The News Limited perspective on tablet media

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I’m at the Woodwing Tour event in Sydney, where Alan Oakley, Group Executive Editor of Digital at News Limited is speaking on the topic of Tablets Change the Game. Below are live notes from Alan’s presentation, showing some interesting perspectives on how News Limited thinks about tablets, underlining in particular their belief in this channel, and how it inexorably drives a converged newsroom.

Alan began by providing a lengthy disclaimer on his technical knowledge, but said he is a ‘huge fan’ of the iPad. He went to cover four issues: Customer, Content, Capability, and Chaos.

Customer. The customer has most of the power. And is prepared to share just about anything. They want everything in whatever way they like.

We don’t enough about iPad users, partly through limitations in the analytics. However three things stand out. 

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Further explanation and answers to 6 questions on the Newspaper Extinction Timeline after one million views

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Well the Newspaper Extinction Timeline we launched a couple of weeks ago has certainly made an impression. Given the 50,000 views we’ve had on my blog alone, plus the extensive uptake by mainstream media around the world (a partial list at the bottom of this post) it’s a pretty safe estimate that it has been seen over one million times so far. Some of our other visuals such as our Web 2.0 Framework and Future of Media Strategic Framework have had well over 500,000 views, but the Newspaper Extinction Timeline has quickly transcended these.

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Click on image to download full framework

The framework has attracted both brickbats and bouquets. However it has been significantly misunderstood, so it’s worth going into some further explanations and clarifications.

Why so specific?

I expect the Newspaper Extinction Timeline to be wrong in the detail. While we think it’s likely to be mainly right I would be amazed if we get much precisely right. That is because the future is inherently unpredictable. We’re not trying to pretend that it isn’t, and that’s why for long-term strategy projects we favor scenario planning as a tool to identify and acknowledge the full scope of uncertainty. However as I noted earlier, precise forecasts can help people to engage with ideas, and hopefully move them to action. The key intentions of the timeline were to bring to life the shift from news-on-paper and the diversity of global media markets.

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Making an Impact in the Digital and Social Media Communications Era: Panel at Ketchum Global Media Network in New York

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I was recently on a panel at Ketchum’s Global Media Network meeting in New York with Chrystia Freeland, Global Editor-at-Large at Reuters News and former US editor of Financial Times, and John Mervin, head of the BBC News bureau in New York, moderated by Nicholas Scibetta, Partner and Global Director of the Global Media Network. The topic was Technology and the Global Media Landscape: Making an Impact in the Digital and Social Media Communications Era.

It was a fantastic discussion which covered a lot of territory. Below are quick unedited snippets I managed to capture during the panel, sitting with my iPad and keyboard on my lap on the stage.

The biggest trend is globalization. IBM illustrates this. From 2003 to today its staff in India has risen from 7,000 to 75,000, whereas its US workforce has fallen by 30,000 to 100,000.

Quoting Ken Lerer of Huffington Post: 25 years ago it took 25 years to build a brand, 10 years ago it took 10 years. Today it takes 1 year to build a brand.

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Dan Sheniak from Wieden + Kennedy on the future of the big idea [with 6 cool videos]

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I spent the day at the Ninemsn Digital Marketing Summit – possibly the first event I’ve been to this year where I wasn’t a speaker. See my separate posts on Jeffrey Cole’s presentation and notes from other presentations at the Summit.

In the afternoon Dan Sheniak, Global Media Director at Wieden + Kennedy, talked about the future of the big idea in a world of fragmented media, liberally using examples from their recent work, notably for Nike and Old Spice. Here are some notes from his presentation together with some of the videos he showed.

We are living in a communications revolution. Complex, evolving, chasing rather than leading, more questions than answers.

We are all feeling the same things.

Tougher to impact consumers in this fragmented world.

It all starts with having a meaningful relationship between a brand and a consumer. For example, Nike’s relationship with athletes, with their mission making athletes better.

Before we had thre of four ways to tell a story. Today, we have a million ways to do it. If your ideas stinks, then is can stink in a million different ways.

It all starts with a big idea.

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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.

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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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