Oct
20
Bonfires of B2B Vanities
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, STM, Thomson, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
Do you hear that slightly soggy, slushy sound, followed by a low moan? That is the sound of a whole industry falling on its sword. The signs are everywhere. Here is W H Smith in the UK, banning self-published books because it cannot see which ones are pornographic and which are not (http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/whsmith-boycotts-self-published-authors). Remember when booksellers used to be able to read? And over here, in my favoured B2B zone, I came across a suggestion in the building and construction information marketplace last week that, to quote my correspondent “it is not the publishers job to produce data for automated building processes; builders have to learn that for themselves”!
As you may imagine, this lit my blue touch paper. In the user-centric world of the network, it will probably become a capital crime to tell the user what he should do – but for me it will always be a criminal offence to stop short, or define the publishing role so that it stops short, of going to the very last point of user satisfaction. Our obligation in every instance must surely be to create the ultimate in end user satisfaction in order to prevent third parties from inserting themselves between us and our customers, and removing our value-add leverage. I do not much mind if in the process we become a content- to -software company – or even a software company – since I see less risk in this than in the removal of our direct-to-client relationships and our ability to raise prices and margins through value add and enhanced client satisfaction. And I refuse to believe that the construction industry, as it slowly unfreezes from recession in Europe, is any different from any other vertical market. I have talked in these columns about the aircraft industry, the workflow of science, medical diagnostic systems, legal practice work-engines and similar developments in the auto industry and elsewhere.
So you cannot find a vertical market without finding automation of basic functions, workflow modelling, data analysis and predictive analytics, and machine-to-machine communications. And when I made my phone call I was looking at the German and Nordic construction markets, since there has been interest recently in Docu Group, a major player comprised of the former Bau Verlag companies of Springer, with the ByggFacta companies that I well recall from Thomson. And I was surprized by how little reaction there has been amongst the European construction information services to the arrival of BIM. And my call was intended to check out whether this was true as well in the UK. It appears that it was, and that no one was very willing to invest in doing anything about it.
This may be linked to the deep recession in the building industry, and it is certainly does not mean that the companies concerned do not have the data. While they remain publishers of magazines, for some curious reason, all the players I looked at – EMAP, Bau, (former) UBM ,Byggfacta – all had familiar collections of data on new building starts, on materials and labour pricing, and on regulation, and good services for bid-monitoring. They showed no sign of collecting public or third party data, enriching it or building knowledge stores of any sort. And yet if you look at the US websites of Hanley Wood, Reed Construction or the McGraw-Hill services you see an acute awareness of the importance of predictive data modelling and an anxiety to help customers use it. This I find almost completely absent in Europe. Yet in a networked society the architect, the builder, the contractor, the engineer, and the property developer are working cheek-by-jowl. It is in everyone’s interest to ensure, through predictive data modelling, that what is planned will work, within its budget, before physical work begins. And we are not short in Europe of institutions like the Institute for Applied Building Informatics in Munich to tell us how to do this. So why not?
My conclusion at the end of my phone call was that many in the information industry went as far as “research” and then stopped dead. It is almost as if by assembling data and allowing users to search it, the publishers satisfied all processing requirements, and that the role of the industry, at least in Europe, stops there. Well, said my colleague, AutoCAD will do all that when its needed, and the big global players will build their own, and the small builders aren’t interested and anyway our events are where we make our money and we are going to concentrate on those. And much of this may be true (indeed, Bau runs excellent technical conferences that train builders to use innovations that they themselves play no part in providing). But to me it all sounds like elements in a collective death wish. If AutoCAD are to do it (and I have not a clue as to where their ambitions lie), who will be their partners and marketeers in European countries. Who can supply the data attached to trusted brands?
There can be no doubt that the European construction industry will revive. Negotiating the streets in central London closed by construction work last week it was hard not to think that it had not done so already. But will the European construction information industry recover in time to be any use other than as legacy data providers? And while this appears to me to be acute in Construction, is it also the case in other vertical markets? Recovery depends upon re-investment and new partnerships. Where are they? And if they are not in place, then those trying to sell untransformed B2B players with ancient lineage but no leverage may find the prices offered hugely disappointing.
Oct
4
Seismic Ad Movements
Filed Under B2B, Blog, data analytics, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
There have been gathering warnings all through the autumn. Now a realization is beginning to form, we can look back and see how it crystalized, and what it may mean. But the underlying message is clear: the power of advertising as a media business model is broken, and will never return with the same force. How do I know? Well, for a start, I heard Chuck Richards, Outsell’s B2B analyst, say that the B2B market would become overwhelmingly “pull” based: we are looking, in the view of the least alarmist commentator that I know, at a world where conventional display and banner advertising will disappear. I sat still for an hour after hearing this thinking of all the precursor events that I knew about and trying to put them in order.
For a start, digital advertising revenues, though trumpeted by anxious media owners, show no signs of returning to either pre-recession or pre-digital levels. Anywhere, not just B2B. So with print diminishing and digital ads becoming a lowly priced commodity, the influence of advertising of any sort on network-based business modes is in retreat. Indeed, the interesting marketplace in advertising suppressants tells an aligned story. Lets take AdTrap (http://www.getadtrap.com/) as a typical example. This is not even software to block advertising, but a hardware-based solution that stands between the server and the modem – and edits web pages. Notice its angle of approach: “a small price to pay to lose intrusive advertising and videos – and have web pages that load more quickly and easily” seems to paraphrase the message. Now keep looking and you will find that Yellow Page style advertising has almost gone, that print is discounting heavily to offset falling circulations. Only television seems secure…or does it? Programme making power seems to be moving from the traditional (cable) networks and franchise holders towards “made for download” TV. The new powers will soon be Netflix and its imitators, and we shall be talking about the Game of Thrones content creation model. Everything here speaks to sponsorship: nothing supports the intrusive intervention of “message breaks” filled with minutes of surplus to requirements video drizzle.
But surely the mighty advertising world will not take this sitting down? Well, I was ticked off recently for referring to WPP as an ad agency: I should have said “marketing and data analytics” company or some sort. Omnicom and Publicis are now engaged to be married: is this a merger of strengths or a way of disguising weakness? Certainly the elan of an industry which, in its 1950s manifestation was a billboard for the confidence and prosperity of a recovering post-war world, now looks fragile and faces real issues in this slow post-recession recovery. Creatives are still a high value commodity, but the world of PR and advertising built on campaign planning and tactical development and space booking can normally be performed by the workflow tools installed on the laptop of the lowliest marketing assistant working for the big brand owners And the brands are more likely to have the data required for higher level analytics – and to invest in it.
So brand management, like the rest of us, looks to lose cost and gain in productivity terms. And all the tools are there to do the job, though they do not present themselves, for obvious reasons, as ways of undermining their existing clients in advertising and PR. Companies like Gorkana and Cision have moved from their historic base in the news clipping services – a dull necessity for ad agencies who needed “voucher” as proof of ad publication and clippings as a oemonstration of launch and PR impact. These players have now become bedrock workflow tools that also enable the migration of PR and advertising back in house, with only the creative elements remaining to be subcontracted.
What then replaces push advertising? Part on the answer lies with social media, with its ability at once to allow brands to create word of mouth interest, and its hugely powerful position as the Recommendation Engine. As social networks get over “big” and return to niche, they will become much more powerful as a source of purchasing impetus. “We need to replace the fridge – who recently bought one…? Why are half of my friends on Apple and half on Samsung…?”. “Here’s a link to where we bought them…” And this works as well in B2B niche sector business and professional networks. This is where users learn to go to Capterra and other niche listing, recommendations and comparison sites. And here is where wholly new buying relationships are going to be forged.
When I began as a young publisher one of my first responsibilities was the Nelson Classics, wonderful mini-editions of classic novels in a small format that had flourished before the First World War under the editorial direction of John Buchan. Of course, by my day they had been swamped by Penguin and the age of the paperback. One thing that I noted was that while Penguins advertised other Penguins, my back pages were a messy swamp of advertisements for liver pills, Dr Collis Browne’s patented cures and other matter thought useful, no doubt, for constipated and otherwise afflicted readers. At one time, the book was thought to be a place for push advertising, and just as it has so certainly retreated from the book, e or otherwise, our children will be surprized when they reflect that it was once an expected feature of magazines, newspapers, networked media and mobile devices.
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