Place, London, 4-5 March 2014) have been amongst the best that I have spent in a conference hall in a decade. And I have wide experience to call upon! But Neil Thackray and Rory Brown and their team at the Media Briefing company pulled out all the stops to advance the game on their inaugural effort last year, and in the process pulled over 340 delegates and some first class “big names” and an even better class of “previously unknowns” from this diverse industry. And they really set me thinking: where were all these newspaper bosses and magazine tycoons during the long years when “it will never happen here” was the rule. Some still looked a bit nervous – Simon Fox, CEO of Trinity Mirror, caught in the headlights of a tigerish interrogation from Thackray, looked as if he were about to confess to war crimes at HMV and indecent assault on “The People”, but most of his colleagues were self-assured to the point of near-arrogance.

That at least could be an explanation of Mike Darcey, the News Corp CEO and his decision to spend 8 minutes of his own allotted time taking apart what he fancied to be the strategy of the next speaker, Andrew Miller, CEO, The Guardian Media Group. At least this precluded further dwelling upon the comparative failure of paywalls and the comparative lack of impact of digital advertising. And it enabled everyone to say that they were faithfully following the user experience. Yet it had the odd effect of making News Corp into a sort of John the Baptist warm up act for the Guardian, to which one felt that Andrew Miller responded by indicating that he had a better plan, but not revealing fully what he had up his sleeve. To those in the audience inured to the media having no plan at all, this was a tonic. At the moment the Guardian seems to be a connectivity junkie, rightly glorying in its content re-use and the amount of referral traffic it gets, celebrating its brand positioning as a global voice of liberal values and trying to draw the advertising it can get on this pitch. But I get an underlying feeling that they know that advertising is not the answer, and the room sat up when the topic turned to Guardian Membership.

Clearly if the Guardian can monetize its community effectively then it may be possible to get millions of people to subscribe to its values and buy into aspects of its content feed. Andrew Miller showed a picture of C P Scott and laid tributes before the lares and penates of great journalism, as indeed he should (and neither he nor I care that Edward Snowden appears to be a right wing Republican with a wholly eighteenth century view of the rights of the individual). However, if you have large populations of like-minded people with a strong community ethic then you can create – Guardian (Eye)witness. I well remember, while chairing Fish4, the frustration of the regional press competing with Mr Miller as he distributed free AutoTrader software to every used car dealer, enabling them to organize their inventory and upload easily – to AutoTrader. As a Guardian Member will I get the equivalent, thus broadening the scope (and reducing the cost?) of Great Journalism. Too early to say it yet, perhaps ? The editors would be talking quality control and the journos would be talking to the National Union of Journalists, but…

But at least we are all talking now. As a digital participant from 1980 and an internet – watcher from 1993, I am interested by how much of the industry response was fear and loathing. Hearst, at this conference a great example of digital thinking, spent the early years of the internet buying medical databases and B2B applications. Brilliant purchases, but what did they say about management’s view of their existing media futures? In the same terms, DMGT has turned itself in these time periods from being a newspaper company into a B2B player. No harm in that, but could earlier action have preserved the original structures. Or maybe the media is best re-invented not by its current practitioners but buy complete outsiders – great examples in this conference from Buzzfeed and from Business Insider? And then, what do we make of what seems to be a very European trend at present – letting the staff who know the markets create and test the ideas for recreating media and beyond media services.

I had heard a little about Sanoma’s regenerative Accelerator programmes before, and so was full of anticipation when Lassi Kurkijarvi covered the stage with energy and enthusiasm. With both internal and external venture activity he had a lot to cover. It is now fairly common for media players to invest in start-ups and develop incubators (Reed Elsevier have been venture capital investors for a decade; Holtzbrinck have their seed corn funding and efforts like Macmillan Digital Science and Digital Education; Gruner und Jahr spoke of their activities here) but getting 150 employees into a boot camp and encouraging ideation? Only for the Finns? Not at all, said Lassi. Here was a a planned process of open innovation starting with a mass kick off meeting, a webinar-based process, staff making quick pitches to get support for ideas, an initial selection of 20, crowd sourced selection of 5 for a boot camp experience and the result is 3 ideas which the company is now developing. So look out for Spot-a-shop, Huge or ClipScool – they did not come from Silicon Valley or Tech City, Old Street, but they may be none the less valuable as they express the knowledge of customers built up within a diversified media conglomerate like Sanoma.

So what does this mean? That media corporations can be regenerated from within? What would we have given to know that in 1993!

Jan

19

There is nothing on TV…

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

“Well” she said “there is nothing on the television. I don’t know why we have one, since its certainly not for what we watch. Well, my husband watches the cricket, of course. He’s cricket crazy, up half the night watching the Ashes from Australia, he was. And I like Crime. Of course, it only takes me 10 minutes to find out who the killer is, and you’ve got to watch all those ads before you can see you were right, so I mostly record them and take out the ads as I watch them…”

This extract from a 2013 survey (this family watched 45 hours of television a week) demonstrates once again that television remains the dominant source of entertainment in many developed societies, even if we do not switch on at 6pm and close with the National Anthem when broadcasting stopped, as British social critics of the 1970s feared we would. Barry Parr, now Outsell’s lead analyst in the sector has started to examine what is happening with a series of very well-argued articles (“TV’s complexity crisis is an opportunity for content owners” 13 January 2014 www.outsellinc.com). He set me thinking about what content owners in the print industry did a decade ago when they went through the parallel process – the traditional delivery format is broken and the traditional delivery mechanisms, with all of their complex supply chain relationships, are beginning to fail. Do the reactions of the print world and the record industry give a clue to the likely reactions of their television peers?

A first reaction in print was disbelief, followed swiftly by denial that the speed or range of change could be anywhere near as severe as commentators reported. So as book publishers were saying that “they will always want narrative and always in book form” so cable operators and channel owners in television are talking about brand loyalty, the high value attached to scheduling, and the importance of holding the line on pricing and packaging. And just as brand does not attach to publishers in entertainment markets but to authors, so brand does not attach to channels but to programming/shows. So as a result both types of middleman – publishers and channel operators – misjudged their users, as almost all intermediaries did in the analogue world, because it was impossible for them to see how content was consumed, and their knowledge of their audiences , despite all the surveys, the focus groups and the market research, was stale by the time it reached them. Only in a digitally networked world do you begin to overcome the problems of knowing audiences, and even then, asking them questions is less informative than watching their behaviour and mapping their reactions (recommendations etc).

Shortly we shall see television distribution, which five years ago in Europe was diminishing its creative efforts and outsourcing everything, beginning to buy back the outsourcers and talk about the value of “content”, as in “content will always be king” (book publishing c.1995). This will be followed by a great wailing and gnashing of teeth around further falls in channel advertising revenues, while every effort is made to seek alternative revenue sources. I quoted Jim Dolan, chairman of Cablevision, last year, when he pointed out that his many children of all ages, now used Netflix on Cablevision. He saw this as a signal to work on Cloud libraries and the ability in the network to download and store up to 10 programmes simultaneously. And surely this is a very proper reaction, but only if the cable players really see their future as utilities, with very well-regulated margins, competitive pressure from telcos in a similar bind and subject to fickle consumers who can change broadband suppliers on a click. So here is the second thing which television will find hard to buy: digitally networked markets increase consumer power immensely, and the contractual tie-in so beloved of cable and satellite is now a very shaky foundation indeed. Alongside Netflix, who can fail to see Google and Amazon as major market players here – and they really do understand about Cloud libraries and downloads.

If Jim Dolan really thinks that the US cable industry is “living in a bubble with its focus on TV packages that people must pay for as offered” (www.hollywoodreporter.com/print/599574) then there is at least a hope that a note of realism may be afoot which was absent in print and music. Yet TV has always been about mass audience and numbers of eyeballs sold to the advertiser. Can it work on a niche interest, subscription model? Spending time last year with Fred Perkins, a survivor of print (ex FT.com, ex McGraw-Hill) at Information Television (http://www.information.tv/?cid=3) in London I saw convincing demonstrations (caravanning and mobile holiday homes formed a classic model for this) which made me wonder why more niches, alongside other B2B or B2C digital content vehicles, do not use niche TV effectively. OK, I know that many magazine publishers invested in studios in the hope of getting into an aligned television market, and this never worked. But that was before the digital broadband network had further blurred and softened the edges between content formats and packages. My conversations with Fred, and stories like the BBC News item (www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25457001) last week which profiled, in describing the prospects for internet television broadcasting, NTVE (Nautical TV Europe) based in Magaluf, Mallorca, and financed not by advertising but by sponsorship and product placement. But its distribution model is, well, fairly cheap… or free, if you don’t find that four letter word offensive.

So this may not be an option for Mr Murdoch, who was rather hoping that the satellite/pay TV model would continue to fund him through the next three decades. The signs at the moment are that, under the same digital network stress as print and music, TV programme distribution will change radically to a My network model, still paid by subscription but no longer powerful as an advertising medium. And beyond that? Maybe the subscription will be to a programme guide that enables you to decide what you watch, when and where and in what sort of device, with monthly billing depending on the choices made, the storage used in the Cloud and the deals that you make with programme makers? It is Your Choice!

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