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!

Nov

18

The Digital Event Revolution

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments

Nothing has higher value in the world of B2B than events. Markets and valuations all reflect this. In a world of digital transformation events have a comforting certainty along with high margins. Attendance at some shows may have fallen during the recession, as well as exhibitors, but this is an industry well used to the economic cycle and generally unconcerned by temporary shifts which always seem to right themselves. I was present this week in Seoul at the 80th Congress of the UFI, the Paris-based trade association which represents both conference and exhibition organizers, and venue owners and managers. I found it hard to work out what was strangest: re-visiting one of the largest cities in the world after an absence of over 30 years, or speaking of things digital to a wonderful audience (at an appropriately well managed conference) who either thought that what I feared would never happen, or that, since people would always want to meet face to face, it was mostly irrelevant.

Which is exactly where the interesting arguments begin. It appears that for many in this industry the challenges are elsewhere. How can the event be made more compelling? Do we do it IKEA-style and force everyone to march past every booth? Will China’s vast plans for another great conference and exhibition centre in Shanghai de-stabilize the world market and drive down floor prices in Hanover and Frankfurt, traditional heartlands of the Great Trade Shows? Will the US cease to be self-contained as a market and compete on the global stage? How can more value be added for the user (one speaker talked of concentrating on attendees after two decades of concentrating on exhibitors)? Yet in all this discussion it was hard to keep on reminding people that a Great Event – a CeBIT, a Frankfurt Book Fair, a CES, etc – is above all a mighty data engine. I came away thinking not how impregnable these market tenancies are, but how easy it would be to compete with them. And they reminded me strongly of the newspapers and magazines of yesteryear when they dwelt on the importance of their brands and the trust and authority vested in them by generations of visitors. Does no one recall anywhere that the Google brand was built in the network in five years without effective monetization – or a single page of display advertising?

My plea here was really to shift the underlying base of the business to a wholly digital operation. Instead of creating data around users and exhibitors as a part of the organizational workflow of the event, build that data out through web analysis to the point where data on both gives real indications of where the event lies in the entire workflow of these populations. Then one can begin to do analysis that supports ideas of what people would like to see, what input they need to have, and how their valuable time and scarce attention is best used. This data needs to have the depth and quality to suggest and create introductions and meetings, support those connections through the year to the next event, create localized satellite meetings or virtual conferences where necessary, and develop in sophistication alongside the needs of users. In other words, the event needs to re-characterize itself in two data-driven ways – both as an encapsulation of the community (or communities) present at the event, and as a vital part of the workflow of participants.

Well, my kindly friends said, with understanding expressions of sympathy tinged with pity on their faces, what if we do none of this? We have these good margins, these strong brands, no competitors, our valuations soar: what could be better. One delegate took me aside and told me that the key topic was trust: you needed to meet the people you traded with in order to know who to trust. When I responded that trust is created in networks by people recording their trading experiences of each other, and that events organizers might be working with credit rating agencies as data partners, he shook his head in disbelief that someone so innocent should be allowed out alone. This must be one of the last marketplaces on earth where it is necessary to say that around 1993, as far as I can now see, a door closed in History The birth of the internet marked changes, slight at first but now gathering force, which generation by generation change the way mankind communicates, and expects to be communicated with. The media industry in the last decade has been in the Tom and Jerry situation – over the cliff and pedaling pure air while realization dawns that the terrain beneath our feet has altered entirely.

In this world turned upside down the events businesses will draw the competition of – everyone. Its started already – just the other day the Huffington Post announced a conference. Meetings and exhibitions do not present high barriers to entry and can, in skills terms, be readily outsourced Big digital market brands – Alibaba around these parts, for example – would find these an easy option. They may not succeed entirely but they could ruin some existing brand positions. And they would be much better organized for digital marketing, using social media effectively and creating community that few real world events seem to have in depth.

But by embracing the data driven world that I tried to describe, the event brand could become a leader in advising the exhibitor on his market penetration and positioning; telling the visitor who wants to meet company X that other visitors with similar interests also met y amd z; enabling the visitor to plan 3 hours to do what formerly took 3 days, and positioning the exhibitor in four different places to catch visitors looking at clustered specialisms rather than relying on a super-stand where the sub-specializations were lost. So data gathering becomes a part of adding fresh value to the existing world, and then part of launching into things entirely new. I have never been more convinced that the virtual conference and exhibition will have their day than this week. Not at first, not to the exclusion of all other things, but importantly and commercially invaluably as one of the tools in the sector armory. We are in the foothills here, but the old lesson of the web is that you have to fail before we succeed.

The UFI organization distributed a splendid App for the event, detailing speakers, schedules and vital information. A perfect information gathering tool, I thought. And once serious data around participants in these shows is assembled, think of the data analytics, the visualization, the predictive analytics that will result. I enjoyed being with the events people and I look forward to meeting them again – in the world of data.

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