Brad Howarth

Respected tech journalist Brad Howarth live-blogged Media 2010. Brad blogs at Lagrangepoint and www.afasterfuture.com – a companion website to his and Janelle Ledgwidge’s forthcoming book A Faster Future.

His super sharp insights and summaries of each of the presentations can be found below!

Live from Media 2010 – Jack Matthews from Fairfax Digital and Richard Titus from The Daily Mail #media2010

Media 2010 – Marc Frons, chief technology officer for digital at the New York Times #Media_2010

Live from Media 2010 – Nik Fulton, chief scientist at the Media Lab at Reuters Media #Media_2010

Media 2010 – Adrian Holovaty, founder of EveryBlock #Media_2010

Media 2010 – Russ Fradin, Frederic Filloux and Oliver Reichenstein #Media_2010

Media 2010 – Simon Gallagher, Hulu’s director of international business development #Media_2010

Media 2010 – Moeed Ahmad, Al Jazeera’s head of new media #Media_2010

Media 2010 – Suzanne Stefanac, director of the AFI Digital Content Lab in Los Angeles #Media_2010

Media 2010 – Tim Harris and Saneel Radia from Denuo #Media_2010

Media 2010 – Ming Chan from The1stMovement in Los Angeles #Media_2010

Media 2010 – Jon Vlassopulos from Skyrockit in San Francisco #Media_2010

(thanks to PANPA!)

Consumers respond to seamless aggregation
What’s special about HULU: Quality, Ease of Use.

Why does it exist?
JV between CNBC, FOX and Universal to help their parent companies deal with changes in the media landscape.
Currently using 200+ partners. All professionally produced content.

How does it work?
Current shows are available after the last US broadcasts for the next
Balances needs of users and advertisers

Ad Format innovation:
1) Choose to watch an ad from the start
2) Choose which ad from a particular advertiser. (SUV or sportscar ads?)

And for Australia???

Hulu is definitely in top ten targets for international expansion: as long as the media companies realise it needs to be a JV and play nicely together, and that our broadband speed increases and loses its caps!

The overall approach:
Al Jazeera has decided to put all their content for free on youTube to form a ‘virtuous cycle’ where Al-Jazzera content in available to all, and users can make their own content and return it ‘not as criminal act, but as an act of love’ for the content. Users act as marketers for Al-Jazeera’s own content. The exposure to social media is really to be where the discussions are happening and where the content is consumed.

Project Examples:
The Al Jazeera Creative Commons repository.
Al Jazeera has made creative commons as part of a management and strategic philosophy. Only Al-Jazeera had content from Gaza as they had their own reporters on the ground, and could get reports out of Gaza under an Israeli government ban. Instead of enforcing this scarcity and charging other media companies high prices for it. They put it out for free and under a creative commons licence.
After that, much leads were generated because other media agencies thought ‘this was good news, can we have more’ and Al-Jazeera sold daily round-up packages to people who had taken the Gaza content for free.

War 2.0
Israeli perspective on the war. Palestinian view of the war. Both sides are pulling the discussion from social networking sites. Al Jazeera made a twitter identity @ajgaza a special topic based twitter feed and gave minute by minute updates on it. Much mileage from retweets, and they brought this feed onto their English service to much popularity

A location mash-up to track fighting in Gaza, gives new context to the violence in the middle east, showing how this related to people on the ground. (This reminds me of the chicago police+ google maps mash up which Adrian Holovaty talked about earlier today. Giving context through mashing up content. )

Al-Jazeera also looked at how reliable tracked the number of twitter accounts from Tehran 60 accounts before the crisis to 6 during the crisis. Moeed noted a relationship in social media from that:
info – noise + context = news

Branded content definition: (i paraphrase) Any content that has contact with the consumer and the brand. The key from what he’s saying is any content, not a product placement. Jon goes on to illustrate this using iphone applications.

Zippo as an example: its a lighter application for the iphone that uses it to mimic the zippo lighter and opens up a new technology stream. Users become brand ambassadors, who become users, (some of them don’t know its a real lighter) plans to build concert application around it. http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/id291622252?mt=8

ROMPLR, a music re-mixer, involving 50-Cent and Glaceau vitamin water. 250,000 downloads for the iPhone app in the first week. This was paid for by Glaceau (a coca-cola company).

The key word is free, but money can be made at different points of the value chain.

Jon’s history of advertising
Back then (madmen) it was so easy you could drink while you do it.
Flintstones video: Product placement. Winston Cigarettes smoked by the Flintstones. “Crazy right?”
Then.. interrupted television ads (which jon thinks is a dead model)
Technology changes it.
Today the Traditional versus Digital battle.
Digital agencies win with youTube and social media: These are SERVICES not really new content.

If you don’t pay for something, it will

to take advantage of the opportunities: you need the skills.
What’s not changed:
every entity wants to get their message across, consumers don’t want to pay for content. There’s a fortune to be made in between.

2 MACRO trends that matter:
Mobile apps and Online Video.
(not mobile devices, focus on apps)

Free will create more contents and more clutter. And that’s what companies will pay dearly for. (aggregate)
“creative needs to constantly improve and try to engage the consumer on an ongoing basis- editorial voice will be key”

Celebrity culture is a key thing to understand. Celebrities will have to market harder to keep their status (and money), also, celebrities are still a way to put across brands.

People will still gravitate to blockbusters and hits, people need something to share and talk about.

“If you don’t make it to the top 10, its highly likely you’ll fall into obscurity” -The Economist.

The holy grail: Branded content + iphone app + (I missed this point)

He prefers iphone apps (subscription fees or multiple reuse and word of mouth) and brand building, instead of continually marketing to consumers again and again (like selling albums, continually re-marketing to the same consumers)

“its a real time world, everyone has to get used to it”

Ming Chan introduces his background as a silicon valley programmer who went into advertising. Gives a quick introduction video.

A difference since the days of the .COM crash. Prior to .COM crash, companies made things and hoped consumers would like it, and after the .COM crash companies make things they know that consumers want. They are able to listen in to consumers.

A look at the Pepsi Brand. adspend decreased. $142 million spend in 2006 dropped to $60 million in 2008. BBDO kicked out in 2008 (after 40+ years) and replaced with TBWA\Chiat. Pepsi Digital kicked out TBWA\Chiat.
Instead individual brands went to new agencies.
Pepsi Digital –> Huge (agency)
Gatorade –> VML
Sobe –> Firstborn
No more superbowl ads, instead a social media campaign.

Why did Agency of Record dominate the ad industry for so long?
Agencies of Record knew the traditional platforms well. but when it all changed, the AoRs didn’t manage to convince the clients that they knew what was going on. New interactive marketing agencies were popular.

A few examples on how in Ming Chan’s experience whether there will be a new interactive agency AOR. His answer is no. He too believes that integration between traditional and digital is broken. (for example an AOR with interactive and traditional components integrated) It takes too long. “we don’t have time”. “Consumers are demanding things and they want it now. He proposes collaboration between big and small agencies to meet the challenges of speed and responding to the consumers.

“The future doesn’t fit the boxes of the present.

1) Idea Buffets rarely maximize creativity
Neither does the Omakase approach (Chef’s choice)
Its about the idea process: Ad agencies are good at divergent ideation. But not good enough alone, convergent ideation is required.

2) Ad campaigns
Ad campaigns are only one way of doing it. Its a finite campaign. Its an expense.
What If…
–Marketing was evergreen? Like media? shine.yahoo.com (sponsored content)
–Marketing facilitated extension into other areas (redbox started by trying to make use of the time of people waiting in line to buy a burger)
(two other what ifs regarding behavior was mentioned)
its about creating marketing assets

3) Marketing teams are made out of superheroes
Its not about the specialist in marketing. You need inter-sectional innovation requires generalists among specialists. To bring ideas in from different fields. Need to hire generalists. (like master splinter from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)

4) Creative leaders should be the most creative people.
Use Creative Leaders cause creativity which requires different skills.
reward creative people differently from creative catalyst
Rockstars and Catalysts have different incentives.

5) Each employee should strive for perfection
We hold folks to our particular idea of what ‘perfection’ in the firm is (a sort of do-list). Create the perfect job not the perfect person.

6) Marketing is a masterpiece to be revealed
We didn’t have the tools to iterate, be nimble and real time. There’s a collaborative launch and there’s the traditional launch. “If you’re not embarrassed of the first release of your product, you released too late.” – a Silicon Valley adage. Evolving based on what consumers are saying, not just ONE BIG LAUNCH. Collaborative launches have a community and a
“Creatives never finish a piece of work, they’re forced to abandon it”
Keep Marketing in Perceptual Beta
You’ve got to be able to evolve it, it may take a different set of people, but

7) Integration is the Ideal
No. Its an exception. Embrace the one-off. Put a little bit of an experiment, build it to rally other ships. You get to fail quickly and get on to the next thing

Her 4 principles:
vision, collaboration, engagement, raw guts

Her view of what’s happening in the digital space, youtube has a commanding market share (37%). The AFI
An overview of projects
‘the interview project’ davidlynch.com http://interviewproject.davidlynch.com/
live music, mass animation: (crowd-sourcing animation)
urban wolf laurent touil-tatour
escape from city 17 the purchase brothers (Machinma and needing to mix it with live action)
An incredible project filmed on a Nokia mobile phone in africa.

“this is the error of no excuses, if you have something, just go out there and do it.”
“we’re in an era of perpectual beta, don’t wait for things to stable out, it’ll never happen again.”

His claim to fame: “he likes to push buttons”

From his blog and his publications and really really good design work and understanding of design.
informationarchitects.jp/the-interface-of-a-cheeseburger/
http://informationarchitects.jp/100e2r/ (The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard)

Web Train Map

Success in IA’s website redesign depends on testing.

10 points for designing news on the internet
The internet wants to get paid on every friday. <>
Twitter is a protocol: << Think protocol, domains are fading >>
missed this one
<< Sell the interface or the service, don’t oversell>> Keep it beautiful.
“Quality is not an act its a habit” << you have to constantly improve your product>>
<> Too many news sites are very boring. Have Fun
<> “you can’t force people to pay for information . we have a word for that, its blackmail.”
<> “Create products and services that scale and can’t be copied”

How Advertising is broken:
1) CPM are lower than ever
2) click-thru rate never took off
3) endless inventories are pushing prices further down with ad networks acting as bottom feeders. (an example, A good car site couldn’t sell 9 euro CPM to renault because an ad network will give him 2.5 euro CPM)
4) Google is sucking up revenues
5) design flaw: content creators v.s advertisors

One of his 3 causes:
1) non-credible audience measurement (Nielson, ComScore, Quantcast) large differences. Advertisers take the best figures. Revenue from
2) the facebook-google sucking effect. Australia leading the world in time spend on facebook. 7h/mth.
Adspend is changing: -2% for online ads, +133% on social networking sites
3) Information Breakdown
3 factors in information breakdown.
- Commodity news (e.g the US plane that went down on the hudson river. twitpic on a nokia phone in 40 minutes. the technology is working better for consumers than newsoutlets. ubiquitous, instantaeous, hard to monetive cos its free.)
- Participatory mashup. (e.g social network sites like facebook, somewhat monetized)
- Quality niche (the tiny niche for quality journalism, which is quickly stolen to commodity news)

THUS: Collapse of ARPU (average revenue per user)
over the last 5 years, each gain of $1 on digital is a loss of $55 on print.
Revenue per web user is usually 16-20 times less than print (washington post as reference case)

ARPUs
NYtimes – $7-10
Drudge report – $3
The Huffington Post – $1.5
TechCrunch 0.85
Facebook 1.5
Skype (paid users) $15 (2-3 times less than mobile carriers)

hybrid approach
–> free/paid
how to reverse the free trend: Target the heaviest users. (segment your audience well)
focus on time spent/user engagement
offer a better user experience (a good search engine, recommendations system [make it sticky!], topic system )
friction free payment system (triple play in the french meaning: web, mobile, ebook)
how much and how many will pay (the notion of average is meaningless, find the willinness to pay, test, learn and adjust.)

Creativity and Adaptivity are the basics.

choose the audience:
Platform perspercive:
Different device for each content