A presentation on the future opportunities in media, turning threats into insights into opportunities.

The presentation future media – no more middle men, is an accumulation of a range of relevant thoughts from this blog, put into system.

It’s built as a master slide set (to pick and sort from), but I tried to ad some structure to it by identifying six major “forces” affecting media, and then a short final chapter summarizing a suggested future mindset.

I’ve also chosen to ad a lot of the explanatory text – not just the headlines – into the slides this time, hopefully this will create more context for the people reading the thing online.

Find individual slides available for download under a CC license on my flickr.com account everything new is dangerous.

Find the presentation below, or on my slideshare account slideshare.net/helgetenno.

In a new video from WIRED, presenting their new magazine/tablet concept, they suggest some solutions to a series of opportunities in digital publishing.

Design
First one is the fact that they’ve used print designers, a good idea obviously as having skilled experience and storytelling designers challenge and play with the interactive medium (and not the other way around – a UX guru who is asked to design some storytelling) provides some stunning results. The magazine layout and experience speaks for itself..

”This is an opportunity we have been waiting for, for fifteen years. We have all these visual tools at our disposal, to tell all these stories, in a way that is efficient, that is multi-dimensional.”
- Chris Anderson, Editor and Chief, WIRED

Advertising
Then it’s their focus on advertising as still being sponsorship placement, and not purchased editorial. But seeing that advertising is such an important part of the audience / participant experience it needs the same thinking as any of the editorial content.

”The advertising is as important as the editorial, especially in Wired Magazine, and people come to Wired for the authority of the edit and the richness of the experience to learn about new products and services that our advertisers provide.”
- Scott Dadich, Creative Director, WIRED

From the video (below) this looks to create some great experiences. And integrates the advertising further into the total value of the publication.

According to Tom Himpe, in his book Advertising Next, the lack of space and time available to brands to tell their story and engage people in the richness of their marketing value proposition is one of the shortcomings of traditional media. And even though the potential for the interactive storytelling stuff hasn’t been explored all that much in this concept, inviting brands in to create these kinds of experiences gives them a lot more room and opportunity to create a valuable, memorable and remarkable experience.

The WIRED brand and the business model
Also, as pointed out by Chris Anderson; WIRED understands that the only way to earn money in publishing is by having a strong and identifiable brand with a unique offering. It is crucial for WIRED to extend the existing brand identity and experience, in order to continue building the same audience/participant relationships as existing publications are.

”Our readers have relationships with brands, we have a great website, we have a great print magazine, and this is just adding one more avenue of communicating and connecting with the brand of WIRED”
- Scott Dadich, Creative Director, WIRED

This is applied all the way down to the content, where it is hoped that such a great and unique editorial experience will be something not found for free somewhere else and there will be a willingness to pay for it.

”But we also think its time to reset the economics. For the first time people might value this experience so much that they’ll pay for it”.
- Chris Anderson, Editor and Chief, WIRED

Find the article here and the video below or here.

A new presentation on the role of marketing in the post digital landscape, with a special focus on developing the product relationship into a membership based marketing business model.

Presented Tuesday for the SAS Institute in Norway.

As I find my slide style being remixed (and loving the fact that it is :) on slideshare.net, I am currently trying to redevelop some stuff. I’ve added a lot of text from this blog to the slides, and hope this will provide more context for the readers and participants.

If interested you can, as always, find most of the individual slides on my flickr.com account everythingnewisdangerous.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think, especially your favorite slides – and why.

The presentation is embedded below, or find it on slideshare.net.

Without dialogue and participation companies get stuck.

The traditional media model is a triple negative:

- No direct relation between companies and people.

- Focus on unique narratives as band aid for lack of unique and differentiating products.

- Having to force complex company/product value propositions into short, simple, media format narratives. (Advertising Next, Tom Himpe)

In this world companies stopped being companies and became brands. People became consumers and customers.

Again… a double negative:

- The tangible value provided by the product is replaced by an artificial generic marketing narrative.

- “Consumers and customers” as terms replace complex human beings with labels. C&C have no motivation or aspiration, just two goals: Getting hold of something, and then making it disappear.

The problem with the traditional media mindset is:

- It forces brands into impossible “time slots”, where the communication has to attract attention (which takes most of our resources) and present a unique and identifiable value.

- There is no response…

And this (“no response”) is the real challenge… because without response companies get stuck.

Brands tell brilliant stories, which in the end are the only stories they listen to, or probably more correct: the only ones they listen FOR. Brands start believing their own generic narrative and listen for it when talking to customers and consumers, while the reality is that there are thousands of narratives, or millions, out there: (brandtags.net)

And with no healthy response cycle, there is no product/tangible value response, just brand/narrative adaption. So, companies get stuck.

That is the beauty of the opportunities rising from dialogue and participation (mistakenly labeled “social media” as if it is a destination…), its an opportunity to break with this and start learning about the product and the real tangible value it is creating in peoples lives.

Products have always been important in peoples lives. Most of the stuff we own and talk about is stuff we have purchased. There is a deep and profound relationship between people and a lot of their stuff.

Unfortunately it’s easy to get the impression that this relationship hasn’t been the focus of marketing, which has spent most of its energy on positioning, availability and sales promotion. To some extent one can suggest that marketing has ignored the existing relationship between people and their products, and instead built it’s own marketing relationship, different from the product’s and built on a different set of values.

This has led marketing and products apart, and often created a cleft between them. This cleft has been further forced by the traditional media mindset where it has been impossible for companies to connect with their audience and participants, where media has become an obstacle, a superfluous middle man, where the marketing and the advertising has become messages – not exchanges.

(And one might also suggest that where the product relationship is based on personal and individual narratives, the marketing relationship is based on a generic and artificial narrative)

There are two negatives here, the first one is that marketing is set on creating its own relationship – ignoring the really valuable one already in place between people and products. The other is the traditional communications landscape, which is increasing this distance between the marketing relationship and the product relationship.

Luckily the shift that has been going on for the last four years aims at correcting this. Where marketing changes from focusing on its own agenda to enforcing the values set by the product. Where we are seeing focus moving away from messages and to exchanges and relationships. Which brings marketing and products back together again. Creating a better environment for products, people, companies and the relationship between them.

How do we get new ideas? By hammering down on old insight, trying to figure out a new way of looking at it? Or going straight to the core and finding a completely new way of gathering knowledge? Where do the good ideas start?

In the new environment, with fresh ideas, tailored to new behaviors in a post digital / post-shift media landscape, the core challenge is not to have brilliant disruptive ideas….

Ideas are the consequence of insight… and insight is the result of harvested knowledge, put back together in a successful way. The challenge today is on us, on the harvesters and the insight magicians – we need new ways of gathering the first glimpses of knowledge, and news ways of connecting them.

If we don’t change the way we gather knowledge and how we connect it, we won’t change the way we think and we won’t change.

Based on the stuff I’ve read and listened to during this last decade (not very scientific :), creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value (Ken Robinson), and ideas are what happens when two or more stored memory fragments in the brain (stuff is stored in fragments – not in videos or novellas) reconnects and creates something new. Now in order for there to be original insight one has to have original fragments, meaning original pieces of knowledge stored around the brain waiting to be picked out by eager ideas.

In a time where the pressure on creativity to contract, expand, change, stay the same and whatever, it all comes down to you – the first spark has as much responsibility to be trenched in originality, maybe more, than anything else – as it shapes the rest of the process.

If marketing is to become a more integrated part of the product experience/context, baked in and/or eventually become more important than the product:

“Marketing becomes the value people want to connect with, the product is merely an invitation into this relationship”. – link

Then it means a different set of demands needs to be put on marketing.

Digital services can’t be measured by downloads, clicks, uses or other advertising-type measures. Marketing integrated with the product needs to be measured by its ability to create value in and business from the relationship with the participant. Marketing needs to be measured by its own business model.

When the marketing becomes the value provider in the company/participant relationship, it needs to define its idea, value proposition, revenue stream and how this is going to measured. Not merely how much attention and use it has generated from being available.

In short, marketing initiatives need more business model thinking integrated into their design process. (And of course this is not exclusive – forcing the BM-ideas to collaborate or grow from narrative ideas creates an environment set to earn from the combination of both worlds).

We might be cautious of forcing new behavior on our participants, because of a reasonable fear that it will be difficult for people to adapt. So we try to find and design solutions inside people’s existing behavioral pattern. But this limits our ability to create better value in our relationships with our participants.

Behavioral psychologist Donald Norman says people adapt to technology; we have always made things that people had to learn – like a doorknob – which attributes new behaviors in their lives. It may have made their lives more practical or better – but they had to learn it.

In the context of company/customer relationships and through the lens of services, Tim Brown, of IDEO, ads to this train of thought:

“Any Service organization has got to get over the idea that a great service is something where the consumer doesn’t have to do anything. That’s a really bad service. A great service is where the consumer actually participates, and where they get drawn in, and where they become part of it.”

People following this blog might have already seen some of my frustration with today’s standards for graphical user interfaces, which I find are almost exclusively based on anything else than the human aspect:

It seems we are at the end of a period where interactive design was mere decoration. Where algorithmic logic and robotic rationality shaped the reasoning behind the interfaces trying to engage people in services, content and marketing. – http://www.180360720.no/index.php/archive/post-digital-design/

As the quote suggests we might be at the end of this era, forced through by a greater understanding for the human aspect as technology is immersing into our everyday life. And as a consequence of new platforms inviting us to interact without mechanical augmentations, such as the mouse and keyboard.

But this should not apply to only stuff happening on a two-dimensional screen, where the ability to involve and engage are limited, we should start thinking how to take our services outside the screen, and into the physical environment.

If one looks at a video game console like Wii, or even the physical augmentation of games like Buzz or Guitar Hero, we can ask ourselves, why aren’t banks, retailers or FMCG doing this? What is the barrier to thinking about physical objects when thinking of digital services?

There are already a range of brilliant and inspiring examples:
(Some of these are just concepts or prototypes)

The Copenhagen Wheel

Phillips – Direct Life

Charmr

The BP Photobooth

Sniff

Delivering immediate effect might not be the best business model for designing long-term valuable marketing initiatives.

Advertising is known for getting peoples attention and affecting people’s anticipation of an experience or product. Advertising is media related, the effect is purchasable through unlimited scope.

Advertising is direct, unwanted, often irritating and too often exhaustingly repetitive. It’s short compact stories or direct messages, highlighting exaggerations and often packaged in a clichéd pun. It’s responsive, and provides hot bursts of immediate effect, which cools down quickly.

Brilliant storytellers used to change millions of minds for decades, today they gather millions of views on youtube.

In my mind, advertising is faced with a challenge; it’s own business model, label or sales pitch: We move people and products – fast.

There is a need for long term marketing initiatives; digital concepts and ideas need to carry the longevity of product relationships. Which also implies a different way of measuring value. (What are the metrics identifying the value of a relationship? Are they the same as used for our ability to traffic people back and forth from, and around in, cyberspace?)

The question is, if the advertising industry is in a place clients come with the preconception to create long term marketing initiatives, or if one needs to alter the idea of what the advertising industry does if we are to acquire and lead these projects.

As a friend of mine, David Reid, told me yesterday, referencing a quote by Martin Sorrell: “We are not in the advertising business, we are in the marketing communications business”.

I would say Zeus Jones and Berg London certainly aren’t advertising agencies, but they are doing some of the most interesting stuff out there in this regards. On the other hand you’ve got Razorfish, CP+B and AKQA proving me wrong.

Any ideas?

Adding digital components to increase the engagement in and value created from a TV event, means thinking outside the obvious Facebook chat integration, the PC, online, and even the TV event itself.

In a recent study by Kaiser on the trends of American youth, shared by JWT on their Intelligence blog, there are numbers stating the increase in multitasking while enjoying other mediums (TV, Radio, Computer). No surprise, but the interesting point is what kind of medium they are multitasking with.

Multitasking is the wrong word here, as the brain can’t possibly do two things at the same time. The correct description would be “switching focus”. As stated by the America Scientist: “psychologists know that multitasking involves switching rapidly between tasks rather than actually performing multiple tasks simultaneously.” JWT has decided to dub the trend Distraction as Entertainment. (But I am having a hard time finding any good articles on their definition.)

From the report:

“…almost half of kids (47 percent) report texting someone ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ about what they are watching on TV—an activity that was almost unheard of five years ago.”

The device people were using together with TV is their mobile phone, up to half the kids are using it to keep in touch with friends and exchange ideas in this context.

This is interesting, with almost one in two kids talking with their friends about what they are watching on TV, and using the telephone – not a desktop/PC based social networking application – inspires to think about two things:

1. The Laptop + TV living room idea is great, but the potential in Mobile+TV might be even bigger. To be frank, the popular TV-event + Facebook chat integration really isn’t that impressive, and seems more like a “lack of imagination band-aid”.

2. Sending SMS is just a choice in regards to the goal of their communication – it’s simple, cheap or free and communicates short exchanges beautifully. Which means that we should be able to introduce new concepts based on a solid understanding of the context itself, low technological barriers and great rewards.

In my personal experience with games, it’s not the national or big games that create the best engagement; it’s the local ones. And not “local” in the geographical sense, but in a social sense, were one engages an existing group of friends. This is not because friends play more with friends online in comparison to with strangers, but because it enables the real-life dimension. Where the game does not exist exclusively online, but creates a form of social worth (a value defined by Jenkins) that ignites exchanges when the group meets socially in real-life. It becomes a valuable currency even when the game is not played. Something to talk about and share, at school, work or other gatherings outside the computer.

Using the game, not to play it online, but in order to share an experience that brings value both to their digital and real worlds (even though it’s the same place), it is the strongest enabler.

As JWT rounds of their blog post:

“Content creators can turn this trend to their advantage by layering a multitude of media into entertainment, producing an immersive experience designed for simultaneous consumption and engagement.”

And I would ad, that it’s when media, and especially TV, not only plays on what’s happening and created inside media, but also plays on the activities, dimensions and social groups that exists outside media – and with additional ideas and activities outside simultaneous – it becomes really powerful.

To sum it up; its when the layering (as JWT defines it) not only includes media but also includes a real world component, includes the idea of the engagement branching of and existing outside the TV time slot, and adding a local, social dimension, things become interesting. And even though the PC/Laptop is a brilliant tool, the mobile phone might be a better instrument in this context.

Three projects, that all bring different but interesting aspects into this line of thinking; Parking Wars, MTV Backchannel and Fantasy premiere League. (unfortunatley I can’t find any examples with mobile)

And of course, this does not only apply to TV events, but all events. As events are like products; an invitation to become a part of something valuable…