disruption | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

The myths of dead brands – busting disruption stories

Blockbuster, Nokia and Kodak are cited as victims of digital disruption. Things however are not so straightforward.

“These three brands have one thing in common – they’ve all been destroyed by digital disruption,” says one business commentator in a recent presentation.

He cited three names; Kodak, Nokia and Blockbuster.

It’s a nice, and often repeated meme, which is only really true of Blockbuster which failed to adapt to a changing market and could be a perfect example of a transition effect although some don’t buy the digital disruption reason for the company’s demise.

Giving lie to the idea the company was a victim of Netflix’s rise, a former Blockbuster executive puts the chain’s bankruptcy down to management not understanding the company’s role in the market, and that it was in decline long before the streaming service’s arrival.

A more fundamental problem with the statement is both Nokia and Kodak are still in business too, the latter having come out Chapter 11 financial in late 2013.

Finland’s Nokia is somewhat more complex than Kodak or Blockbuster, having been founded as a paper pulp mill in 1865.

The company became a global brand thanks to being a leader in mobile phones prior to the iPhone disrupting the market but the name faded as the Apple and a new breed of East Asian manufacturers came to dominate the market.

Despite fading as a consumer brand, the company is still a major player in telecommunications – being a major supplier of cellular base stations – along with a range of other technologies.

Both Kodak and Nokia are still very much alive, albeit no longer being recognised by the average consumer.

There are major lessons from both companies for those studying the effects of technological disruption on brands and businesses. Even Blockbuster’s mistakes in the face of a changing and declining market has many lessons.

Citing them as examples of ‘digital extinction’ though is untrue and almost certainly unhelpful in understanding what management can do to respond to new technology or societal shifts.

Television’s argument for relevance

The TV industry warns the fight for advertisers’ dollars is far from over

One of the notable things about the media’s collapsing business model is how television has suffered nowhere near the same downturn in advertising revenues as the other channels.

This has been baffling for many of us pundits so a series of interviews I’m doing with media executives on digital disruption was a good opportunity to discuss why television is holding the line where print has dismally failed.

While the executive has to remain anonymous at the moment, the series is for a private client, their view on why television has so far avoided the advertising abyss is simple – accountability.

We have something, as do my friends at other media companies, that YouTube and Facebook don’t have which is we create quality content. What will differentiate us is we have premium, locally produced content that is one hundred percent brand safe and one hundred percent viewable and, most importantly, is independently measured by third parties.

My view is that advertisers in that environment is a much more powerful experience than advertising in Facebook or YouTube

While many of us may laugh at Australian commercial TV being described as ‘quality’, it does appeal to audiences far bigger than the typical YouTube channel or Facebook Live stream.

The advertising industry’s established systems also, unsurprisingly, work for the television industry in giving the sector accountability that the online services lack in a world where ‘click fraud’ – software tricks to report false web impressions – is rampant.

Even more importantly for the new media giants is the ‘brand safe’ message being pushed by the incumbents. The advertising crisis for Google is real and the established players intend to exploit it.

While the TV executive is pushing their own product, it’s clear the fight for advertising and marketing dollars is far from over.

Telcos and the battle to diversify

Australian telco Telstra’s attempts to diversity are part of the broader industry’s struggle to find new revenue streams.

How Australia’s incumbent telco, Telstra, deals with the industry’s commoditisation is the topic of my interview in Diginomica with the company’s Hong Kong based director of Global Platforms, Jim Fagan.

The need to diversify is pressing upon Telstra with the company’s income down 3.6% in its last financial report with mobile sales, by far their biggest revenue earner, down eight percent.

Across the developed world, telcos are seeing their markets slowing with global smartphones sales largely static, formerly big profit generators like SMS declining and broadband data rates collapsing.

In the US both formerly untouchable telcos are struggling which has seen them attempting to diversify with AT&T buying Time-Warner for $85 billion and Verizon buying Yahoo! despite its problems that saw a $250 million discount after the service’s hacking scandal.

With the pressures on the telco industry, it’s not surprising they are looking at alternative income streams and Telstra’s strategy seems to play more to their traditional strengths than a media play, which Telstra has tried previously and failed.

It could be though that Telstra, like all telcos, could be destined to become a utility service. While that might disappoint executives and shareholders who dream of glamour, excitement and high profits, that might not be a bad thing.

When AirBnB comes for real estate agents

Disruption for the real estate industry has only just begun, but it could be the local newspaper that is the first victim of AirBnB into property sales and management

One of the web’s promises was to eliminate the middleman – the retailer, the broker and the agent. During the heady days of the original dot com boom in the late 1990s many of us, including this writer, thought relationships between producers and consumers would become stronger without intermediaries.

As it turned out, things things didn’t quite work out that way with new middlemen like Uber and Amazon rising while some sectors, like real estate, just saw the industry evolve around new tools, distribution channels and advertising models.

Now it appears AirBnB is coming for the real estate industry with a plan to move into rental management, something that publicly bemuses the incumbents but no doubt privately worries them.

Like Uber, AirBnB is having to look at alternative revenue streams to justify its sky-high stock valuation. Particularly so given the company is looking at an IPO in the next few years.

Rental management is a pretty low margin, high maintenance business so it’s an odd choice for AirBnB and it’s not hard to think the real target is the real estate sales business which far more profitable and in many cases quite doable with algorithms.

No doubt real estate agents will retort with how they add value and how computers couldn’t do their sales job but in truth it’s like many other industries where automation can deliver cheaper and quicker results.

If AirBnB does successfully enter the real estate market the first victim won’t be the agents but the newspaper industry.

With local newspapers still dependent upon real estate display advertisements, particularly in Australia where the print media’s only real revenues come from property advertising, losing out to an app would be the industry’s killer blow.

As with many other things in the digital economy, it may be we underestimated how long it would take some industries to fall. We could be about to see two sectors fall to disruption now.

How the movies beat disruption

With the movie industry’s Academy Awards taking place last night, albeit not without mishaps, it’s worth reflecting on how Hollywood has defended itself against a range of disruptions.

With the movie industry’s Academy Awards taking place last night, albeit not without mishaps, it’s worth reflecting on how Hollywood has defended itself against a range of disruptions over the last century.

From when the first movie was shown by the Lumiere brothers in Paris just after Christmas 1895, cinema has been both a disruptive force and one that’s been subject to its own challenges.

The immediate effect of the new technology was an explosion of new businesses, trades and techniques not dissimilar to the first dot com boom of the early days of the web as the traditional theatre industry was displaced by movie theatres.

As the technology evolved, the movie industry itself was subject to disruption as sound was developed – ending the careers of many silent film stars – followed by colour both of which allowed new techniques and markets to developed.

Then came television and, it would have seemed, the end of the movie industry. Although that didn’t happen and it’s instructive how the industry reacted to the challenge.

In a 2007 paper, academics Barak Orbach and Liran Einav showed the movie industry’s evolution starting just after the introduction of talkies in 1927.

The shift to sound drove the movie industry to its all time heights prior to the Great Depression, however the economic downturn hit the film business hard – something to consider when people talk about the ‘lipstick effect’ -however steady growth returned through the 1930s and until the end of World War II.

Following the war, economic change and the arrival of television were tough for the movie business as attendances fell dramatically until stabilising in the late 1960s. Interestingly, the price of movie tickets went up dramatically shortly before the decline tapered off.

The graph finishes at 2002, at the end of the first internet boom and it’s notable the early days of the web, or the rise of Pay-TV in the 1970s and the Video Cassette Recorder in the 1980s had little effect on the industry’s attendance figures.

Despite those new technologies, the movie industry managed to attract audiences despite the plethora of entertainment options on offer at home.

Much of this was due to technological change with advances in computer generated graphics and recording techniques giving film makers far more creative scope while the roll out of multiplex cinema complexes allowed patrons far greater choice in movies.

Fifteen years later the effects of technology are still telling. In 2002, the average American was buying five movie tickets a year, according to the 2016 Motion Picture Association of America’s annual report this had fallen to 3.8, no doubt partly due to the success of Netflix.

However the film industry has still remained lucrative, partly through developing alternative streams of income like product licensing and international sales – China is by far the US industry’s biggest market and non-North American sales are growing by 21%. At the consumer level, movie houses increasingly make their money from concession sales and add-ons like premium seating.

So the answers to the movie industry’s success in staying profitable in the face of disruptive technologies seems to be in adopting new tech, diversifying income streams and globalising their product – although a bit of legislative protection in extending copyright probably helps.

The lessons though from a century of disruption though are clear, how well the movie industry responds to continuing disruption from the likes of streaming services like Amazon Prime, Netflix and their Chinese equivalents remains to be seen.

When is a Chief Digital Officer needed?

The contrasting attitudes of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane towards the need of a Chief Digital Officer tell us much about how that role fits into an organisation

Last week the City of Sydney and councillor Jess Scully came under fire for an apparent backflip about the need for a Chief Digital Officer.

Scully, who was elected at last year’s council elections, told InnovationAus “the idea of a CDO or chief innovation officer seems a little bit redundant” a day before the organisation advertised for ‘chief, technology and digital services officer’.

To be fair to Scully, the roles being advertised by the City of Sydney were not truly CDOs in the way Brisbane, which has a small business focus, and Melbourne’s city councils have appointed them however it raises the question of whether Scully is right that an organisation doesn’t need a Chief Digital Officer.

As with most questions of this nature, the answer seems to be ‘it depends’. A key part of that discussion is where a CDO sits in an organisation. If they are senior executive or even board role, then it’s likely they are going to come into conflict with other c-suite managers such as the COO and CFO.

What’s worse, such a conflict in the c-suite can mean digital issues can be seen as ‘belonging’ to the CDO and not other key business units, which can only be to the detriment of the organisation.

There’s an argument too that the changes to organisations is so great from the changing economy and emerging technologies that responsibility of understanding and dealing with these changes is the role of the CEO and the board.

Where a CDO can be very effective is being an advocate for change and a trusted adviser to senior management, however even there risks lie as identified by Paul Shetler who found the siloing of agencies within the Australian Public Service meant it was very hard to effect any change in the face of resistance from an organisation’s vested interests.

It seems from the story that the City of Sydney has chosen an advocate and support role for the digital officer position, rather than formalise a CDO position who becomes a figurehead for the organisation’s digital evolution.

For a CDO or any technology advocate to be effective, there has to be support from the board and senior management. A technologist can only drive change if they have a mandate from the top.

Even then in some organisations the culture may be so factionalised that the response to change and drive for digital transformation has to come from the existing powerbrokers and a CDO could be at best a hindrance and even obstruct the process.

So the City of Sydney and Jess Scully aren’t wrong in not having a Chief Digital Officer, and neither are Melbourne and Brisbane for having one, it’s a deliberate decision by the various managements to choose the structure and roles that works best for their organisation. Driving change though always remains the responsibility of the board and the CEO they appoint.

Disruption comes at a high price

The cost of an industry’s disruption is felt by many stakeholders, as one US bank is finding.

Not so long ago, lending for taxi medallions was a safe bet. Now it’s pretty risky, as US lender Capital One revealed in a presentation last week.

Bloomberg reports the lender believes over eighty percent of its taxi loans are at risk of default.

In New York, medallion values have halved while in San Francisco taxi companies are going out of business. As a result Capital One’s loans that looked good a few years ago are now risky.

That problem is global. As I wrote two years ago for The Australian, the Aussie taxi industry has been tipped upside down by Uber and a cast of smaller competitors.

How the taxi companies failed to adapt is interesting. In most cities they were protected by a nest of laws and regulations that were ostensibly to protect passengers and drivers but actually acted to create high barriers that benefited license owners.

In most cities, certainly in New York and Sydney, taxis were dirty and unreliable – drivers were treated poorly and passengers were taken for granted – which made alternatives attractive even before the cheaper UberX and Lyft services arrived.

The protection also made the taxi companies slow to adopt new technologies. There was no reason why Australia’s Cabcharge or San Francisco’s Yellow Cab Company couldn’t have developed a smartphone app to order taxis, track progress and improve business expense reporting – that they didn’t speaks volumes about their inefficiency and complacency.

Being complacent was understandable though as regulators were tame and kept competitors out. Customers had nowhere else to go.

When customers did get the chance, they voted with their wallets and now its the bank accounts of taxi owners and their lenders who are hurting.

That Capital One is feeling the effects of that change is telling – when genuine disruption happens there’s a range of businesses, people and stakeholders affected. We should never underestimate that.

When does a digital strategy matter?

Some businesses are obsessing too much about their digital strategy, a UK based business professor believes.

Should a business spend a lot of time on its digital strategy? A recent article in the Harvard Business Review suggests many businesses, and consultants, are focusing too much on the technology.

Freek Vermeulen, an Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School, describes how strategists may be making a mistake in responding to digital disruption. He argues many industries are learning the wrong lessons from disruptors like Amazon, Uber and Google.

In Vermeulan’s view, the world is not a globalised as we’d like to think and the network effects that work so well in internet based industries don’t necessarily translate to other sectors.

As a consequence, businesses that work on the assumption their industries will be affect the same way as, say, the taxi industry with Uber or newspapers by Google and Facebook may well be making their own strategic mistakes.

Digital is changing the nature of competitive advantage in many businesses – just like major technological developments have done before. However, the change will not be uniform across all industries. Digital technology is affecting and will affect different businesses in different ways. Miss these nuances and your strategic decisions could lead you seriously astray.

That’s certainly true and how technology or a rapidly changing economy affects each industry, or business, is far from uniform.

One of the case studies Vermeulan uses is that of a consulting firm that has largely eschewed digital platforms and focused on its human assets – primarily the skills and connections of its associates and staff.

While that’s undoubtedly true of all consulting businesses to some degree, the use of digital tools and marketing is changing that industry dramatically as well.

Vermeulan is right in that some industries may want to respond more slowly than others to digital or economic changes, however a business that disregards them or reacts too slowly may not know what hit it.

Goodbye to Yahoo!

The demise of Yahoo! shows eyeballs are not enough for a mature online business.

And so Yahoo!’s journey comes to an end with the company being renamed Altba and most of its operating assets given over to Verizon.

With the changes both CEO Marissa Mayer and original co-founder David Filo will leave Altba’s slimmed down board.

Mayer’s failure is a lesson that being an early employee at a successful, fast growth tech startup isn’t a measure of leadership. It may even be a hindrance given companies like Google were inventing new industries during her tenure there which develops different management skills to what a business like Yahoo! needs.

The biggest lesson of Yahoo!’s demise is how even the most powerful online brands isn’t immune from disruption itself, with what was once the internet’s most popular website being eclipsed by Google and Facebook.

Interestingly, as Quartz reports, Yahoo! is still one of the US’s most popular sites and only slightly behind Google and Facebook in unique monthly views.

Despite this, Yahoo! has struggled to grow for 15 years and has struggle to make money although it remains a four billion dollar a year business.

Which shows eyeballs aren’t enough for a mature web business, at some stage it has to show a return to justify its valuations.

Among Yahoo!’s many properties remain some gems like Flickr and it will be interesting to watch what Verizon does with them. Sadly any successes will be tiny compared to what the company once promised.

Automating the back office

Walmart’s streamlining of back office processes is a warning to middle managers everywhere

US retail giant is to slash 7,000 back office jobs reports The Wall Street Journal as the company looks to focus on customer service. The process that’s seeing those jobs lost are part of a bigger shift in management.

The automation of office jobs isn’t new – functions like accounts payable have been steadily computerised since the early days of computers – but now we’re seeing an acceleration of white collar and middle management roles.

As increasingly sophisticated automation and artificial intelligence increasingly affects middle management roles, we can expect further changes to organisations’ management structures.

The opportunity to streamline and flatten management will be something company boards will have to focus on if they want to keep their enterprises competitive and responsive in rapidly changes markets.

For managers, there’s a lot more disruption to come for their roles. Those stuck in 1980s or 90s ways of doing things are very much at risk.

Digital businesses’ lost tribe of managers

Business leaders are struggling to understand their digital strategies, Forrester reports.

Are senior executives lost when discussing their company’s digital strategy?

At the Huawei Connect conference this morning in Shanghai, Nigel Fenwick, a Vice President and principle analyst of Forrester Consulting, released his company’s study titled Business and Technology Leadership in a Post Digital Era.

Forrester surveyed 212 IT and business managers across selected markets in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific for the survey and found only four percent of business leaders were confident they understood their companies’ digital strategy.

Even more worryingly less than ten percent of business IT leaders claimed they understood their organisation’s digital strategies.

The reason for this, Fenwick believes, is the pace of change in the technology sector as managers struggle to put digital innovations into the context of the business.

Exacerbating this lack of understanding is how companies are ‘bolting on’ digital strategies to their existing business models rather than thinking about how their industries, products and markets are being transformed, Fenwick says.

There’s little new or surprising in Forrester’s report and the small and selective data set doesn’t inspire confidence in the survey’s results. It is however a good reminder of the challenges facing today’s boards and executives in understanding the consequences of a rapidly changing economy on their businesses.