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.

Sep

27

Re-Building Inside Out

Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

All this time has passed and we are still in the “sheep v goats” definition stages of online market development. My easily irritated duodenum flared on this in this morning’s MediaGuardian (never to be taken in any case without antacid);” Facebook is absolutely not an AOP  (Association of Online Publishers) member. We wouldn’t recognize Facebook as a content producer and they would not define themselves as one”. (Lee Baker, Director of AOP, MediaGuardian, 27 September 2010). Since AOP also excludes the BBC, but includes News International (and thus My Space as well) it could be defined as the Society for the Protection of Old Media against Intrusive Business models (SPOONFED). But for my current purposes the issue is not quite that: why, I want to ask, is it permissable for “old” media to be given time, and often protection, in order to rebuild their businesses for a networked world, when that time and investment have largely been used for strategies of ill-informed diversification by acquisition as a hedge against change. Or for market strategies designed to slow change and push the market, largely unsuccessfully, towards halfway houses in which the format to be protected is prefaced “e” in the hope that this will prevent a strike of lightning. Thus, eNewspapers a la Murdoch, eMagazines and eJournals … and, alas, eBooks. All doomed halfway houses.

So what is to be done? It has now been clear for a decade that the media needs to re-invent itself in terms of network grounded communications. Adaptation has to flow from a real understanding of how virtual users behave, and that this behaviour is crucially different from that of the same individual in a real world environment. Publishing platforms that create and hold content must be neutral to end use, and marketing has an enhanced editorial role in defining those usages. We need to recognize that the word publisher may have lost its utility, that anyone and everyone who creates content in the network may be one, and that to exclude the world’s largest networker of user-generated content  from the definition of an online publisher is sublime. Jonathan Swift would have been proud to own that fantasy. It belongs in an imagination that could envisage two nations fighting over whether it is correct to open a hard-boiled egg at the sharp or the rounded end.

In consumer publishing it is really hard to find examples of players once great in print who are now able to operate in network terms with a similar facility. But in broadly-defined B2B and professional information activities some players are beginning to turn their whole culture around towards the network  in ways which underscore what needs to be done. I would have said that this was harder for the bigger players, but the example given by Thomson Reuters (http://thomsonreuters.com/content/press_room/tlr/tlr_legal/621902) last week contradicts that prejudice. This, the largest player in the market, demonstrates real committment to the networked user by redefining its focus in a critical area from Financial Services v Law, Tax and Regulatory to Governance, Regulation and Compliance. Why is this important? Because it is saying that the ancestral divisionalization of this huge company must also be subject to the client bases of both sectors being utilized to satisfy an appetite for horizontal information to inform the workflow of compliance officers and a great number of managers who have regulatory responsibilities but who are not lawyers.

How do we know that this is serious and not window dressing? When the group’s chief strategy officer steps down to run the new business unit. And the acquisitions of recent years (Paisley, Complinet) which represent a response to these market developments, are built into the foundations of the new division. This sends messages throughout the organization, for while Reuters was always, in its post news agency years, a trading environment in an electronic world, the esprit developed in its titanic struggle with Bloomberg might have produced insularity. And Thomson Legal’s roots lie in eighteenth century law books at Sweet and Maxwell, and mid-nineteenth century law reporting in the US at West. These two outfits, when they came together, were also placed with an ancestry in portfolio brand ownership. The old Thomson view that interconnecting group holdings was wrong if it went to a point where elements might grow together (and thus be harder to sell separately) has certainly gone into retreat with this announcement.

I expect many of Thomson Reuters’ competitors to look at this announcement and then at their own portfolio holdings and wonder about current strategies. I also feel that the portfolio days of B2B have drawn to a close. Investing in disparate service elements in niche markets no longer adds sufficient value to be justified, and if the future really is around workflow emulation, as this column has been suggesting, then the niche positions do not cut it without a great deal more content and software. That content and software will most often come through third party deals and alliances, which also means that the industry must drop its long term aversion to strategic alliances. That is the problem with change: it changes everything.

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