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.

After publishing the slideshow Seven actionable marketing trends about a month ago, I asked if there was an interest in an expanded version of the slideshow. Elaborating on each trend and including some references and quotes from the insights behind them.

Unfortunately it has taken me some time to put this together, and I do apologize for the delay. But now the deck has been published via slideshare.net.

I would like to state that the goal of the document is not to work as a coherent presentation, but rather using the slideshare format to comprise and present a collection of valuable ideas that I felt was/is relevant in regards to each trend.

I hope you find the presentation useful, and that there are stuff/slides in there that proves to be inspirational.

As always, if there are any questions or comments, please contact me and I will do my best to reply.

Also, find most of the individual slides available under CC license on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/everythingnewisdangerous

Find the presentation below, or here:

A company’s ability to engage and connect with people has to do with its imagination and not the product or product category.

A couple of days back a quite popular and knowledgeable blog wrote, as a small part of their quite smart overview on social media, that some brands don’t belong in it.

I do agree with their statement, but disagree strongly with their reasoning:

” Some brands do not need to engage with their customers online, period. Products like bread or socks, for example, are not the kind of things that people want to have a social relationship with anywhere, forget online. It just makes them look silly.” – madebymany.co.uk

Now to me, both bread:
- Bakertweet
And socks:
- LittleMissMatched (mentioned on several occasions by mister Godin)
have a potential following too them.

In my mind it doesn’t come down to the category. It comes down to the company – if you are boring and uninteresting brand, and never even tried to create something remarkable or interesting in regards to your product. Then social media, as would be the case with advertising, is not a golden ticket, and will either fail or prove you wrong faster – or both.

And it comes down to our imagination. Just because we haven’t seen it done before it doesn’t mean there isn’t a possibility that it might happen – in a way we could never imagine. In fact, having NOT seen it before only proves that there is a market and that it is there for the taking (if my initial statement is correct that is :o).

So, it’s not the product or category that defines a companies ability to connect and grow with its audience and participants. It is its ability to imagine something remarkable inside what to others seems like a lifeless and boring category.

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.

Presenting at the iab Interact 2009 in Amsterdam at the end of November, I have been asked to talk about new marketing under the theme of the conference: “It’s the people stupid”.

As my bio states:

“…As technology becomes invisible, the opportunity for companies to connect with participants arises from its understanding of its fundamental ability to ad value to situations in a persons life.”

The presentation tries to identify the difference between traditional attention based advertising (company centric) and new marketing (human centric). Proposing some challenges/opportunities regarding the former and exploring some of the major mindset changes regarding the latter.

The big idea being a continuation of one of my earlier presentations: That marketing becomes the product, adding additional value, eclipsing it and making it unique.

Marketing being the value provider and products being invitations to next generation memberships and subscription models

Mobile is at the forefront of representing a completely new way of thinking about marketing.

But in order to understand this we need to look beyond the SMS and the text voting, and start exploring the real potential of the platform.

Since the Mobile Abilities Map pdf, published two weeks ago, has received a great deal of interest. I thought it would be a good resource to readers if I collected and published my inspiration and ideas to each topic. Hopefully getting some inspirational juice flowing.

- I’ve added links to each resource on slides where this was possible.

I hope people appreciate the presentation, and continue sharing great links on their own blogs (and link back here) or in the comments section on this blog.

Every traditional marketing campaign is a customer purchase, that is no revelation: ROI and CPC, CPM, CPA are all standards. But I suggest there is something wrong with that mindset. In fact, with the uncertainty of the future of media, everything might be wrong with that mindset.

Display advertising might still be around at the end of 2010, but what is the gain from buying 30 seconds from about 0,001% of viewers when your competition is racking up thousands of engaged participants and members?

This is not an argument against the format, it’s not the format that’s the problem. Its the alternatives, the future of media, and your competition.

(And the reason I’m saying end of 2010 is because media is changing, FAST, including their business model. And the outcome is highly uncertain.)

There is one more thing, of great importance and huge interest:

People will gladly spend a minute of their day composing and publishing their own version of the brand story, but they won’t give five seconds of their time to listen to the company tell their version of it.

I’ve put together a list for 2009/2010:

1. People talk. They don’t want to be interrupted, but they do want their conversations to be ignited and more valuable.

2. Earned media is becoming more and more important in the mechanics of the marketing eco-system. People don’t share stuff because they notice it, they share stuff because it’s valuable.

3. People are not on one platform, they switch between several – all the time. Only people building things for platforms care about platforms. Our activities need to give the participant the opportunity to choose how and where to participate.

4. People will share their version of a brand’s story with other people, but they don’t care to listen to the brand’s own story.

5. People are more valuable owning and using your product than thinking about buying it.

6. In the words of Kevin Slavin: “People will watch a TV program once, maybe twice, but they will play chess an hundred or maybe a thousand times”. Where would you grow your most important relationships?

As technology immerses into our daily life and disappears, value based marketing becomes available through new behaviors, inside situations where it is meaningful and useful.

This turns marketing into the experience surrounding the product – and in some instances becomes the experience people connect to and build relationships with. The marketing becomes the product, and the product becomes the marketing.

This is a presentation held for a class of students in electronic business development at BI, in Oslo Norway.

Availability can not be underestimated, two reasons for this:

1. First, a minor mindset thing:
People want to choose their own arenas, not be forced into one because the company finds it sufficient to only make their stuff available in one place.

2. Then the bigger thing:
The missing link between something being a tool and something changing our behavior is its availability (link):

Clay Shirky’s famous quote:
“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors” – Clay Shirky, Us Now

Which, linked with availability, in a tools and services perspective could give this:

“The goal would be to make the service so easily available that it as a technology becomes invisible but contextually becomes valuable.” – Bridging the gap between technology and behavior

Pushing Shirky a bit, we could say that technology is tools, but services are behaviors. And that tools only become valuable services as they are made available within the context where the person naturally adopts them.

- That in order for people to adopt something within their everyday life, it has to be designed based on human and contextual abilities, not just to fit into technological or informational frameworks.

- Or, that publishing stuff only gives people new tools, but if we make sure the stuff becomes available to the point of becoming invisible it will change peoples behaviors in the situation surrounding the product – and that is the interesting shift when marketing stops demanding exclusive attention and starts becoming valuable (which means shareable).

Which, if I’m right, would also be very close to this; Purple Cow, and this, Baked In.

Now there are two types of availability:

1. Being where the niche is (Jonathan MacDonald). The old saying that everything is only one click away on the Internet is outdated. Today, hiding stuff away behind walls of technology or website cartography is as good as not publishing it at all. We have to make the stuff available so that different people in different contexts find their “natural” way to engage with it and become a part of it. (Tim Brown)

2. Design. At a seminar two years ago the brilliant people at TAT presented some insights into the fact that the visual presentation layers has to be tailored to the activity we want the participant to perform – not the economical preconditions of the technological framework. That design is one very important part of a service’s availability, and should not be underestimated.

(Also supported by Michal Tchao, presenting Nike+ at Picnic08: These things already existed, but we designed it in a whole new way, so that people were able to use it.)

This is what I’m trying to say: Just because the stuff is available on a companies website doesn’t mean people will find it or use it. It needs to become available on platforms and arenas that fit into peoples everyday life. Which means that we need to fragment our marketing much more (”light lots of small fires” – Mark Earls), and tailor it to fit into the participant-product context.

I’ve been invited to do a five minute presentation on Context at Paris 2.0 this Tuesday. Working my way through the script I decided to put the whole thing into the presentation and upload it. Love to get some feedback on this before Tuesday :o) Thank you in advance.

(View slideshow at slideshare.net)

The script:

The immersion of digital stuff, making the accessibility of media-, communication- and social technology almost ubiquitous, has led to a behavioral change in our everyday lives

- (it will mean so more next year, and more the year after that) – Kevin Slavin….

This is interesting, not because we think this means that marketers can reach people all the time, they can’t, but because people can reach marketing all the time, which is much more significant.

Brands now have the opportunity to be reached, by people, when people want to.

This turns marketing up side down….

Marketers used to be the people that reached the people (the customers), now the people (as participants) are the ones who reach marketers.

The great shift is this:
When marketers were controlling the situation, marketing was done blindly through media channels, affecting people’s anticipation of a situation outside the situation itself, manipulating their feelings about it. We were telling people how to feel at a point in time when they didn’t feel anything. (Who cares about shaving while enjoying a 2pm break from boring work routines?)

Today marketing is accessible inside the situations, so the job changes.

When marketing exists inside situations the brand’s own story is irrelevant, the experience itself will always be stronger.

(why would I stop doing what I’m doing just to listen to your version of what I’m experiencing right now?).

Marketers stories become irrelevant inside situations because they are different from peoples own stories.

So marketing changes …

The only reason for people to access marketing inside situations is because they gain something valuable.

And if marketers can’t tell their own story, the goal becomes making the participants story better.

So how do you make it better?

By understanding the context, and adding value to it.

This is the new marketing economy:
The goal of marketing is not to win the battle of stories (as is the case for traditional media marketing), but to understand the abilities, emotions and activities of a situation – the context – and add deliberate value to it. Making it better, becoming indispensible as a value provider, and gaining ownership to people through direct relations with them over time…

To understand this we need to accept that products are worthless. And only become valuable as they are introduced to a situation where they are relevant. That brands aren’t product providers, but value providers, something they have always been – marketing has only spent its time distracting our focus from this and done its most to become unwanted.

Products are worthless:
A toothbrush is worthless outside its context, taking up much needed space in the bathroom, but when it comes to tooth hygiene, it becomes indispensible.

The New Marketing economy says that the context is larger than the product, much larger, and that marketing is about increasing the value of this context – and growing the context itself.

As Whirpool found when they went on to increase their value by launching a podcast about the American family – not talk about their home appliances..

Or Fiat as they use personal environmental initiatives to create value – not brag about their car.

Or Wasa, as they help you get a nutritious breakfast – not sell their delicious bread/cracker things.

Or BakerTweet – making sure you enjoyed the product in its best possible context – when it’s steaming hot…

Brands need to see themselves as value creators, adding value to contexts where their value is appreciated and needed. They need to investigate and explore these contexts, surrounding their brand and products, and take ownership of them.

The next marketing arena isn’t similar formats in similar media, it’s becoming the most valuable brand inside the experience surrounding the product and the brand.

The marketing currency is not about attention, interruption or interest. It’s about creating deliberate value. Building direct relationships and great marketing through connected services, utilities, arenas and stuff.

The new Marketing economy is about understanding context and adding deliberate value…