Oct
23
Creative Disruption Disrupted
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
And now for something entirely new (here, at least) – a Book Review. I have been reading Simon Waldman’s new book, Creative Disruption (FT Prentice Hall 2010 ISBN 978-0-273-72573-2). And a very good read it is too, full of thought provoking insight. I recommend it. Simon, known to many in the industry as the digital strategist at Guardian Media Group during its discovery, adoption and triumphs in creating digital media marketspace for itself, has a great deal to say. His core observation, derived from four interesting case studies, is that real world companies receiving the painful jolt of a swift kick in the digitals can and must re-invent themselves through a three stage process of re-generation. This involves a transformation of their core business, the discovery of big adjacencies, and the ability to “innovate round the edges”. His case studies include Encyclopaedia Britannica, Apple, IBM and HMV, and within their recent history he is able to demonstrate how these processes operate. And his point is that the re-invention of these businesses could not have taken place without the digitally-inspired disruption which can be so creative but for many companies can also simply demonstrate the inadequacy of management, the disaffection of audience from brand, or the inability to understand, finance or harness the transition to technology innovation.
So I completed my readings in total agreement with Simon, but rather wishing he had written a slightly less panoramic study. At some point in the generation of this work, I hear Simon’s publishers saying, as publishers always say, “Can’t you widen the scope a bit? So much of this is about media, the land of the vanishing headcount. We need buyers, so please bring in the whole range of tech businesses – and then point to the wider business world, so we can promote this as a vade mecum for industrial re-invention!” Simon has answered these syren cries very well, but for this reviewer this entails an element of regret. I wanted to read from a master with this experience exactly how media markets will be regenerated. In some ways he points in the direction that I was discussing in the previous blog – and indexing to his successors at the Guardian. What if emerging from the the flames of digital transition leads to businesses with less revenue but higher margins on the revenues they retain? Certainly Britannica qualifies there, and probably HMV. But Apple? Or IBM? We may be in danger of putting strictly non-comparable items into the same scales for measurement and judgement; and then finding that our measurement system needs to be re-calibrated in order to make any sensible generalizations at all.
And I would like to say that this aspect of the book is redeemed by a chapter late on entitled “Out of print:the reinvention of book publishers”. This has its interesting aspects, but leaves me where I was already: we have all seen newspapers and the music industry go over Niagara in a barrel, and I hope, with Simon, that book publishers “have learned eough to get the basics right from the outset”. Since he is talking about another consumer market, however, I must eschew his genial optimism. By far the larger part of the management of consumer book publishing known to me have, while embracing a digital strategy, regarded everything that emerges from it as a defence mechanism to protect the printed book. Using the eBook creatively in multimedia formats (as that wonderful, wilful publisher Peter Kindersley did within the chronic limitations of CD-ROM in the mid-1990’s) is just not happening. Managements seem to view continuity as a strategic aim, and re-invention as a car crash unless it has instant acceptability. Simon uses a favourite Latin tag: Contra vim mortis, medicanem non est in hortis. There is indeed “no cure for death in a garden”, and as these thoughts are written from the bottom of my garden during the “little death” of autumn, I see a great deal more of it in media marketplaces than he does.
But here is a hopeful note. Simon quotes from what I recall as a conversation with him during the writing of this book when he makes reference to the potential of turning research articles on X-rays into a workflow solution for digital training of X-ray technicians. I want to refer Simon to the excellent Brian O’Leary’s “Unified Field Theory of Publishing” http://bit.ly/bQspSU. There he will find that passive content no longer has value in networked applications. O’Leary is a “context” man, but his context is ever closer to my workflow. The problem we all face is not just that it is very hard to get people who are not used to it to start analysing the active, problem solving applications of content in the lives of their users/consumers, but it is well nigh impossible to do that if the end purpose is to defend the rigid linear internal production workflow model of the publisher, who cannot conceive of relinquishing his containers or his pricing models, or the accident-waiting-to-happen business model of advertising.
Mischievously, I was also thinking of Simon’s general business readers when I opened a press release from Experian. That company now offers “Decisioning as a Service” http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/experian-now-offers-decisioning-as-a-servicesm-the-industrys-only-hosted-environment-to-manage-and-optimize-business-decisions-105163364.html, creating a workflow model around decision making and designing in, presumably from the web as well as their own copious resources all the content you need to inform and support a decision. I am sure that this solution does not work at all levels, but it is at once indicative of where the content market is going and poses a challenge to all who commentate on Digital Disruption: why don’t we go and create the modelling that does the job and indicates, even if in outline only, what we need to do in order to transition an old and broken business model into a networked (and mobilely networked) society in a context of rapid change with no foreseeable end. Now that would be a workflow triumph!
Oct
5
In the Eye of the Storm
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media | Leave a Comment
It was one of those weeks last week in Florida. Those of us who blew into Miami for the annual Outsell Signature Event were almost blown right out of Key Biscayne as a tropical storm, generating gusting winds of up to 45 mph, threatened to turn Key Biscayne into the Key Largo of the movies. As moderator, I expected the next entrance to be by Edward G Robinson. However, the weather did keep us very attentive to what was happening on the platform, and very worthwhile it was to listen, and abandon a few prejudices on the way.
Since we are our prejudices, I found this hard. For example, having been scorned by consumer print media throughout the Nineties, I have always treasured the idea that not only were they far behind the game – but Doomed! And I can point to some newspaper groups on both sides of the Atlantic to illustrate the point. Yet two consumer magazine companies spoke, and both, in differing ways, had me and my (ever so slightly) smug B2B buddies scribbling furiously. Reporting rules prevent me from getting into the detail, but the acquisition of iCrossing by Hearst is very public knowledge, and now seems to me a very rational strategy for moving along the value chain, and extending and deepening the service and value that can be packaged for advertisers. At the same time, the conference saw some really smart iPad apps from consumer publishers, and while there was an annoying tendency to talk about “replica” publishing, the attractiveness of the end-product could not be denied.
This “replica” business must be addressed. It seems to me that it derives from a confusion between brand and format, and an often near-unconscious desire to “protect” print. This is irrational, both because print must defend itself and needs no sheltering, and because the behavioural mode of use for digital is so often so different to that of print that we are talking about different service models for different markets, even though those separate markets may be composed of the same people. Thinking that brand can only be affixed to print in media (even when that media is on the move to digital) is equally bizarre, and is as much a folly of STM publishers as of consumer publishers. The point is to get to a neutral platform position as soon as possible, and then operate as a creator of content divorced from a delivery strategy, and then deliver what users want in media packages, be they print, mobile, online or whatever, with the brand attached at all points to everything, but most especially to the service values.
For me, it follows from this that the day will come when, from content neutral platforms, we are delivering a mix of services where the media elements, as well as the content and delivery method, are dictated by users. They may buy by the drink, of course, but naturally subscription services and depletion payment models will all work well in this context. And some people will want to mix print and digital in these services, and to the extent that they do, “print will not die”. However, the print brand will in time assume the quality, trust and authority of the whole service. My only worry at the end of all this is whether we shall have larger businesses as a result.
The conference held a great deal more than this thought, of course. Those who, like me, had never seen a Facebook senior executive on a public platform had their curiosity amply rewarded by Mike Murphy’s charm offensive. Those, also like me, who speculated that all service values are ultimately niche values found satisfying content from Ascend Worldwide, DataExplorers and Farm Journal Media. And those who wanted to get a fix on where we are, economically and commercially, got that too, with the addition of valuable insights on the performance of the information industry and the state of its marketplaces from McKinsey’s Richard Benson Armer. Outsell will no doubt post the general session slides on their site (www.outsellinc.com). They are worth watching out for in this particularly difficult to read pivotal year when it is hard to say how long it takes to cross the plateau and whether there is a double dip at the other side.
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