Notes from Ninemsn Digital Marketing Summit: Joe Pollard, Carolyn Everson, Brian Monahan

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I’m at the NineMSN Digital Marketing Summit today, seeing some great presentations, trying out new products like Kinect for Xbox and Windows 7 Mobile, and catching up with a few good folk.

It’s a big production at Sydney’s Luna Park, with a great turnout from the core target community of media buyers, along with some agency and client executives. Below are a few quick notes from some of the sessions of the day.

Also see my notes from Jeffrey Cole’s excellent segment this morning, and on Dan Sheniak of Wieden + Kennedy on the future of the big idea.

Joe Pollard, CEO of Ninemsn, hosted the event, and in an interesting format shared her five top influences on the landscape one by one through the day. These are:

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Jeffrey Cole at Ninemsn Digital Marketing Summit on the future of digital media

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I’m at the NineMSN Digital Marketing Summit today, checking out what NineMSN, the Australian online joint venture between television channel 9 and Microsoft, is telling the marketing industry in Australia, significantly related to Microsoft’s vision. 

The biggest drawcard of the day for me was Jeffrey Cole of USC Annanberg School Center for the Digital Future, who I hadn’t heard speak before. Below are notes I took during his presentation. See also notes from Dan Sheniak of Wieden + Kennedy on the future of the big idea, and on presentations by Joe Pollard, Carolyn Everson, and Brian Monahan.

Jeffrey runs the World Internet Project, which has studied the impact of the internet every year since 2000, beginning in the US and now covers  over 30 countries around the world. He says it should have been conducted on television in the 1940s when that began, but at least we are now able to track the progress of the internet. 

Schedules have almost disappeared: newspapers used to come out once a day, albums of a dozen songs or so would be packaged and released every 18-24 months, and TV programming was selected from a TV guide.

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BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) plus Indonesia are where internet and mobile are exploding

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Doyen of internet analysis Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has provided some great data and insights in her presentation at Web 2.0 today. She has framed it around 10 questions Internet executives should ask themselves (and answer). The full deck is well worth going through – I have put that at the bottom of the post – but I wanted to highlight a couple of her slides on globalization of the internet and mobile.

BRIC_MorganStanley.jpg

Almost half of the people in the world using the internet are in five countries: the US plus the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China). The US is close to full penetration, though there is still a little further to go, and the pace of growth in Brazil is slow despite only being at 39% penetration – this is likely to increase. Where there is undoubtedly extraordinary potential for growth is in China, where internet usage is soaring, and India, where growth hasn’t yet started to properly ramp up. Russia, while not as populous as its neighbors, still has plenty of scope of growth. In short, these five countries will soon account for significantly more than half of the world’s internet population.

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The top tweets from Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010 #foc10

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Things have been crazy for me for a little while now. It’s now two weeks since Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010, and I am only just now able to download some of what happened at the event. The feedback from participants at the Summit has been consistently excellent, and we have been keen to share some of the great insights at the event with the world at large.

We do not have full video of the event, however we do have audio, and we will be sharing that before long, together with some written excerpts from what the speakers said. In the meantime, here is a small selection of some of the more interesting tweets from the event. (Note that since Twitter search only goes up to 10 days ago, I have retrieved the tweets from Topsy, which has an excellent search though I’m not sure that it has captured all of the twitterstream.)

You’ll notice some emerging themes from these tweets – I’ll expand on some of these later.

@bhc3: #foc10 Winsor: Victors & Spoils are developing reputation ratings for creatives based on their crowdsourcing contributions.

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The variety of connection speeds around the world – it matters!

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I’ve written several times about internet bandwidth across countries and why it matters, including some interesting research back in 2007 correlating time spent on PCs with bandwidth and a more recent post on bandwidth and economic growth.

Now Royal Pingdom has compiled a nice list of real connection speeds in countries around the world, using the largest content delivery network, Akamai, as the source, making this probably the most reliable data available. Here is the list below.

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Source: Royal Pingdom

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Gulf News: interview on the path forward for newspapers

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Today’s Media & Marketing section of the Gulf News, the largest English-speaking newspaper in the region, published our Newspaper Extinction Timeline and a brief interview with me, which is below in the print version, and also in text at the bottom of the post. In the interview I emphasise the opportunities on the other side of the challenges for those that can meet them.

The latest figures I have seen for Gulf News show audited circulation up 34% in the 3 years to March 2009. The date for U.A.E. in my timeline is 2030, which reflects issues including the affluence of the country, pronounced wealth polarization, good urban bandwidth, strong urbanisation, and absolute size of the economy.

Interview on Newspaper Extinction Timeline in Gulf News

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The launch of color digital paper moves us further towards the transformation of newspapers

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Our Newspaper Extinction Timeline that we launched last week refers to news-on-dead-tree-paper. One of the fundamental dynamics that is driving this shift is the rise of digital paper that has almost all the qualities of print, as well as the advantages of digital. I wrote about the transformative power of e-paper in 2005, and things are pretty much on track from the snapshot I provided five years ago.

E Ink, which leads the industry, provides the screens for the Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader. The advantages of digital paper over traditional computer screens include extremely low power requirements, only using power when the screen is changed, and passive screens that can be read in any ambient light, just as real paper. Remaining deficiencies include lack of color, and the inability to show high-quality video. Rollable digital paper has existed for some years though still needs further development.

However color digital paper is now in the commercial space with the launch of E Ink’s Color ePaper Triton, as shown in this video (via Akihabara News and Engadget).

E Ink Triton Imaging Film from E Ink Corporation on Vimeo.

The first device announced with this color digital paper is a 10″ digital book reader from Hanvon.

Yes there is certainly a lot further to go with the development of digital paper, however the pace we see this progressing in coming years is a key element in how we believe news consumption will shift from dead trees to digital devices.

Future of Crowdsourcing Summit: initial reflections on Twitter

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Future of Crowdsourcing Summit is just over, and I’m very pleased with how it went and the feedback so far.

The format of back-to-back cross-continental panels over two hours means that the content is very intense, and given the size of topics we take on – the impact of crowdsourcing on work, organizations, media, economies and more – we can only really touch on the key issues, so much goes unsaid. Still, an extraordinary amount of really rich material was covered during the event.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to keep notes while I moderated. Part of the audio of the event was captured, so we hope to get that up in some form. However the primary record of the Summit was from Twitter, with the #foc10 stream very active throughout the event. @LeslieCBarry generated a very nice visual overview of the Twitter stream at the event:

FoC_Twitter.png

The full Twitter stream for #foc10 is here – it’s well worth a read. The event done, I now have to focus on my Future of Global Media keynote in New York later this week, but will reflect more on the Future of Crowdsourcing Summit when I get a chance, hopefully soon. This really is one of the defining issues of our times.

Reactions to the Newspaper Extinction Timeline: brickbats and (a few) bouquets

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It would be fair to say that my Newspaper Extinction Timeline, released on Monday, has stirred up some controversy.

A partial list of media coverage I have seen so far is at the bottom – I am doing a stack of interviews today and tomorrow so I know there is more to come.

Reactions to the timeline has varied from taking the forecasts at face value, to more commonly scepticism at the pace of change I suggest, to a handful describing it as “complete rubbish”.

It’s worth providing a little background to why I have created the timeline. Given that the future is uncertain, I long believed that it was not appropriate to make specific prognostications. I thought (and still do) that scenario planning was the best way to help people understand the scope of uncertainty in the future, and to prepare effectively.

However in more recent years I have found that being more specific helps to focus people’s minds. If they think the forecast may be right, then there is something very concrete that they have to think through and work out how best to respond. If they disagree, then they need to think through why they think the forecast is wrong, helping to crystallize their own thinking.

The esteemed Roy Greenslade of the Guardian has written about the newspaper timeline two days in a row now, first discussing the forecasts and anticipating “inevitable brickbats” for me, then covering some of the responses to my timeline.

I am delighted that Roy picked up on what is exactly the kind of response to my timeline that I was looking for, from Earl Wilkinson of International Newspaper Marketing Association, who wrote a thoughtful piece about the timeline, excerpted here:

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The role of BRIC in the future of global media

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As I mentioned the other day, I am giving the keynote at Ketchum PR’s Global Media Network meeting in New York later this week. One of the themes of my keynote will be the increasing divergence in the structure of media markets around the world, which I will illustrate with my Newspaper Extinction Timeline.

Immediately after my keynote will be a panel on Breaking Through BRIC: Understanding These Influential Global Media Landscapes, which will look at what is happening in the media landscapes of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Media industry experts from Ketchum’s offices in Brazil, Russia, and India will be on the panel, with Nicholas Scibetta, the Global Director of Ketchum’s Global Media Network as moderator. Since Ketchum’s China team is tied up with client work at home, I have been asked to step in to speak about the Chinese media market, since I have had a fair amount of exposure to this over the years.

I will take notes from the panel as I can and share them – this has to be one of the most fascinating topics of today.