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.

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).

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:

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.

Understanding the challenges affecting digital media as a marketing platform introduces some new creative challenges. What we are seeing is very solvable, and they are triggering the start of a much more diverse and interesting time for marketing and advertising.

There are four main challenges disturbing the effect of marketing investments on digital media [DM]. Understanding their abilities, and why they are doing a much better job than DM on doing what DM originally did gives insight into what DM needs to offer in order to regain its value. (Sorry about all the DM’s :o)

The important thing is not to copy these abilities, because that would not be bettering digital media, it would be destroying it. We need to find the solutions within the context of the existing value creation of the digital media body. And this is where it introduces some great creative challenges for strategists and creatives.

The four horsemen in this case can seem very threatening; on the other hand, sometimes innovation needs to be forced by inescapable realities.

The Four Horsemen:

1. Earned media. We are increasingly seeing earned media outperform paid media and becoming the main driver of traffic to marketing initiatives.

2. Middle men. Media needs to build down the barriers between brands and participants online, today the artificial divide media offers are lessening the value compared to brands own initiatives.

3. New behaviors. Increased accessibility to tools and technology not only boosts media consumption, but also changes how the use integrates into our daily lives. Advertising models tailored for a more traditional media consumption looses effectiveness.

4. Brands as competitors. The competition is no longer between digital media channels with similar products; it’s between media channels and the brands own initiatives.

Looking at the larger picture there are already two visible solutions:

1. Media channels need to offer arenas where brands with shared values can build direct relations with the participants through offering deliberate and relevant value over time.

2. Exploring and understanding Media’s new role in online activities – defined by its abilities. And build products that fit better to this part of the online marketing eco-system, or create a new role all together.

Lets look at the horsemen, where are the opportunities?

1. Earned Media, this is simple. Earned media is earned, which means it finds and links to stuff that is valuable. (In effect this isn’t relevant to any advertising campaign that people don’t want to share. On the other hand…). If the advertising is valuable, then the media channel needs to offer the space for where the content resides. If brands build stuff on media channels that earned media links back to, you create a win-win situation. Simple :o)

2. Middle Men, a bit more complex. Media needs to get out of the way. At the same time they need their presence as they are dependent on not becoming invisible themselves. This creates a situation where brands and media need to collaborate. We already know that both brands and media channels are value providers, and it is the interfaces where they create shared value we are looking for. Media opens to such a collaborative opportunity through its development of arenas specially tailored to niche interest and niche brands.

3. New behaviors. Increased accessibility to information-, media-, and social technology first changes our tools, then our behaviors. What we are seeing now are people not only changing how much time they spend with media channels, but also how they use them. The jury is out on this one as the changes in behavior have just started, but both Transmedia, synchronized media activities across platforms and content enrichment through participation carries some very promising and clever inspiration.

4. Brands are the new competitors. As brands can create their own media channels and direct relations arenas, the need to use media as a vehicle for messaging decreases. This means that the competition for marketing dollars is not exclusively between the media channels but between the media channels and the brands own initiatives. What media needs to do is both understand how they can facilitate and increase the value of these arenas, by offering a new property tailored to each brands initiative. Top of mind this might be “free” traffic, but better and more unique values will be more connected to synergies gained from shared values.

Summarizing this into seven simple bullet points, digital media needs to do the following:

1. Start seeing themselves as value providers, not content providers.
2. Understand that advertising moves from just being messaging to becoming something useful and valuable.
3. Start selling long-term initiatives, helping brands build direct relations with people, and connect with them over time.
4. Produce content that is stealable and multipliable.
5. Build a portfolio of unique values – not unique content or formats.
6. Offer clear values as a part of a marketing eco-system, facilitate larger parts of this system.
7. And finally, offer brands marketing abilities that they are unable to offer themselves.

Display advertising was designed to work inside a traditional media format, tailored to a certain context of media use. As this use-context changes with the accessibility of new technology – as readers become participants, as media gets integrated into everyday life and exported outside the browser – these formats don’t fit the context anymore and start to loose their effectiveness.

This is similar to saying “digital didn’t change anything, but everything digital changed”. Because with the advent of the Internet (before broadband) the old models didn’t really change that much, they just got digitalized –the use pattern stayed the same (looking at use statistics we see that the older the citizen the more similar their use of digital media is to traditional media). What we are seeing now is the alteration of the core concepts of the use part – which has a much greater effect on media and advertising than just moving some stuff from one platform to the other.

Regarding click-rates on online banners we’ve moved from being told a 0,15% click average is good to a 0.05%. This isn’t necessarily because we’ve got lower expectations. It might just be because the average drops – because the advertising formats aren’t following the changes in consumption patterns.

Now we are very busy measuring the amount of media consumption, and supporters point to every research showing an increase. But this only points to the amount of media consumed, not the pattern of the consumption – and this is where stuff has changed…

In other words, there is a new context for using media, and measuring how much we use it isn’t helpful as it isn’t relevant. What is useful is understanding how the use has changed, and figuring out how this should change media – and its advertising..

If control is unattainable, what is the goal of our brand building efforts? The answer seems more related to adaptability and changeability than unanimity, let’s call it ability to multiply.

The lack of control is demonstrated to a grand scale by the traces people leave on social and recordable media. One brilliant example is Noah Briers brandtags.net, which quickly illustrates the illusory concept of a company representing a limited set of values. What is obvious, is that people have their own personal opinions of the brand (it is shaped by their daily exchange of ideas within their communities, but it is still personal).

Another example is brands’ fan pages on Facebook, full of peoples’ stories and descriptions of how they relate to it. Giving the impression that a brand is a PART of a person’s own story not a story in itself.

This should come to no surprise, and probably doesn’t. A brand is meaningless unless people can connect with it in the sense of relating it to their own identity and values. And they do this by transforming it so that it fits with a part of their world view. In other words, people make brands their own.

So, brands are absorbed by people, and to be successful at that they need to have the ability to mutate or transform in order to be meaningful. They need to have the ability to multiply. A concept inspired by Henry Jenkins who calls people multipliers.

A condensed and probably polarizing summary of “If it doesn’t spread it’s dead” by Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb Krauskopf and Joshua Green makes it a bit clearer:

- People share stuff in order to have something to talk about, we know that, but Jenkins also states that content is introduced into a social network only if it inhabits characteristics that will help define the identity of the participants sharing the content and/or their relationship with this community.

- People share stuff to articulate their persona and their role in the network.

- Now to achieve this a brand needs to be designed to serve its multipliers (customers). Jenkins states that a brand’s original message is one of mass culture, a commodity. In its current form it has no worth within a social network as it is “sterile”. In order for it to become shareable it needs to be transformed, so that it enters what Jenkins calls the gift culture, something of social worth.

- In order for content to transform, and multiply, it has to have a certain characteristic that allows for people to make it their own. It needs to be “open ended” and “producerly”. It needs to allow people to take the brand and fit it into their existing world view, and help them tell a small story about themselves.

This is something people already do with brands, to a large extent. And it’s very interesting to see how little effort it takes to create a lot of participation: Coca Cola.

The question is, if we build stuff to be producerly and open ended. If we design brands not for control, but for the ability to multiply. Will they become better, more popular, more embraced and more shared?

This last year has seen logarithmic changes in marketing, fueled by different concepts like Utilities, AR, The Collective Exchange of Ideas, Transmedia, Digital becoming ubiquitous, Mobility and more.

I have tried to be a part of some of these discussions online, and have as a result of other peoples shared and collective wisdom published a range of posts, presentations and tweets on the subject.

What I wanted to do before leaving on a short summer vacation was recombine all the best ideas, into ONE Post Digital Marketing 2009 presentation. Summarizing all the major thoughts finding its way to my “ideas”-folder this last year.

View presentation below or here.

Hopefully it will both be interesting and inspiring to some, and the format introduce what Erin McKean defines as Serendipity:

“Finding something you weren’t looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damn difficult.”
- link

Please enjoy, and have a nice summer (winter).

Best Regards
Helge