Future * Convergence * ThinkPLANK

Erosion of Ad Revenues for TV

So the broadcast industry is finally reading the writing on the wall. This year, at the IBC we heard broadcaster after broadcaster confirm that they now believe that their business models need to be reviewed. The view was confirmed by many others who participate in the broadcast ecosystem. Jeff Rossica, of Thomson Grass Valley summed it up by saying “The old business models are starting to fail”.

Why has the industry woken up suddenly to this problem? Well for one the recession has jolted the industry into a very harsh reality. The dramatic drop in advertising revenues (35% in the US, 28% in Spain, for example) has made everybody sit up and take notice. The industry has historically not been a margin-conscious business, most players relying instead on a few big hits to see them through the year.  Margins have been healthy and as somebody put it rather succinctly, “when you have a lot of money, you can be as inefficient as you want." But even beyond the recession, which could be seen as a short term blip, there is now a growing realization that things will never be the same again. This was the first year that subscriptions outpaced advertising. And there is a growing recognition that this is a financially more robust model. The Economist article “Triumph Of The Monthly Bill” confirms this view. Third, the tidal impact of the Internet and specifically Google/Youtube is suddenly being felt more keenly by the industry.

All of this has come to the foreground as revenues are actually being impacted. All this while there were rumblings and gloomy forecasts but they were countered by bullish prognostications by players who were happy with the status quo. It seemed to serve many decision makers well to believe the views that made them feel more secure. 

Now, the numbers are on the table and the P&L doesn’t lie. Everybody now agrees that there are troubled times ahead. But exactly how is revenue impacted and what are the sub-trends underlying the flight of revenues, now and in future? Let’s take a closer look.

One of the interesting developments which has been coming for a while, is Sky’s announcement that it will serve ads from the Set Top Box. This means that some ads will be served not as a part of the broadcast stream but will be inserted by the Set Top Box. Why is this better? Well most broadcast advertising is based on the hazy logic that most people who watch a “type” of programming have a similar profile and consumption habits. This is a terrible generalization but one that has sustained the advertising industry for half a century. It assumes that sports watchers are beer drinking males, that day time television is watched by housewives and that a cookery show has a female audience that is also interested in cleaning products. While these stereotypes are true, they obviously miss all the variations and exceptions and completely miss the niche audiences. Also obviously, serving the ads from the Set Top Boxes enables use of a much more granular level of data. A household where a lot of Cbeebees is watched will probably be consuming a lot of childcare products and it would make sense to insert them into any programs are being watched. This beats the pants off a model that serves babyfood ads on Friends, at 4:30 PM under the assumption that a large percentage of people watching will be women with babies. Not only does it waste money on those who don’t fit, but it also misses an advertising opportunity to show them some other more relevant ad. So the Set Top Box ad benefits from much improved targeting and also from the ability to be more granular than at a program level. The same program could therefore carry ads for baby-foods or cars, in the same slot, depending on the segmenting. It could also vary the make and price of car being used in the same ad, based on post codes, for example. Sky plus and HD customers could get different ads from other Sky customers. And so on.

There’s no doubt that this will work better for the advertiser, and with due concern about privacy, it will generally work better for consumers. So barring operational and technical issues and some teething problems, we would expect this to be picked up quickly.

The real impact of this will be felt by the program maker – who will now find that their revenues are impacted – as they will now be sharing some of this revenue with Sky. Presumably, Sky will want to keep some % of the revenues that come through this route, and also, will have its own sales team out selling the product. There might be a premium rate, but there will probably be a shrinkage for the program maker.

A second source of leakage of revenues is the move to Internet of course. Although the global advertising market shrunk by 12% in the last year, the Online Advertising market grew by some 8%. Admittedly much of this has come at the expense of print, but global TV ad revenues have shrunk as well. We now know from the New Media Age story that Online Advertising in the UK is officially the biggest chunk of the advertising market and is now bigger than TV Advertising. Clearly brands are showing a preference for the higher level of accountability, the more evolved commercial models and the dramatically better metrics in the online space. And with a healthy 70% people online, spending increasingly more time, and on ever broadening broadband connections, this is clearly a large as well as growing market. This is the part that everybody understands – as reflected by the efforts of Channel 4, ITV, and most other players to build strong online brands – from 40D and ITV.com, to Skyplayer and the branded iPlayers. The NMA reports Mercedes Benz UK earmarks 50% of its budget for online.

But it’s not just that audiences are drifting to the internet – the fundamental premise of interruptive and media-driven advertising is also changing. I’ve written about this earlier. Some 50-60% of the online advertising is search driven and obviously the bulk of that goes to Google. Google has won search marketshare over Microsoft and Yahoo in the past year, and sucks up more advertising revenue than ITV’s income, in the UK. And more recently we’ve had Channel 4 and reports of ITV also getting into deals with Youtube, with Google planning to release a video ad auction model for Youtube searches. So it’s no longer good enough to take your content online, you’ll still lose revenues to the search engines.

Finally, there’s the trend of brands building direct linkages with consumers. Halifax has recently launched a social networking site. Ocean Finance has joined Audi in creating it’s own TV channel. Bayer Schering have launched a cure for erectile dysfunction – not through a TV ad but through online films created by Aardman. Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy pronounced grave judgement at the IBC when he said “conventional advertising no longer has the stranglehold that it used to have on the ability to create a brand.”

The bottom line for the broadcast industry is that they will now need to plan for a future where television advertising revenue is no longer taken for granted. It will be split by Sky, splintered by the internet and slashed by Google. The returns per hour of TV programming will effectively drop. Interestingly, there is no drop in global TV watching numbers or averages. So what this means is that the revenues per stream are dropping even more sharply, even as programming costs keep going up.

This is not apocalyptic, and in fact has been coming for a while. There are plenty of strategic and tactical options available to incumbents looking to protect their bottom-line before rushing to cull staff numbers. But these options are available to the agile, innovative and bold. Not to the slow, the orthodox and those waiting to follow.

http://www.nma.co.uk/opinion/leader-a-watershed-moment-for-online-ten-years-in-the-making/3005031.article

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14587429

Old Media – Not As Bad As It Sounds; Not As Good As It Looks

In all the talk of digital convergence, including from people like myself, you often get the picture that all of old media is history already and that it’s sinking faster than the Titanic. This is strictly speaking, not true. There’s plenty of life in Old Media – right from Newspapers, to Magazines, and from Television to hoardings.  In fact, as the digital wave grows, the value of successful old media becomes disproportionately high.

The New York Times 2008 annual report is instructive. Revenues have shrunk from last year but still stand at $ 2.9 billion. That is an awful lot of advertising revenue. That revenue base would put NYT in the top 5 advertisement earning websites in the world. The NYT’s own website incidentally, attracts about a 10^th of that revenue base.

Or consider the ITV figures for Britain’s Got Talent – 15 million for the final – or 25% of the UK population.  How much would you have to pay to get your brand to be seen by 15 million people in one go?  Increasingly, when faced by the dramatic fragmentation of media and audiences, brand managers  will flock to the few areas where old media is actually able to create huge audiences.

Assertion #1: Successful instances of Traditional Media  will be disproportionately rewarded.

Another great example is the deal struck by AON insurance company with Manchester United to be their shirt sponsors. The deal is thought to be worth around £ 20 million/ year for 4 years. Now I don’t know about you but to me for a certain type of brand objective, that is a killer deal. Specifically, when you’re seeking higher awareness and recall of a product, or seeking to go global for example. It’s not a complex message, but in 200 countries, millions of people – make that billions, will see AON on Man United shirts for the next 4 years. Over and over again. They will see the name every time a highlights package is shown or whenever there is footage of a Man United player in club kit. And the clincher is that every year, over 6 million Man United t-shirts are sold across the world. A huge percentage of this is counterfeit. But guess what! That makes not a jot of difference to AON – they actually get the benefit of all that counterfeiting as well, so there will be about 24 million walking billboards for AON all over the world in the next 4 years. How much would you need to pay to get that kind of coverage alone? $ 20 million sounds like a very sweet deal to me.

All of this might sound like an argument for “Old Media” to feel quite complacent but that would be a fatal mistake. First, the examples of such huge audience aggregation are increasingly limited and on the wane. As has been commonly pointed out an audience of 15 million wasn’t uncommon in the days of 5 channel television. Today it takes a Susan Boyle phenomenon to drive that kind of number. Second, even these numbers are going to require a closer inspection – ITV may have had 15 million watching it on TV but some 200 million people saw the Susan Boyle clip on Youtube and ITV made no money off that at all. Man United doesn’t make any additional money out of all those additional replica jerseys – but they should factor it into the commercials! And finally, it would be useful to remember that these disproportionate rewards are driven partly by inertia to change and by the yet un-evolved nature of digital media platforms. The biggest mistake you can make, either as a media owner or a brand manager is to therefore assume that things are rosy because some of your shows are doing better. This is temporary and the fall off will be steep. The next 3 – 5 years may be very lucrative for successful TV and print models, but unless that is treated as a cash cow and the money invested wisely in emerging platforms, the fall off would leave the same businesses high and dry with no migration plan for their audiences.

Sky has already started charging for online video access. The New York times will continue to grow its website. The iPhone is already changing the way content is used. All you can eat subscription models for music are being trialled. And new projects like Canvas and Picnic will sooner or later change the landscape.

So what are these changes exactly? Again, if you look at the NYT annual report, you find that NYT has about 10,000 employees. Among which there are jobs such as Paper Handlers, Drivers (for delivery), Machinists, Stereotypers  and a few others, which are at great risk every time another newspaper or magazine gets shut down. The closing of “City & Suburban” led to 1350 such jobs being affected. Similarly, for television companies there will be a number of jobs which are to do with media handling (Tapes  and physical media delivery) which might be at the greatest risk.

For businesses, this means planning for the transition or retirement of such jobs including long term plan and investment in place for retraining, where necessary and/or possible.  And it means using all that cash that successful old media is generating to create and build up the emerging revenue models which will need to be in place and be robust within the next 5 years.

Assertion #3: if you are lucky enough to have a successful old media model on your hands make sure you milk it and invest the proceeds into your emerging business model because the winds of change are already blowing and current models will only get less and less effective. 

The Future Of Broadcast Revenues

The last time, we spoke about the impact of convergence on telescoping the AIDA cycle. But what about its impact on media revenues? 

Historically, brands, media and consumers have been comfortable with a 3-way contract that has survived for decades, or rather, centuries. Consumers understand the need for advertising and accept the presence of interruptive advertising in the media they consume, and occasionally even like the advertising. Media depends on advertising to fund the business model as consumers would never be able to cover the full cost of media creation and delivery. Brands have always found it a highly cost effective way to reach high volumes of consumers – to go through media which does the job of aggregating eyeballs, and often segmenting them.

Let’s take a 2-minute walk through 2000 years of history.

The earliest advertising was by way of posters in gladiatorial Rome, announcing contests and events. There was no “media” so the message had to reach consumers directly, presumably appearing where the maximum number of people were likely to see it.

The advent of printed newspapers around the 17^th century quickly led to the insertion of simple textual ads, and the next 300 years have seen the complete intertwining of advertising and all forms of media. To understand the implication of this, you only have to look at the size and shape of the advertising industry, which is about $650 billion according to Plunkett Research

The overwhelming majority of this number is made of fees garnered by commissions on media placements of advertising. For WPP, almost half of the annual income comes from “advertising and media investment management”.

Back to today – what this effectively means is that advertising agencies through much of the last 50 years have been the sales and distribution agents for media businesses. Although over the last 10 years, major brands and big media businesses have sought to disintermediate this model by talking to each other.

With the advent of convergence, there are some significant challenges facing both the advertising agencies and media businesses. In this post, let’s focus on media revenues.

You only have to look at the plight of publishing to see how this plays out. Classified revenues – a major source of revenues for newspapers has gone completely out of the door, and to dedicated classified sites such as Craigs List or even to commerce models such as ebay. Even display advertising has been on the decline. And recently Group M and WPP suggested that print revenues might fall drastically in 2009, leading to many well known titles vanishing. With contraction estimates between 19% and 32%!

What does this mean for television though?  Is the future of television revenues any safer? Or any more defendable? The answer, whichever way you look at it, is clearly, no. First, there is the much higher accountability of emerging digital platforms – which allow brands to measure and monitor their spends with greater accuracy and predictability, minimizing wastage. Second, there is the overall growth of the online audience. Third, the clutter and fragmentation in traditional media means that traditional advertising has become less effective anyway. 

But it’s not simply a move from TV to online – it’s more fundamental a shift. This is a shift away from media based advertising. The 3-way contract we spoke about earlier, is no more. Brands can reach increasingly greater number of consumers without the help of traditional media. And consumers themselves are getting a taste of free content and access to product information – so their dependence on traditional advertising is falling as well. Note that the advertising dollars are not simply shifting to banners and prerolls on websites. They’re moving to completely different models such as Google. Or, as in the case of the TFL campaign in Bebo, they’re becoming a part of the story itself. Thereby questioning the very nature of interruptive advertising around which media businesses are built.

It doesn’t help that PVRs are encouraging ad-skipping.

Worse, there is also the emergence and spread of devices and alternative networks. The time is not far when a share of the advertising you will see on TV are being served from your set top box, rather than being included in the broadcast stream. Similarly you could see ads on your mobile phone. In future, you as a consumer will have a home network and a mobile network (which will connect your car systems, your mobile phones etc.) and access to these networks directly will come at a price for brands.

And to top it all, consumers will get a choice of viewing or consuming content which as ad funded or paying for it themselves, as in the case of Spotify. Of course this will mean that premium and most attractive consumers will escape the net and the value of the remaining eyeballs will drop.

Bottom line, the traditional and linear model of television is truly reaching the end of its life.

Does this mean that well known Television companies will all die? Of course not! They know all of this as well as anybody else. A lot of smart people are involved with television businesses. The model will die but the smarter companies will mould themselves around the new models. In short, I expect many of the same companies to be around for years, but their business models will have morphed significantly. And yes, the slower to adapt will suffer greatly.

So what changes and innovations can we expect to see in television and media in general over the next few years?

-          Agile strategies which allow traditional and slow moving businesses to quickly try new ideas, align resources, experiment and learn quickly and scale efficiently into the successful ones. The New York Daily News has recently launched a small business social network. Note, it’s the New York Daily News and not the NY Times.

-          Acquisitions will form a big part of this strategy because many of these new ideas will not come from inside the business. But the ability to spot winners early, rather than pay gazillions for proven models will be key

-          Success will come from innovation and “judo” strategies and not from strength and financial muscle.

-          A tighter operational integration between the revenue and product teams within media businesses will be essential. The current model for most broadcasters involves an-arms length relationship between ad sales teams, who believe they are the key people since they bring in the money for the business, and creative teams, who believe they are key since they bring in the audience. With brands set to talk directly to consumers, these two groups of people will have to collaborate closely to create innovative new models in order to get brands to work with them again.

-          Broadcasters will have to modify their businesses from being channel centric to being asset centric. In the channel centric model, business revolves around units of channels. Profit and loss is typically ascribed to channels and decisions are made at a channel level. In the asset centric world, the unit will be media assets, and a portfolio of distribution options will need to be maintained. Importantly, the financial performance will need to be based on assets, and value and cost measured across distribution platforms.

Of course this is not comprehensive. You will see Omnimedia companies rather than “print” or “tv” or online ones. Product placement will certainly come in, as will content labelling. And many, many more innovations. But more on that later. For now, let’s just see who’s innovating and who is in danger of becoming “the weakest link”

The Future Of Advertising - Telescoping AIDA

Revisiting the age-old discussion about the future of advertising in a converged and Google dominated world, it was interesting to look at the impact of the growing mainstream adoption of convergent technologies and the expanding might of Google. Of course, this being advertising, everybody has a view, and so do I.

A key axis of advertising is the long-term v short-term continuum. Advertising plays a role in the immediate term getting you to actually buy stuff – at the point of sale, through coupons and offers, or at least initiate the buying process through “calls to action”.  At the other end Advertising seeks to create awareness, bring a brand and its values into your consciousness and create aspiration. Now, it can be argued that this is not about creating purchase but about creating aspiration. But can you really divorce advertising from purchase intention totally?

It’s a bit like the weird offside rule in football – arguing that a player standing 1 meter in front of the goalkeeper and obstructing his view is not interfering with the play. (apologies to non-football types). At best you can argue that advertising can seek to influence your decision in the short term or in the long term. Or that it can influence you directly or indirectly (by influencing people around you, for example).

In fact, I would argue, that the reason brands spend so much money on creating awareness and brand values “for the long term” is for two big reasons. First, because they historically have not been able to reach consumers effectively at the point of sale – because there isn’t an effective way of getting to consumers at that point. And second, because consumers typically go into a purchase with a short list of brands and products and it’s important to be in that short list. The first reason has changed, the second hasn’t.

So what’s the influence of Digital Convergence on this, then? My view on this is that we are going to see a telescoping of the AIDA cycle – the classic Awareness, Interest, Decision or Desire, Action stages of how we buy products. Thanks to convergence we will move much quicker from awareness to action – and there is no better example of this than using the Shazam on a smart phone. You can hear a song that you’ve never had before, like it, and use Shazam to find out what it is. (If you didn’t know, you just hold up your phone so it can “hear” the song, and it samples and submits it to a central service, which then performs some complex algorithms to tell you what the song is. This takes about a minute. You can then buy the song from your iTunes account which takes another minute. A final minute for your song to download – and you can go from never having heard the song to owning it in 3 minutes.

Of course not all products are not downloadable to a phone. But in this case, you can argue that with the spread of smartphones (and smartphone owners having higher incomes on average) will mean that music advertising will move from simply telling you about an album (on TV, print, posters etc.) to actually getting you to hear the song. As a marketer of a large record company would you not look to spend more money getting people to hear a song in as many places as possible – malls, movie theatres, in offices, on radio etc. and less on “traditional media based advertising”?

What of other products? Toothpastes, cars, home furnishings, consumer electronics? Well all of those will make a move on the long term – short term axis, they will spend a little bit less on traditional “brand building media” and a little more on “action oriented advertising”.  That action can be as simple as encouraging people to look on a website, or seek more information or order a free catalogue.

 

Here are some specific reasons why this will happen:

• Emergence of smartphones – truly converged devices which do voice, data and video and are “always on”, location-aware and personal. This makes everywhere a point of sales, as with permission, you can be reached with context sensitive offers and calls to actions you can respond to.

• The power of Television advertising is waning because of ad-skipping and time shifting behaviour. Also because emerging platforms are showing up traditional media for the paucity of effective metrics.

• Worth noting that the shift isn’t simply to “online advertising” – the shift is really from “interruptive advertising” to “search”. In a nutshell, rather than getting people to notice you while they’re reading or watching something else that you hope to distract them from, you want to pop up at a time when they’re actually looking for something your brand has a relevance to. It’s still not clear that they’re looking for products, but at least they’re looking for similar information.

• Universal connectivity and growth of broadband – with ever increasing broadband and connectivity everywhere, people are accessing data services everywhere and the incidence of dual-screen experiences at home is on the up as well. Combined with media fragmentation – it’s ever harder to attract and retain attention. The “attention economy” is a term that’s been used a lot of late.

The economic downturn that coincides with this at present provides conflicting directions. On the one hand, the tendency to stick with the tried and tested is high. On the other hand, the “long term” has become ever more elusive – who knows what will happen in 10 years or even 5? Ask companies like GM – if they had created less aspiration and more short term sales through their advertising – would that have served them better?

Coming up: the Impact on Media Businesses

UFO Films, India - Executing a Digital Vision

Amsterdam 13th September.

With 2 days of the IBC gone, I've hardly had a second to stop and ponder about what it is I've learnt or found. Certainly one of the wow moments was listening to Rajesh Mishra of UFO Films in India. UFO have executed a powerful vision to digitize (till now) some 1250 movie halls, putting in their own investment, technology and actually operating the systems. They deliver the movies to the halls via a satellite link. In most parts of the world, the film distribution have struggled to implement a good idea - mostly arguing about who should pay for the digital upgrade.

Consider some of the numbers - the cost of prints for a film used to be around $ 1500. Because of this high cost, even the biggest mega-films only do about 500 copies. Most big budget movies do around 400. These are shown in the top 500 halls, then the same prints are sent on to the other ones. Obviously this a) slows down the revenue cycle and b) opens the door for pirates.

Now, the movie can be simultaneously be released to 1250 halls, at a cost of under $150 each - a 90% reduction,  with a target to more than double the number of halls in the next few years. Apart from dramatically improving the cash flow, it strikes a blow at the heart of the piracy which apparently takes out up to some 40% of revenues.

The piracy itself is an outcome of the slow speed of distribution. In the celluloid based world, people in the smallest towns are exposed to a film's marketing and if they don't get to see it for 6 months, they will do whatever they can to get their hands on the prints. The pirates are very organized with "blockers" - groups of people who will surround the person who actually carries a movie camera into a hall. The blockers ensure that there are no "heads" and shadows popping into the pirated print.

Thanks to a more immediate distribution model, the movie reaches everybody at the same time and thus a big chunk of the piracy will be knocked off. Although I didn't have time to speak with Rajesh after the event, I enjoyed his simple and direct way of explaining the model. No powerpoints, no marketese, just a structured and simple explanation. Much impressed, both with the delivery and the model - always great to see somebody who actually puts their money where their mouth is, with the digital dream.

The Truth About Broadcasters & Dinosaurs

Why did dinosaurs die? Many theories exist, including environmental change, their own inability to adapt, cataclysms, lack of self defence ... and if you go to the childrens' section of the Natural History Museum in London, you might even see the hypotheses that they overate themselves to death at picnics.

Actually, the truth is that dinosaurs didn't die. Thats right. They just stopped being dinosaurs. Or to be more accurate, some individual dinosaurs died, but the rest just became other animals over a few (hundred) generations. Mostly they became smaller, and more adept at surviving in the new conditions, as the Jurassic age gave way to the Creataceous age. Because by the end of that era, it just didn't pay to be a dinosaur anymore.

So... is broadcasting a dinosaur whose time has come? And if so, what is the new animal it needs to morph into?

First things first, yes, there is a BIG change. A cataclysm? Sounds negative, and instantaneous. Neither may be true. It's cataclysmic if you're locked into an unchangable model or technology (just invested your entire 100 million in a new factory to supply HD-DVD discs). But otherwise, its mostly good news, especially as consumers. And yes, it's not an overnight change. This is why we argue about whether it's happening at all or not. It's not easy to spot, because it's gradual. But yes as sure as the ice ages or more recently, global warming. And just as you can't stand by the seashore and watch the water level rise, you can't see the changes in the broadcast environment. But just as surely, they're changing.

The other important thing to remember that this is not a simple zero sum game. Just because it's bad for some incumbents doesn't mean every new player coming along will pick up the spoils. The idea that this is Darwinian is not new. And Darwinian evolution isn't prescriptive. It's more like every generation includes thousands of tiny mutations and a miniscule percentage of them survive and flourish and become the new order. In much the same way, old and new companies keep throwing thousands of ideas into the market, and the successful ones are the ones that find some uptake and whose backers are able to recognize this and grow bigger quicker. What all this means therefore is that the fact that the older model (the Dinosaur) is going to die is clear, but it's not clear which particular mutant will replace it. Sometimes it boils down to a simple matter of money, technology, marketing (Blu-Ray vs HDDVD) but at other times its more subtle and driven by much less predictable or manageable factors (e.g. social networking). Of course, simplicity, and low cost are always going to work better.

So, back to broadcasting. Which depends on a) a specific device b) a specific set of delivery mechanisms c) a specific operating model and d) a specific set of standards & processes, e) typically consumed in specific user patterns. Built into the model are some clear constraints, beyond the obvious price performance.

Lets remind ourselves of a few things that go on behind the TV screen. First the device. The TV as a device used to be a CRT, now is plasma or LCD, it used to work off an antenna, now it relies also on a Set Top Box. It used to be an dumb device, now the set top box makes a lot of decisions. It used to have a power socket and an antenna input. Now, the back of a TV looks like the control panel of Starship Enteprise. There's nothing you can't plug into your TV - camera, computer, phone, music system, washing machine, home-server, DVD player... okay I admit, I threw in the washing machine to see if you were paying attention! But you get the drift. The point is, it isn't a device thats just used by broadcast content.

Similarly and without boring you to death, we can easily see that the delivery mechanism has changed (from analog, terrestrial to satellite and cable to IP over copper and fibre); the operating model of scheduled, one-size fits many, expensive-to-make content that has very little flexibility and is largely hit & miss - will (slowly) yield ground to personalizable, made to order, unscheduled, interactive, place shifted, fast-cycle-time content that can react faster to user behaviour. Currently for some broadcasters this it takes months from a show going out to being able to change it based on poor feedback. Yes you can swap it out for another show, but what if you bet a few million on it being the summer hit?

Importantly, the existing broadcast model bases itself on certain patterns of societal behaviour. This is the knowledge that goes into scheduling and into regulations. Children's programs air at specific times. F words are allowed after 10. Housewives watch TV in the afternoons. But as more diverse cultures start to proliferate and stereotypical behaviour patterns fade away (this is a whole discussion by itself - one that we've had Convergence Conversations evenings about!) it takes a little bit more away from the broadcast model.

The other aspect of the broadcast model is the underlying economic assumptions. Broadcast, especially satellite or digital terrestrial works on scale economics. Which means it's the best model for sending the same content to a few million people (live sports, news, big shows), but terrible at serving niche markets. The way existing broadcasting models serve niche markets is to choose an obscure time and/or an unused frequency and convince people to tune in at the time. Caravan Channel on Information TV does good business, but it's only on once a week in a half hour slot. What if you're in your caravan at the time?

So, it becomes apparent that as we enter a new age, the conditions under which broadcasting has survived and grown into the behemoths we see today are changing. As the Jurassic age gave way to the Cretaceous, a Satellite Era is giving way to a Convergence Era. Does this mean broadcasting is dying? No, but some broadcasters will suffer mortal wounds. The ones who pin their hopes on channels, the old TV device, the historical viewing behaviour and the old operating model will go first. But most broadcasters will simply morph into convergent media businesses. The shape of convergent media isn't clear though. With the success of Kate Modern, some signs may be visible. Likewise, Facebook comes up in living room conversations and office cooler banter more often than East Enders does, among some sections of the population. But the mutation, as they say, has just begun.

Social Networking - the Future

On Thursday, January 31st, at Intellect, the first edition of Convergence Conversations for 2008 was a real eye opener for me, and a wonderful reminder of all the reasons why we started this event. Way back in 06, when Amy, Laurence and I first discussed this event, in my head it was like an "art movement" - a forum where people would come to present and discover the future and argue about tomorrow. The january conversation, themed around social networking, was a real example of this. I left the event with my head buzzing with dozens of ideas which had all been planted over the past two hours.

Probably the most interesting idea for me, was the distinction between public social networking websites, and the use of social networking software within closed groups - especially within large organizations. The example of IBM's use of social networking tools to get thousands of people across the world to focus on specific problem domains (such as solving Rio De Janeiro's traffic situation) came up.

On the other hand the most far reaching was the suggestion that social networks represent the beginning of the end of command and control - both as a societal tool and for organizations.

Closer to the present, a few clear polarities emerged. On the one hand, more and more institutions - educational and professionals are resorting to research on prospective candidates (students & employees) - and a growing number of people are uncomfortable about the privacy issues and are lobbying for change or prevention of such scanning. On the other hand most people including younger professionals seem to be  off the opinion that when you put something on a public social network, you need to be aware of your liability and only you are to blame.

Of course when it comes to children - an entirely new set of issues emerge, and the bottom line here was the need for education - first for teachers and through them for the early schoolers, on dos and don'ts of social networking. The reality is that's its as much a part of our lives as crossing the road and rather than avoid the subject, kids need to be taught how to embrace it safely.

Social networking is, then, the new TV. It's where the eyeballs aggregate, its forms the social currency and its the means through which communities are increasingly built. Of course, a critical difference is that television broadcasting is almost always demarcated by political boundaries, so it enhances national identity. On the other hand, social networks go across borders so it pushes us to a post national world - a more borderless one.

At a more commercial level, social networks bring us to the nirvana state of continuous engagement with our customers and consumers, although we need to recognize that the group is essentially self selecting.
And it allows us to spot the weak signals before they become the strong signals which are apparent to everybody.

From the perspective of an individual - you have a situation where you have multiple, distinct networks - which allow you to federate your identity across these networks - and potentially allow you to express yourself freely within each network. My preference is always to have have social contacts in facebook and professional ones in Linked in for example. Of course there are limits on how many networks you can be a part of - and we know there are thousands of social networks out there with more being launched every day. I've stopped accepting invitations to more networks like WAYN and Hi5 and Yaari etc. But as somebody said, there's still room for more networks - be they for love or money, and it seems the ones launched out of love, or concern, will outlive those launched to make money.

(more soon on social networking...)

More on Content Strategies

Following up from my last post on Music and Content pricing and strategies, I discovered belatedly an excellent piece by David Byrne in the Wired Magazine - which really lays out the music industry out on the dissection table and points out how the economics work. Importantly, according to Byrne, the artist's share of the rakings in a label-published album or even one sold through iTunes is less than 15%. You really have to be sure of the bigger numbers for this to work, obviously. But to me this also points to the following:

First, the value of the album is therefore largely composed of retailing, marketing and other elements. Hence it might be argued through hard economics that the retailing and marketing are more critical components of the success of the album seen through a business-person's eyes and clearly the level of predictability of costs and performance is higher in this area. Almost makes you sympathise with labels!

Second, Byrne's logic could be extended to films and other forms of content as well and it would be interesting to see the kind of strategic alternatives which might arise for movies and games in future. When there's enough broadband connections of significant size to enable movie distribution, will any independent release a film with a pay as you want model a la Radiohead? Seems just beyond belief, but those horizons are shifting as we speak!

Content Value Strategies

I've argued before that the price of content is falling and will do so for a while. The latest example how this is taken on board by the industry is the recent example in the music industry. Guy Hands' plans for his prospective takeover of EMI includes getting albums sponsored by corporates, as reported in the FT. (Although the notion of Sudafed sponsoring cold play smells of a bad pun!). For some this may be blasphemous or patently implausible, but here's a couple of arguments for you. We all know the stories of decline in sales of CDs and recorded content with the growth of Youtube and P2P downloads.

So where then do content producers and owners go? Well, there's still value in News and live Sports, for example, and in evergreen shows which have an audience even after a decade of airing (Friends, Monty Python, etc.) but for the rest, there are some emerging alternative strategies.

The first is that people still pay for the experience, not the content. Of course we do, that's why movie halls still sell tickets at vastly higher prices than the best DVD rentals. Madonna's deal with Live Nation, away from Labels shows how this works. As this article in the Times points out (thanks Raja!), you can buy Madonna's entire output of recorded music for the price of seeing her live for two hours on stage. Still think it's all about content? Incidentally, the article also looks at why Tony Blair can charge £ 500,000 for a speech or why the Led Zep concert sold tickets on the web at an average of over £ 7,000.  Bottom line - bands used to do  concerts to sell their CDs, now they do CDs to sell their concerts. Is that change enough for you?

Other interesting fall-outs include examples such as this story in the Prospect Magazine which suggest that bands prefer to sell their T-shirts rather than their CDs. The t-shirts cost nothing and sell for $ 20. The CDs sell for half, but costs double of the t-shirt to make, and cannibalizes sales of t-shirts. Enough said.

Of course, when all else fails, there's always advertising. Doesn't seem all that implausible now, does it?

Don't Panic

Nothing to do with convergence. Just one of my favourite movie trailers.