media | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Three screens, four screens, infinite screens

The three screens idea of media consumption that was cutting edge five years ago now seems rather quaint.

This morning I had the opportunity to interview designer of the Fitbit, Gadi Amit, ahead of his visit to Sydney next month.

I’ll have the full interview written up in the next couple of days, but Gadi made an interesting point about not being in a ‘four screen world’ anymore, but in one where there’s infinite screens ranging from wearable glasses and watches through to smartphones and intelligent signage.

A few years ago the concept of the ‘third screen’ came into use when we started talking about the smartphone supplementing the PC and the TV, it quickly morphed into four screens as the tablet computer appeared.

Now the five year old idea of limiting ourselves to three screens seems quaint when there doesn’t seem to be any limits in the way we can view information.

The end of the three screen theory is an interesting illustration on how quickly technology is moving, it also shows how rapidly business is changing.

Peak Google and the limits of internet advertising

The warning that online advertising revenues may have hit their limits has huge consequences for the internet industry.

Last week, Google’s share price slumped on news of poorer than expected revenue results and website Asymco has a detailed examination of how the company’s growth might have reached its limits.

Asymco’s warning to the online advertising industry is clear with the warning that revenues might start to decline in 2016.

That online advertising may have reached its peak means even an even more uncertain future for businesses rely on those revenues, and times have been tough for those sites in recent years as returns have fallen.

At the same time online ad spending seems to be peaking, print advertising revenues in the United States dropped a further 8% last year with income at now at 1982 levels. It seems publishers can’t win either way.

So its now wonder that online services like Google and Facebook are looking to payment systems and other ways to generate revenue, for online publishers things are even more problematic.

What is clear is the advertising driven revenue methods that work so well for the broadcast industry aren’t working for online publishers and quite possibly other internet based businesses as well.

The online industries need a David Sarnoff to figure out a model that works.

“He looks like a geek”

The media scrum around alleged Bitcoin founder Dorian Nakamoto is based on some flimsy thinking

The unseemly media scrum around alleged Bitcoin inventor Dorian Nakamoto has not been the press’ finest hour.

What’s more worrying though is a Business Insider interview with Sharon Sargent a ‘forensics analyst’ who was part of the Newsweek investigative team.

A systems engineer by training with experience in computing security, military protocol analysis, and artificial intelligence, Sergeant said everything she found converged on an individual with a background apparently similar to hers — and who ended up sharing a name with Bitcoin’s creator.

“I said, ‘I think I know this guy — he wears a pocket protector, he has a slide rule, he comes from that genre,’ which was very different from other characterizations,” she told BI by phone Friday.

He wears a pocket protector and uses a slide rule? Hell yeah, not only did he create Bitcoin but he’s probably a witch as well.

One hopes Newsweek have found the right man.

Picture courtesy of forwardcom through sxc.hu

Buzzfeed and the cat problem

Can Buzzfeed become social media’s New York Times?

Last week, the viral news site Buzzfeed launched its Australian operation with a visit from Scott Lamb, the company’s Vice President for International operations.

As the “media company for the social age” in Scott’s words, Buzzfeed has led the way in ‘viral media’.

The viral media model revolves around audience reach, and revenue, being measured on the amount of sharing on social media services like Facebook and Twitter rather than how many people view or visit their websites.

Buzzfeed’s Cat problem

For Buzzfeed attracting this traffic mean cats – people love sharing pictures of cats on the web.

While Scott likes cats as much as any of his readers, he describes the industry as facing a ‘cat problem’.

“The cat problem is that we all love cats, but they’re also a barrier to taking the internet seriously,” Scott said. “It’s true for Buzzfeed and it’s true for a lot of other websites as well.”

Cats may be both a problem and a boon for Buzzfeed but there’s more to the business with Scott describing to the Sydney audience what he saw as the four myths of online media;

Long form writing doesn’t work on the web
Paying attention to clicks leads to lowest common denominator stories
Social is merely a box you need to check
Creating sharing content is easy and trivial

There’s no doubt that item four is hard, although how much harder re-purposing stuff found on the web is compared to creating original content is open to question.

Point three is a given for Buzzfeed given its business model and there would be few media sites that weren’t concerned about how often their stories aren’t shared on social media.

Being taken seriously though weighs heavily on Buzzfeed so it was the two first points that Scott emphasised in his Sydney presentation.

Long form journalism

Scott was proud to show off BuzzRead stories like Why I Bought A House In Detroit For $500 or The Most Dangerous Sentence in US History to show the site’s credibility as a reputable, considered venue for long form journalism, just like the New York Times.

The problem for Buzzfeed’s aspirations though is the US Presidential story received 1,400 tweets and just over four thousand Facebook shares, the Detroit story gained five thousand tweets and 29,000 shares.

On the other hand, a quiz on what city should you live in received 578,000 shares and 26,000 tweets. For the record, I got London which is something I’m ambivalent about but certainly beats getting Murmansk.

That meme proved so good that Buzz Feed repeated it a week later with a what sort of job you should have quiz.

You can’t blame them for exploiting a meme, particularly one that gets half a million shares.

Scott though didn’t see the traffic mismatch between the worthy and the tabloid as being a problem; “we know we can’t equate an 8,000 world article to a quiz,” Scott said. “In terms of our business model our revenue isn’t tied to page views.”

“There is incentive for us to get as many a views for an 8,000 word article as possible.”

Riding the Facebook tiger

Regardless of the viability of 8,000 words articles, the real problem for Buzzfeed in its aspirations to become a virally shared New York Times is the site’s reliance on Facebook.

Relying on Facebook is path to disappointment, the service has shown it’s quite willing to burn partners, including advertisers, small businesses and users in the interests of its own corporate interests.

For Buzzfeed, the assumption the media site’s corporate interests will always align with Facebook’s is brave assumption.

Another problem for Buzzfeed is content, the bulk of the site’s material and what drives most sharing are posts that gather pictures from the web – primarily Facebook.

Using other people’s content lies at the core of viral sharing sites and most of Buzzfeed’s competitors shamelessly steal material from other websites, particularly Buzzfeed, in the aim to drive shares from gullible users.

Buzzfeed itself isn’t immune from that risk, with a photographer suing the site for $3.6 million over a photograph used in one of its lists.

Risks in the model

On the scale of risks to Buzzfeed not being seen as an viral version of the New York Times is quite low; the real risks are of being overtaken by a savvier competitor, falling victim to a Facebook change of policy, or simply turning out to be a transition effect in an industry that’s undergoing massive and rapid change.

The aspiration of Buzzfeed becoming a New York Times is probably irrelevant anyway, most Facebook users don’t care about long form journalism – they like cats.

In an era where the public wants animal pictures and celebrity scandals – who needs to be the New York Times?

Perhaps the cat problem isn’t a problem, but the future for media channels like Buzzfeed.

Launching Networked Globe

Network Globe aims to be one of the main sources for information on the Internet of Things

Out of the last six months of travelling, a new project has been born. Networked Globe is intended as a clearing house for news and opinion on the Internet of Things, Machine to Machine and all the technologies that surround these industries.

The intention is to have a daily update on industry news along with two or three feature pieces a week to start with. If gets legs, and an income, then we’ll be looking at extending the coverage.

Finding things to cover certainly won’t be a problem, equipment vendors and telecommunications companies are pouring into the space and security issues are already becoming a major concern, as this story on the vulnerabilities of home automation illustrate.

Hopefully this blog won’t be neglected as the focus shifts to Networked Globe, although there’ll probably be more posts about the usual rollercoaster ride about setting up a business.

Falling out of love with Google Glass

How the pundits turned against Google glass is a lesson in tech media management

Media hype is normal in the tech industry, it’s common for a new product to receive swooning coverage in its early days but when the press falls out of love with a device, it can be a harsh breakup.

Google Glass is suffering one of those harsh breakups with with writers and bloggers who were formerly gushing over the product now being publicly unimpressed with the product.

First out the blocks was Wired’s Matt Honan who described his year as a ‘glasshole’.

Honan is enthusiastic about the future of wearable devices but doesn’t see Google Glass as being ready for prime time.

Which is to say, I’m really, really excited about where Glass is going. I’m less excited about where it is.

Adding to the anti Google vibe was tech maven Robert Scoble who after his year of using the device decided it was too expensive and clumsy.

Scoble’s point is the current generation of wearable tech is too clunky and user unfriendly to solve the problems it hopes to address.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber — who wasn’t one of those gushing over Google Glass — points out this is the exactly why Windows XP tablets were such a failure in the marketplace.

Gruber also points out another similarity between Google Glass and Microsoft’s attempts at a tablet computer. Each company’s staff were reluctant to use them.

When your own employees don’t use or support your product, the problem is with the product, not the employees.

The eating your own dog food mantra cuts both ways; if your own staff find your products unattractive, then you can’t expect customers to warm to them.

In some ways it’s ironic that Google are receiving press scorn as the company plays the tech media like a violin with privileged insiders getting early access to products create an aura of exclusivity.

Glass was a classic example of this with a small group of tech journalists getting access to the product, unfortunately those insiders are turning out to be less than impressed.

Even if it turns out the Google Glass is a failure, it will have been one of the company’s brave moon shots and no doubt what they’ve learned in usablity and mobile data will be very useful to other parts of the business.

It’s only technology

We’re doing ourselves a disservice when dismissing new technology stories

“We treated Bitcoin as a tech story but now it’s become a much more serious economic story,” said a radio show compere earlier today when discussing the digital currency.

One of the great frustrations of any technologist is the pigeon holing of tech stories – the real news is somewhere else while tech and science stories are treated as oddities, usually falling into a ‘mad professor’, ‘the internet ate my granny’ or ‘look at this cool gadget’ type pieces.

Defining the world we live in

In reality, technology defines the world in which we live. It’s tech that means you have running water in the morning, food in the supermarket and the electricity or gas to cook it with.

Many of us work in jobs that were unknown a hundred years ago and even in long established roles like farming technology has changed the workplace unrecognisably.

Even if you’re a blacksmith, coach carriage driver or papyrus paper maker untouched by the last century’s developments, all of those roles came about because of earlier advances in technology.

The modern hubris

Right now we seem to be falling for the hubris that we are exceptional – the first generation ever to have our lives changed by technology.

If technological change is the measure of a great generation then that title belongs to our great grandparents.

Those born at the beginning of last century in what we now call the developed world saw the rollout of mains electricity, telephones, the motor car, penicillin and the end of childhood mortality.

For those born in the 1890s who survived childhood, then two world wars, the Spanish Flu outbreak and the Great Depression, many lived to see a man walk on the moon. Something beyond imagination at the time of their birth.

It’s something we need to keep in perspective when we talk about today’s technological advances.

Which brings us back to ‘it’s only a tech story’ – it may well be that technology and science are discounted today because we now take the complex systems that underpin our comfortable first world lifestyles for granted.

In which case we should be paying more attention to those tech stories, as they are showing where future prosperity will come from.

As seen on TV – where are today’s trusted sources

As seen on TV was a great way to sell in the 1960s, is it still valid fifty years later?

In a local shopping centre over the weekend this business was selling massage tables using the fact they’d been mentioned on TV to enhance their reputation.

Citing an appearance on TV in the hope of improving your credibility is very much a mid-20th Century way of doing things. In the 1960s or 70s an enthusiastic mention from a TV host was the way to get the punters beating a path to your door.

Today, things aren’t quite the same. TV was on a decline as a trusted medium – despite the successes of talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey – long before the internet arrived. The web bought social media and now buyers can consult their friends and peers before deciding to buy.

What was interesting about the sign was there was no indication of a social media presence or web page and that in itself showed how old school this business’ advertising was.

For the business owner, it would have been hard work getting a mention on TV. Space isn’t cheap to buy and getting a mention on a current affairs show requires either the services of an expensive PR agency or many hours of bugging producers and not a small degree of luck.

Then again, maybe a complete lack of online engagement didn’t matter. The shopping centre I was in would have an average customer age well over forty and, most of the market the business was aiming probably comes from the sizeable retirement village across the road.

How this business ignores modern communication channels is instructive about the generational change in business and society, particularly on how different age groups find their trusted sources.

Delighting the customer – the new business normal

Peter Coffee, Salesforce Vice President for Strategic Research discusses the new business normal where mobile services, collaboration, community and understanding your data are essential tasks for every manager.

Salesforce’s Executive Vice President of Strategic Reserach, Peter Coffee joined the Decoding The New Economy channel at last week’s Dreamforce conference to discuss the new normal — delighting the customer.

Coffee’s role at Salesforce is to help the company’s potential clients understand the new normals of business life. “It’s a lot of listening,” he says.

In describing the new normal, Coffee is in tune with Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff in seeing mobile services as being one of the key parts of how business will look in the near future.

“The fundamental statement is your mobile device is no longer an accessory,” says Coffee. “It’s the first thing you reach for in the morning and it’s the last thing you touch at night.”

“Fundamentally people are mobile centric so we need to rethink our operations.”

Continuing the social journey

It’s not just mobile services that are changing the way we do, social media continues to be companies’ weak points in Coffee’s opinion.

“There’s research that’s come out of places like MIT that shows traditional print and broadcast media are still valuable for creating awareness of your brand but the final step of turning someone from knowing who you are into deciding to do business with you is now made today only when a trusted network confirms it.”

“People don’t make that final step of buying from you until they’ve consulted their trusted advisors.”

“Another fundamental change that’s happened is that the connectivity of the customer is such that if you have a customer that’s unhappy with you for even five or ten minutes there’s a tweet or a Facebook post or a LinkedIn update just begging to leak out and damage your brand,” says Coffee.

“The closer you can get to instantaneous resolution to the issue, the better.”

Internet of machines

With the internet of machines, the ability to resolve customers’ problems instantaneously becomes more more achievable in Coffee’s opinion.

“Connecting devices is an extraordinary thing,” says Coffee. “It takes things that we used to think we understood and turns them inside out.”

“If you are working with connected products you can identify behaviours across the entire population of those productslong before they become gross enough to bother the customer.”

“You can proactively reach out to a customer and say ‘you probably haven’t noticed anything but we’d like to come around and do a little calibration on your device any time in the next three days at your convenience.'”

“Wow! That’s not service, that’s customer care. That’s positive brand equity creation.”

Delighting the customers

All of these mobile, social and internet of things technologies will give businesses the tools to delight their customers and Coffee sees that as the great challenge in the new business normal.

While many businesses will meet the challenges presented by mobile customers and their connected machines Coffee warns those who don’t are in for a painful time.

“If you do not have delighted customers you have no market.” States Coffee, “the way that you delight customers is by making sure every interaction with you leaves them happier than they were before.”

“Traditional silos of sales, service, support and marketing must be dissolved into one new entity which is proactive customer connection.”

“Companies that neglect to adopt it will discover they have customers who are sensitive to nothing but price,” warns Coffee.

Paul travelled to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.

Crumbling cookies

Internet cookies are dying, what will replace them?

On the last ABC radio spot we looked at how our data is being tracked, in the following 702 Sydney program with Linda Mottram we looked at the role of Internet cookies and online privacy.

Cookies – tiny text files that store visitors’ details on websites – have long been the mainstay of online commerce as they track the behaviour of web surfers.

For media companies, Cookies have become a key way of identifying and understanding their readers making these web tracking tools an essential part of an already revenue challenged online news model.

Cookies also present security and privacy risks as, like all Big Data, the information held within them can be cross-referenced with other sources to create a picture of and often identify an internet users.

These online data crumbs often follow us around the web as advertising platforms and other services, particularly social media sites, monitor our behaviour and the European Union’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications is the first step by regulators to crack down on the use of cookies.

Similar moves are afoot in the US as regulators start to formulate rules around the use of Cookies, in an Australian context, the National Privacy Principles apply however they are of limited protection as most cookies are not considered to be ‘identifiable data’, the same get out used by US government agencies to monitor citizens’ communications.

Generally these rules promise to be so cumbersome for online services Google is looking at getting rid of cookies altogether .

Ditching cookies gives Google a great deal of power with its existing ways of tracking users and ties into Eric Scmidt’s stated aim of making the company’s Google Plus service an identity service that verifies we are who we say we are online.

Whether Google does succeed in becoming the web’s definitive identity service remains to be seen, we are though in a time where the questions of what is acceptable in tracking our online behaviour are being examined.

For the media companies and advertising, putting the control of online analytics in the hands of one or two companies may also add another level of middle man in a market where margins are already thin if not non-existent.

It may well be that we look back on the time when we were worried about internet cookies tracking us as being a more innocent time.

Fighting the content wars

Developing original, unique content that stands out from the crowd will be a challenge for many marketers in coming years.

I’m moderating keynote Q and A’s at the ADMA Global Forum today. One clear message from the international speakers’ presentations is how original, unique content is one the key planks of a modern media strategy.

“Content will be king” says McKinsey’s Joshua Goff, a thought echoed by Weiden and Kennedy’s Husani Oakley.

During one of the breakout sessions, the AFL’s Sam Walch explained the sporting code’s strategy of using content to retain supporters and expand the sport.

The fascinating thing about this content strategy is how organisations are having to deal with gathering unique, compelling material.

For many businesses, getting customers to contribute material makes sense. Josh Goff showed how some businesses, even in the B2B space, were using user generated content to get a buzz happening around their sites.

Others are commissioning their own work with the AFL employing nearly fifty journalists to provide content.

What’s particularly interesting about the AFL is how this threatens broadcasters and the print media business models which increasingly rely on ‘events’ like sports. This is something I might explore on the blog over the next few days.

In the afternoon ADMA session Michael Bayle, formerly of ESPN, described how much of that content will be accessed on mobile devices. Interestingly ESPN has the greater share of mobile visitors for US Sunday football despite not owning the broadcast rights. This is both an opportunity and challenge for rights holders, sporting organisations and media disruptors.

The key take away from this morning’s ADMA sessions though is that we are going to be drowning in content marketing over the next couple of years. The challenge for those businesses engaging in those wars is to make themselves heard over the noise.

Never going to let you go – the failing businesses clinging desperately to baby boomers

As younger people turn away from old business models, those comfortable with the status quo cling desperately to their established but shrinking markets

Probably the driving factor of the consumerist society’s development was the baby boomers’ growing up.

Through the last fifty years everything from Coca-Cola to baby products and hair loss treatments has been aimed at the cohort born between 1945 and 65.

For many businesses and marketers this group has been so profitable it’s been hard to let them go.

The US motor industry is a good example of this with Bloomberg reporting the over 55 age groups are dominating domestic car sales as younger folk turn away from car ownership.

A similar thing is happening in Australia as TV executives decide that competing with the internet for millennials is too difficult so sticking with the over 50s market is safer.

“We’d go out of business if we stayed with our traditional demographic of 16-39.” Channel Ten CEO Hamish McLennan told the Mumbrella360 conference in Sydney earlier this year.

The problem for both the US motor manufacturers and Australian TV stations is the trends are against them.

For TV stations trying to compete against the internet, the older age groups are following their kids across to the web at the same time that they are beginning to save for retirement.

That need to save is also working against the car dealers, while many boomers fawn over new cars a large number simply aren’t going to be able to afford these indulgences. It’s not a good prospect for the motor industry.

In the meantime, younger people are turning away from the motor car, Bloomberg quotes University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute s researcher Michael Sivak who penned a report on generational shifts in the US motor industry.

“I have a son who lives in San Francisco; when I get a new car and I tell him what I got, he couldn’t care less,” Sivak said. “To him, it’s a means of getting from A to B. He goes into great lengths about taking a BART or bus, even though it takes him an hour longer. He does have a car, but uses it very rarely.”

The movement away from the motor car indicates something much more profound about western society — if the baby boomer represented the age of consumerism, the entire Twentieth Century was defined by the automobile.

For politicians and town planners wedded to a 1950s view of economic development, it may be they are making terrible and expensive mistakes in pushing freeway and other road projects.

While aging baby boomers purr over their expensive cars, the forces of history may be passing them by. Those businesses pandering to those older groups might just want to consider whether they want to be left behind as the economy, and the kids, move on.

It’s comfortable to cling onto what has worked for the last fifty years, but sometimes the lowest risk lies in letting go.