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BRITE blog
by David Rogers
Like many mass media that dominated in the second half of the 20th century, television is dying a thousand slow deaths in the rising tide of digital media. (See also: print newspapers, recorded music, the adult movie business, etc.…)
I used to think that I was terribly retro because I rarely watch television, have only sporadically owned a set, and have paid for cable just one year of my life. But recently I realized I haven’t been living behind the curve of American media consumption, I’ve been ahead of it.
At a roundtable at the Ad:tech conference, I noticed that the participants who were 10 years younger than me didn’t have television service either. Who needs to scroll through channels of ComWarnerCast when you can choose on-demand from the vast menu of the Web -- with a side order of Netflix? Especially with sites like surfthechannel.com and pandora.tv streaming all the network TV you could want, for free, over web servers in South Korea and China. College students are increasingly watching tv on their laptops.
In our Center office, most of the under-30’s either prefer their TV content over the Internet, or are source-agnostic (“Wherever the game is” said Anthony, whose EuroCup viewing skipped from cable to web and back). Apparently, my in-office poll is not unrepresentative either, because…
It’s now official. Half of the people still watching live broadcast television are so old that advertisers won’t even pay to market to them. I just read the sobering facts on the Silicon Alley Insider: The average age of the network TV viewer hit 50 years for the first time this year. Consider, for a moment, that advertisers don't pay the networks a nickel for any viewer older than 49 -- except during news programs, when they'll pitch adult diapers to those up to 54 years of age. So viewers' average age is now too old.
Lisa Hsia, VP of Bravo TV told me recently about the dynamic work they’re doing to put their content in new interactive media, from Hulu.com to online voting contests. She conceded that despite making money, the interactive outlets are still a small minority of Bravo’s revenue. But at least they’re moving in the right direction.
Broadcast as a mode for any medium (1-way, top-down) is a waning game. TV networks will need to aggressively embrace social media and disruptive business models if they’re going to avoid heading into the steep decline of the music industry. In the meantime, I’m going to pull out another episode of “House, M.D.” from Netflix. My media, my schedule.
I was in Barcelona last month to speak at the “Brand Challenges 2008” conference, presented by our partner Center on Global Brand Leadership at ESADE business school.
The haute cuisine in Barcelona was as creative as I remembered (sea foam, flavored smoke, ice ravioli, and the like), as were Gaudi’s timeless architectural wonders in Le Eixample.
But for all their innovativeness, the Spaniards I met at the conference are grappling with the same Web 2.0 whirlwind as everyone else. Their marketers and brand managers all keenly aware of (and actively using) social networks, wikis, blogs, and the other growing new media. They just don’t know how brands should respond to this environment. “How do you control the dialogue with your consumers?” I was asked. You don’t, of course. And for many organizations, giving up the mindset of brand “control” will be the biggest challenge.
I was interviewed after my speech by the paper La Gaceta de los Negocios – who were kind enough to send me a PDF of the article. We discussed the changing models for brand building, what dialogue means for brands, how to energize brand ambassadors, and the importance of innovation. You can find the article (in Spanish) here.
(One clarification: “Si lanzas una nueva marca, es probable que sean mejores los medios tradicionales” should read “…sean mejores los medios nuevos.”)
Chris Bellerjeau here at Columbia Business School has kindly posted the video of last week's panel on “Mass Media in Transition” which took place as part of Internet
Week New York (see my prior posts on the panelists and key issues raised and the suggested reading lists of the panelists).
It's 74 minutes, RealMedia, and plays nearly instantly with a broadband connection.
Click on the image, or here.
Left to right:
Sree Srinivasan (Dean of Student Affairs, Columbia School of
Journalism)
Lisa Hsia (Sr. VP of Digital Strategy at the Bravo tv network)
Moderator: Ava Seave (founder of Quantum Media)
Jeremy Kagan (VP Strategy, Publicis Modem)
me: David Rogers (Director, Center on Global Brand Leadership)
 At the end of last week's Internet Week panel on "Mass Media in Transition" (see post here), the moderator Ava Seave asked us to suggest blogs, books, and other media for reading on the subject we had discussed -- social media, viral marketing, user-generated content, and marketing. Here were our compiled recommendations.
Happy summer reading!
Lisa Hsia
www.stylehive.com
www.thisnext.com
www.crowdstorm.com
www.kaboodle.com
www.wists.com
Jeremy
Kagan
http://www.paidcontent.org
http://www.emarketer.com
http://www.iwantmedia.com
http://www.techcrunch.com
Since Sree covered Lifehacker here's another summary of Marketing blogs:
http://marketing.alltop.com
I assign Chris Anderson's the Long Tail as reading, and recommend John
Batelle's the Search and also Wikinomics. (Also, I co-wrote a small
article in The Online Advertising Playbook - -shameless plug.)
David
Rogers
Blogs:
http://briteconference.typepad.com/
-- I blog here on how new media and innovation are transforming marketing.
http://www.micropersuasion.com/
– Steve Rubell’s blog on all things p.r. in the new media world
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/
-- Kevin Kelly's blog and a book-in-progress, searching for “the meaning of
tech.”
Events
www.BRITEconference.com
– speaker videos & agendas for: a global series of conferences, workshops,
and leadership summits on branding, innovation, and technology.
Books
http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/1594201536
"Here Comes Everybody" – Clay Shirky
Podcast
http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/
Future Tense with Jon Gordon (American Public Media)
Additionally,
as an added perspective to Chris Anderson's on "Free," see Kevin
Kelly's post on "Better than Free” http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php (Kelly
is a longtime collaborator with Anderson)
Ava Seave
Groundswell:
Winning in a world transformed by social technologies by Li and Bernoff
Emotionomics
by Dan Hill
And
I also mentioned the trade publication AdAge (www.adage.com)
Sree
Sreenivasan
BuzzMachine.com
AllThingsD.com
LifeHacker.com
Influential
Marketing Blog - http://rohitbhargava.typepad.com/
MicroPersuasion.com
- http://micropersuasion.com/
I also
track a whole bunch of articles, stats and resources about the changing media
landscape at http://www.sreetips.com/landscape.htmlRequired
class reading: Chris Anderson's the Long Tail as reading, along with the
comments...
Wired, Feb.
2008: Free! Why
$0.00 Is the Future of Business http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all
Call it the ultimate challenge for repositioning a brand. Alex Bogusky, the creative advertising guru famous for making Burger King cool again and the Mini Cooper an automotive icon, has been awarded the contract for Microsoft’s consumer branding. This for a guy whose ad shop was built using Mac’s. And after a year in which Apple’s advertising has aggressively tarnished Windows’ brand image.
Bogusky’s agency has done brilliant work in the past using the old advertising model (spinning funny, creative, and highly memorable 30-second story lines for TV), and it has the awards and the rep to show for it. But big budget ad campaigns have not had a stellar track record for Microsoft (do you remember “Windows Has Evolved. Have You?”).
Maybe Bogusky will try some of his great interactive work (like the infamous www.SubservientChicken.com site, which went viral for Burger King). Or better yet, he could build a genuinely community-driven campaign that gets Microsoft’s users excited to contribute and interact with each other. Of course, that would raise some risks, given mixed sentiment about the Microsoft brand.
The bigger question may be whether Bogusky can turn around the Windows’ brand trajectory as long as Vista is plagued with user dissatisfaction. (To be blunt, can you do good branding for a bad product?)
Maybe Bogusky just needs Microsoft to innovate more things that he can sell. VC investor Bill Joy commented recently in BusinessWeek that the company’s reliance on steady revenue from cash cow products has inhibited a culture of innovation. With a Yahoo! acquisition off the table Joy suggests that Microsoft consider buying several smaller, more innovative companies instead.
Not a bad idea, if Microsoft can link a strong set of acquisition with a compelling strategy to compete in the web services space.
 Yesterday, I took place in a panel discussion at Columbia Business School on “Mass Media in Transition.” The panel was part of Internet Week New York, a festival of events focused on online media companies and innovators in the Big Apple, supported by the Mayor’s office.
Moderator Ava Seave (founder of Quantum Media) posed the question of how media companies can maintain competitive amidst the growing threats of amateur content, digital piracy, and new online competitors.
Lisa Hsia (Sr. VP of Digital Strategy at Bravo) discussed how NBC Universal is using new media (online voting, mobile txt, videos at Hulu.com, etc.) to create new forms of customer participation with, and new revenue streams from, their television content.
Sree Srinivasan (Dean of Student Affairs, Columbia School of Journalism) talked about the changing nature of journalism, and how the J-School is training “tradigital” journalists, who combine the practices and skills of traditional reporting with both a new media skillset, and a new media mindset.
I discussed, along with Jeremy Kagan (VP Strategy, Publicis Modem), the need for new models of marketing that account for the rising power of P2P communications (from bloggers, videos, and brand mashups). We considered how successful marketers and entrepreneurs are giving up a “command-and-control” mentality for their brands, and learning to embrace and leverage customer interactions and online communities. Examples: Coke & Mentos responding to the viral videos created by Steven Voltz (video of Steven speaking at BRITE); and why did Hasbro decide to sue the creators of Scrabulous (the #1 Facebook widget), instead of offering to buy them, and build on their enormously successful social media offer?
Thanks to Robbin Smith, Director of Columbia Business School's Master Class Program, for organizing.
If we get a videostream of the panel, I’ll post here.
UPDATES:
Video of the panel is posted here.
Suggested reading list (blogs, books, etc.) of the panelists is posted here.
Yuval Zuckerman spoke at the BRITE ’08 conference about social networking tools he was developing to help supercharge fundraising for the Mitt Romney campaign. Too little, too late, perhaps, for that candidacy. But online networking has been a dominant story in this year’s presidential campaign.
In particular, ever since the launch in February 2007 of MyBarackObama.com, the Democratic candidate has amazed observers with his savvy in raising money and reaching out to supporters through online social networks.
A recent article in the The Atlantic monthly focused on the role online networking has played in the astounding quarter-billion dollars raised for his campaign so far. Worth a read.
Remember the browser wars of 1999? (Netscape against Internet Explorer, anti-trust suits, etc.) Get ready for a little déjà vu.
With its primary competitor defeated, Microsoft waited five years to announce an upgrade to IE in 2006. But since 2003, the the non-profit Mozilla Foundation has used the open-source model of innovation to continually add improvements to its Firefox browser, improvements which were copied in due course by IE (tabbed browsing, for example).
By now, Firefox has an 18% market share worldwide and is preparing for the launch of Firefox 3.0 (download the public preview release now here). Microsoft is expected to release an Internet Explorer 8 this year, Apple is promoting its Safari browser for Windows PC’s, and new start-ups are entering the field.
Why all this interest in the humble web browser?
An enormous shift is underway to web services: more and more, software and even hardware will be delivered through “cloud computing” on the web. Think “Google Docs spreadsheets,” rather than running MS Excel on your laptop. Or, “Salesforce.com” rather than contact management software licenses. The future is cloudy for software license businesses like the enormously profitable Microsoft Office suite. Even hardware is disappearing into a cloud, as Amazon.com and others offer server space and data storage remotely (read about Jeff Bezos' big move in Wired).
So with more and more business models moving to the web “cloud,” expect increased competition to offer the browser that provide the entry point for all that business.
(image from my.opera.com)
UPDATE 2008.06.06: Future Tense (American Public Media) news analyst Dwight Silverman weighs in that Firefox 3 is "hands down, the best browser." Hear the podcast.
Yesterday, Penry Price, Google's VP of Advertising, N.America, spoke with me for an executive education program here at Columbia Business School. We discussed the evolution of online branding models, as well as Google's process for nurturing
innovation -- including its famous "20% rule," which allows all employees 1/5
of their time to pursue innovative projects outside their main job area.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt discussed the company's approach to innovation in an interview published last week in Businessweek. In it, he discusses the importance of innovating during a recession, how to test new ideas to choose which to invest in, and how much control leadership should try to exert over innovation: The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small
team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people
around them and their executives...
... You have to have a set of necessary
conditions for innovation to occur. To start with, you have to listen
to people.
Read the article here.
Preliminary results of a study on the use of online communities for business goals was presented by Francois Gossieaux (BRITE advisor, speaker, and blogger) recently at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR).
The study, titled the “2008 Tribalization of Business Study” is being produced by Deloitte, Beeline Labs, and SNCR. You can see Francois’ slides below:
The findings are still preliminary, as the study is still in progress.
People involved in managing online communities for their organizations are invited to participate in the online survey, To take it, go to: http://www.communityeffectiveness.com. Final results of the survey will be shared to all who are interested. More info: francois [at] beelinelabs [dot] com.
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Like many mass media that dominated in the second half of the 20th century, television is dying a thousand slow deaths in the rising tide of digital media. (See also: print newspapers, recorded music, the adult movie business, etc.…)
