I am overwhelmed by Flipboard. Which might be the best and most innovative thinking in regards to media I’ve seen in a very long time.

This is flipboard:

The reason for my amazement is two fold, both argued in a former post:

1. I think this is from Clay Shirky: The perception of news is changing from something distributed through newspapers and news bulletins to something found on Facebook. People now view checking out what their friends are doing as newsworthy and as “news” as the formats pushed by news media.

2. In the next iteration of publishing, anyone or thing distributing information is a publisher. At the same time the sharer becomes as important as the content itself. How does the business model change when content and distribution becomes two separate businesses?

So the question would be, why didn’t this come fro The Guardian, The New York Times or Wired? Are they avoiding mixing their own content with democratized content because of a perceived brand implication? And does Flipboard represent ONE interesting direction to the media as a distribution brand, not just a content brand? (As more and more of Facebook’s content is being enjoyed off-site, why can’t nytimes.com be the distributer of this content?)

In order to understand the future of news we need to understand that there is more to publishing than content, meaning and images. It’s also its context, especially who shared, what and why.

In my first presentation on media called Future Media, I focused on changes to the media business model (from products to value and from infrastructure to relationships). In this article I will try to present the third idea (of three), related to context – where the relationship to the sharer (identity) becomes as important as the content itself.

In one of her articles Danah Boyd, after researching peoples tweets, found that people as often referred to the person who shared the content as its originator. And suggests that the source of the content (the person who shared it) is as important as the content itself.

Adrian Ho also pointed this out:

“We are becoming less willing to pay for information but we are becoming more willing to pay for someone to provide context to that information.” – Adrian Ho, Zeus Jones

A former boss of mine, Kristin Halvorsen, taught me two things on knowledge managment:

1. It’s much better to hand someone an article or book with your notes in it, because it tells the person what and why stuff is important.

2. You can always tell something about the content based on its source. As an example you never bother reading stuff from some people, while you make time no matter how busy you are to read stuff from others. In the end it is your relationship with the person who shares that decides if you’re going to engage with the content or not.

Now why is all this important for publishers:

1. Publishers need a clear and consistent identity, which goes all the way to the core of the product – the content itself. The problem is that a lot of publishers’ brands have become generic, so there is no contextual value connected to the content. And by that no additional contextual incentive to engage with it.

2. A publisher is both content and filter. There was a time when the editorial staff did the filtering, but this is not effective enough anymore, as Chris Anderson points out: “In the age of free everything gets published”. (PopTech). If publishers are to publish everything, they need to make sure their filtering mechanisms are designed based on their contextual value and identity.

At a time when the concept of news is changing (checking your friends Facebook updates is as important news as reading about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico), the source’s contextual value, the contextual promise, will be ever more important.

On the other hand, in the next iteration of publishing, anyone or thing filtering information is a publisher. The distribution of content becomes democratized and the landscape shifts fundamentally.

How does the business model change when content and distribution becomes two separate businesses?

I used to hate these things; thinking that it turned the Internet into a generic reading platform (as opposed to a marketing platform), but now I think it’s the other way around.

Publishers aren’t good at designing business models online, most cloak inside a big publishing category, and there are few interesting and identifiable identities. If one could adopt more of the principles behind these kinds of presentation designs, it would be a starting point to create stronger identities, better experiences and hopefully more viable business models.

The service I’m talking about is Arc 90′s Readability, aimed at simplifying the presentation of content so as to make it more readable. But what happens is more than that…

Readability – Installation Video for Firefox, Safari & Chrome from Arc90 on Vimeo.

The removal of all the strongly colored, moving shapes of inefficient advertising (business model wise), all the disarranged forms of hyperlinks and navigation scattered around the page (to get more page views) adds up to quite an efficient interface giving the reader more time to enjoy the content, mull over it, get more value from it – compared to when it is presented in a rushed, hectic navigation environment.

Now I’m not saying that it is the lack of graphical elements that are making this environment better, I’m not. It’s the lack of intense navigational and commercial noise aimed at supplementing a business model designed to generate clicks and views. Which is an infrastructure business model for advertising, a business model that has been proven not to work:

1. Digital, often representing half or more than half of a publication’s readers generate only 5% of a publisher’s income. (link)

2. There is an increase in earnings from subscription models, while the advertising revenue is declining. (Add to this recent news that a large Norwegian publishers is earning four times as much money from its niche subscription products compared to all its display advertising – the infrastructure business model’s future looks bleak.)

Publishers need to enhance the experience of their environments by designing them through their identities; their value proposition, mantra, promise to the customer etc. (Through the application of design and form in order to enhance the value of the content AND the environment).

Today the generic standard publishing interface is overly linking up every piece of content in every direction in what ends up to be a navigational piece of content rather than a valuable piece of content.

Secondly, most publishers today present their content in generic CMS-publishing windows where there is little brand, no identity, just more of the same publishing “cate-orgy”. :) (There are exceptions of course)

As the Future Media presentation suggests, the value for publishers is not from their advertising, but from offering readers, subscribers and even members, a unique, valuable experience over time (content is created in collaboration with companies). This is achieved both through more interesting, scarce content, and better environments for extracting value from it.

The Popular Science iPad application, although tailored for that specific platform, is a long way ahead. And is in stark contrast to the experience Popular Science invites people to in their “browsered” environment.

I suggest that it is – in the interface between / by understanding the principles of – the Popular Science iPad application and the Readability application publishers must explore, in order to design more interesting, unique and valuable identities for their browser based content, enabling them to discover new business models.

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.

How come design for technology is so inherently anti-human that we had to invent a whole new industry around it just to band aid the wounds created by having the wrong focus in the first place?

Behavioral Psychologist Donald Norman has been quoted saying:

“Each time a new technology comes along, new designers make the same horrible mistakes as their predecessors. Technologists are not noted for learning the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again.”

When it comes to design for interactive platforms it seems that the knowledge from existing design practices have been overlooked in favor of designing interfaces more eager to ease the technological development budget, rather than accommodate the human mind.

The problem with this is that it prohibits technology of immersing invisibly into peoples lives, because the technology itself becomes far to visible. We need to understand that it is behavior that initiates innovation, not technology. It wasn’t speed that made broadband the game changer, it was how it removed technology (the dial-up and cost model) from the process of going and being online.

This first film is by Berg and Mag+, its a case study presenting some insights into and visualization of e-Magazines. It presents the kind of thinking needed in order to bring technology into peoples lives

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.

Design is for humans not robots. And humans should force technology to adapt and evolve, not the other way around.

Both videos where found at the brilliant blog Mobile User Interfaces by TAT, which together with BERG provides a lot of brilliant insights and inspiration into the future of design on interactive platforms.

Online advertising will change fundamentally during the next year to four years. The reason is more unexpected, and with larger consequences, than anticipated.

I’ve written previously on how both the competition to the online ad product (ie. earned media) and our citizens’ change in online behavior should be forcing online media to innovate its advertising and marketing products. Now it seems these symptoms where only the tip of the iceberg: a change in the fundamental business model of the media industry.

In 2009 media has been failing, and it’s failing fast. All hands are on deck and the ability to think disruptively, not only incrementally, has invited people to rethink the whole structure of their business model. This will affect their income strategies and the companies sponsoring these income strategies.

In other words: online advertising is changing, because the media business model is changing.

This is the case I’m trying to make:
Media has been stuck for some time, but the scalability of the online advertising real estate, and the enormous market has kept the ball rolling. Not sensing that the drive for traffic and the drive for more ad space lessened the editorial product and made the media brands invisible.

As Kristin Skogen Lund, CEO of Aftenposten, one of the biggest newspapers in Norway said at a talk last week:

- ”We’ve been to identical, bought cheap traffic at a cost to our brand for to many years.” - Kristin Skogen Lund, CEO, Aftenposten

Scott Karp, editor of the Publishing 2.0 blog ads another argument:

“most newspaper websites sell SPACE for commodity advertising — display ads and classifieds — and thus are hard pressed to compete with ad networks that specialize in selling commodity ad space by the megaton” – Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0

The result is that the display advertising model works just fine for media buyers, but for brands they are receiving a decreasing amount of effect – and compared with the effect from earned media the investment at times can seem as a complete waste. At the same time media companies have brought a knife to a gunfight, they are competing against the networks, a game they can’t win, and are destroying their most valuable possession – their brand – along the way.

So something has got to change!

An incentive for change:
Two important facts where laid out by Skogen Lund at a conference last week:

- Only 5%
Skogen Lund stated that Aftenposten’s online revenue only represented 5% of their total revenue. Scott Karp confirms this as representative for the whole industry:

“That’s why the newspaper industry is worth about $60 billion offline but only $3 billion online — they only have about 5% of the pricing power that they did when there was only a finite amount of space in for printing ads.” – Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0

Online advertising in it’s current form is not a big revenue model for media companies, which would incentives innovation. If only one believed that online customers where better customers… Are people worse customers online? Hardly, FEED: The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report / 2009 states:

“Brands that use digital to drive awareness also drives sales: 64% of consumers report making a first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience” – FEED 09

So there is nothing wrong with the platform, there is nothing wrong with online, it’s how we’ve utilized it for advertising, and as a business model, that has been completely of the mark.

- Advertising decreasing, subscriptions increasing
A second interesting fact presented by Skogen Lund was a graph showing how advertising has represented a sharp decline in revenue, while subscriptions a sharp increase this last year. This at the same time as we are seeing niche newspapers, with strong brands and identifiable products, increasing their subscriptions in contrary to the mainstream newspapers which are declining. This tells us that there is an interest in a strong media product, and people are willing to pay for it.

My conclusion is this:
Media is a product (a membership), has always been a product and will continue to be a product. But somewhere along the way someone found that sponsoring it with advertising was a god idea. (Brilliant video for Norwegian readers to be found here (Thx. Freddy)). Which it was, to some extent. But the consequence was that the drive for traffic became more important than building a strong brand and a unique product.

Today when advertising sponsorship is failing as a business model, media has to start charging for something. But since they are left with a generic product it is impossible to charge for content that can be found for free ten other places.

(which is probably why Murdoch is shutting out Google, and also the argument of Mathias Dophner here. They want to protect it before they create it.)

So I anticipate that blood will continue to flow in the Media industry – because there is not enough money to finance all these institutions, and there is not enough strong brands to charge for their product.

Which leaves us with advertising: Advertising online will change because the media business model will change. Media brands seeing that they either don’t need to garbage their stories with competing stories, as Scott Karp says:

“advertising isn’t more valuable when placed next to premium content because display advertising has so LITTLE value to begin with. In fact, display advertising creates so little consumer value that it actually SUBTRACTS value from high quality editorial content when placed next it.”

Or because they find that people reading their publications are there because they get provided a value, and that brands in a lot of instances can co-produce this value. That NEW BRANDS are value creators, and that NEW MARKETING IDEAS are about creating additional value – not a competition between the attention of stories. And that this value, and a relationship built on trust between the media, the brand and the participant, will create a new, valuable, membership based content system.

That brands, as Forrester already has anticipated, will sponsor niche arenas where they can build direct relationships with their participants and members. What these arenas are, how large, small, niche or commercial, content, conversation or context based is completely up to our own imagination and creativity.

The first ten years of digital was (to a large extent) the same siloed ideas that we’d already been exploiting for decades on other content and messaging transportation infrastructures (media). It was a carbon copy.

It is only in the last 2-4 years something interesting and revolutionary has surfaced through the emergence of social media (the collective exchange of ideas) and digital utilities.

This creates a new currency for marketing online, not replacing traditional advertising / messaging but competing for the same budget and offering a completely different set of returns.

Since posting this presentation two days ago, I’ve added some ideas to it, relating to Time and Direct Relationships.

Apologies for re-posting, but this is the conclusion to my series on the new currency online, with special focus on opportunities for media companies.

- What is value in Everyday Life marketing
- A New Business Model, for content that Grows, Connects and Augments
- The Direct relationship Business

Find the Slideshow below, or here.
(If you have already seen the first version the second one might not cache, there should be a yellow ribbon in the upper left corner if you are watching the updated version).

There is a big difference between how the existing media business models work in the old landscape compared to how they will work in the new.

Blindly copying concept from platforms where content actually disappears removes us from the ability to create value in an updated reality where content is stored in the “long here”. Where it isn’t static, but grows, connects and augments.

If media is to take advantage of the opportunities in the Everyday Life marketing landscape we need to shred the idea of short term, Attention Web concepts like clicks, views or time.

Explanation of terms here..

As some of my readers know, I’ve tried the last week to digg up some hopefully interesting or inspiring thoughts on the challenges of the media industry. I believe in the industry, but I also believe it needs to break out of the limitations of their traditional mindset if they are to discover new and innovative opportunities. There is a lot of artificially constructed walls limiting their creativity when it comes to developing new ideas.

Understanding how the concept of time has changed, unlocks a few barriers:

1. There is no time. As I stated in my introduction. Content doesn’t disappear, it gets more valuable. We need to connect companies with this content, help it grown, and build mutual and extended value.

2. Time introduces an artificial constraint into the company / participant relationship that limits the participants opportunity to engage and connect with the companies brand values.

Now it’s artificial in the sense that it is not designed by the value proposition offered by the brand to the customer (summer, Easter or Christmas related products could have done that), but it’s limited by money. To be more correct, it’s limited by the cost of running messages in media.

Now in the Everyday Life marketing landscape the goal is to connect and share values with the participant. Constraints on time creates a problem, best articulated by Amanda Mooney back in January:

“If you’ve only budgeted 2 months to be available to our community, we’re only going to give you 2 seconds of our time … at best.” – Amanda Mooney

As I see it, if Media Companies are to have a role – or get value out of the Everyday Life Marketing potential they need to put aside this limitation, they need to develop products for companies and participants without the constraints of time attached. Not putting clicks or views or days as a business model – but shared value.

We are as marketers and digital strategists to focused on the tools and arenas we want to be “on” rater than our job; to connect consumers and participants to the brand.

Marketing and brand building is not about being “on” anything. It’s about uniquely communicating our ideas to the customer in a situation where your brand is given the opportunity to mean something with the result of establishing a relationship with the participant.

We need to approach digital marketing value first. Not selecting platforms first, and then try to uncover value through a clever choice of strategy.

In order for us to understand the New Brand Landscape we HAVE TO deconstruct our linear models for distributing content, take one step back, and start understanding how and WHERE people connect to our brand, and then start putting the pieces together in the right order – if there is any order at all?

I attended a brilliant talk Thursday by Jess Greenwood, Deputy Editor at Contagious Magazine. The talk ran through a range of ideas and exemplified them with campaigns, many represented in Most Contagious 2008, and all exploring the new digital landscape. But after seeing all this, we are stuck with wondering how and why do I get there? How do I come up with these great ideas, and not limit myself to the regular receipt:

Old model: Campaign site + banners + Facebook + mobile + large amounts of expensive media = Great Success

as compared to the

New model: value + situation + incentive + existing landscape = arena
(although it’s not linear like this)

Understanding the New Mindset:

1. Brand building is about communicating a unique value with the goal of connecting to people, resulting in extended loyalty and preference.

Communicating value is THE purpose of a value driven company, not banners, display ads, Facebook or blogging. The tools are not the goal, the purpose is. And the purpose is: Value, communication, loyalty and preference.

2. People only care about brands in situations where they are relevant. If I’m baking a cake, I don’t care about Nike, but if I’m exercising, Nike is everything.

This gives that brands need to focus on identifying the situation in which they mean something – the situations are the only events where customers would give a damn, and they are the arenas where the competition between brands occur.

3. Identify your value in the situation where you are important, it’s still not about your product, it’s about identity. Whirpool figured out that no one would hang around talking about dishwashers for weeks on end, and created The American Family Podcast, where Whirpool talks about the Family – for the 264 episodes. Beat that!

4. Figure out how to become accessible. How do participants and customers get a hold of you when they care.

This is where many brands fail, choosing only to be accessible online, via the laptop’s browser, when the customer is at home, after putting his children to sleep. Brands need to shed the notion of having an appearance, and start thinking about accessibility.

5. Landscape. What your competitors are doing are just as important to you as your own activities.

First of all “you can’t out-amazon amazon”; unimaginatively trying to challenge a market leader at their own game has failed many. Secondly, as Dove has demonstrated when developing their Real Beauty campaign, a result of admitting that their old adverts where so similar to their competition that changing the product shot inside an ad with a competitors product, made the ad seem for them, rather than Dove. And thirdly, if everyone else is doing it already, it’s probably easier to win by creating a new idea. In the food world everyone wants to become an online distributor of receipts, but there seems to be little understanding that many food brands are not about food, (like Whirpool being about the family, not cleanliness or appliances)?

So the golden rule of the new marketing landscape would be, given that the uniqueness of communicating your values will be as important as the values themselves: Build your own game.

6. Small successes, it’s all about moving your competitor through the snakes and ladders game board, every step is a success. Make sure you build and measure for all the small steps, with your eye on the final price.