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.

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…

Is media in the wrong business? Looking at business model imperatives it seems that it is…

In the excellent book Business Model Generation, by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur, there is a chapter on “unbundling”. Where the concept is that there exist three fundamentally different business types, and that a company should separate these types from each other to avoid conflicts and undesirable trade-offs.

From the book:

“The concept of the “unbundled” corporations holds that there are three fundamentally different types of businesses: Customer relationship businesses, product innovation businesses, infrastructure businesses.”

And then continues:

“Each has different economic, competitive, and cultural imperatives. The tree types may co-exist within a single corporation, but ideally they are “unbundled” into separate entities in order to avoid conflicts or undesirable trade-offs.”

Under the imperative “competition” there is an interesting revelation: Where product innovation focuses on being employee centered, and customer relationship management on being highly service oriented. Infrastructure management has its competitive imperative set to “Cost focused; stresses standardization, predictability and efficiency”.

Now looking at these three models I would say media definitely puts itself in the infrastructure category – which also might be its biggest mistake.

Media used to be in the infrastructure business, providing mere opportunities to traffic messages from the brand to the consumer. But today this is costing media dearly. Having little or no unique content, having standardized every piece of real estate available for the brands to purchase, and thus removing any advantage in the bidding war. Thus resulting in trying to sell its identical product by having the cheapest product (or the biggest discount) and flooding its editorial content with advertising in order to compensate for the low price per. unit sold.

Its sometimes seems like media doesn’t see that basic marketing economics (scarcity and demand equals higher price) also applies to their business.

If media is in the infrastructure business, it is in the wrong business.

I would suggest media position itself to the relationship business, and be selling completely different, more scarce and more valuable products to brands.

What I would like to see is a change of business model focus. From infrastructure destruction, to creating valuable relationships – providing new and interesting products for brands to sponsor in order to increase the value being created between media and the participant – as opposed to flooding the available real estate with messaging as uninteresting and generic as the format it has chosen to be presented in.