Launch of the Future of Media Lifecycle framework

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[UPDATE:] The complete Future of Media Report 2008 is now available.

Another Future of Media Summit, another framework! We are today proudly launching the Future of the Media Lifecycle framework. This is the central framework of our Future of Media Report 2008. (See also the Future of Media Strategic Framework from 2006 and Key Elements of Media Business Models from 2007).

Over the next few days two additional frameworks as well as the full Future of Media Report 2008 will be released – check back soon!

Media Lifecycle FrameworkMedia_Lifecyle_Framework.pdf

While I’d like to think that the Future of Media Lifecycle framework is self-evident, it probably helps to explain it a bit :-), so here goes:

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Newspapers promote QR codes, linking print and outdoor media to online, and building tighter social-mainstream media symbiosis

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QR code for this blog

The Sydney Morning Herald has recently had big features in its Saturday edition on QR codes, the 2-dimensional bar codes that act as visual URLs for mobile phones, taking them automatically to the linked online content. QR codes are massive in Japan, appearing in magazines, billboards, business cards, shop windows, T-shirts, and more, by dint of NTT DoCoMo’s promotion of the codes. One Japanese magazine consists entirely of free things you can download with QR codes. Now Australia’s Telstra is trying to do the same thing in Australia, shipping all of its NextG phones with the necessary software, and making it freely available to anyone else.

It is very interesting to see a newspaper so actively promote a mobile technology. The Sydney Morning Herald is introduced daily QR codes on page 2 from this Monday, providing a link to the five most popular stories in the paper and other content. This means that you can engage with the media cycle even while reading a print newspaper. I wrote over two years ago about how each story on the online version of the Washington Post was showing links to blog posts about that article. Now this kind of immediate reflection of social media views is available in the print world.

So far in the US there have just been tests of QR codes in San Francisco, providing links to Citysearch reviews of local restaurants and merchants.

While there are a number of competing standards for codes that will link mobiles to online content, QR codes are substantially in the lead, and look set to become an international standard. There is a good chance these could become commonplace globally within the next 1-2 years. What is most interesting is the innovative ways they are used, particularly within mainstream media (which can include television).

The symbiosis of media: Journalists find stories on Twitter

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This is cool. Renai LeMay, a tech journalist for the Australian Financial Review (just now returning to CNET Australia as News Editor) attended our Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications event the other week. While he was there, he sent a message on Twitter asking if any companies had a good story to tell. Richard Slatter of Plugger, one of the companies showcased at the event, twittered Renai back. Renai found it a worthy story, and it appeared in the Australian Financial Review, the major business daily in the country, this morning as Plug in to keep tabs on directors’ board links. (See Renai’s telling of the story on his blog.)

This harks back to what I was talking about a couple of years ago on the ‘symbiosis of traditional and social media’, as illustrated in the Future of Media Strategic Framework we released then (as below). While many have compared social media to parasites on mainstream media by feeding on it, increasingly mainstream media finds its sources and stories in social media. Things happen and are seen in social media before they are discovered and disseminated more broadly in traditional media. Each has their role, and they feed off each other in a highly complementary symbiosis.

This will be a theme on the future of journalism panel at the Future of Media Summit 2008.

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The future of privacy and targeted advertising

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One of the key themes at our Future of Media Summit 2008 (Silicon Valley July 14 simultaneous with Sydney July 15) will be the future of privacy and targeted advertising. The panel run across the locations will include top executives from Traffic Marketplace, Dataportability.org, Acxiom, and Electronic Frontier Foundation (see event site for details).

This topic is at the heart of the future of media. In a world awash with advertising, shown to a fragmented and increasingly cynical audience keen to avoid it, the value (and thus the price) of advertising is falling. Media proprietors are finding it harder to pay for content production, and in many cases media properties are getting smaller.

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Source: eMarketer

What could entirely change the equation is targeted advertising, in which people are shown advertisements that are relevant to their interests, profile, and forthcoming purchases. Often the best way to understand people is to study their behaviors, thus the current emphasis on ‘behavioral targeting’. This would make the advertising far more valuable to advertisers, media companies would make more money, and media consumers should be happy because they get relevant and interesting advertisements.

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Free webinar this Thursday on SmartCompany: Six Driving Forces Changing Media

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SmartCompany.com.au is one of the most interesting online media ventures in Australia. Established in February 2007 by Amanda Gome, formerly a journalist and editor at BRW, it is targeted at entrepreneurs and owners of small to medium size businesses.

While the site initially had both free and subscription content, within the first six months they decided to make the site entirely free. The site reaches a highly targeted audience, so attracts good advertisers, and has excellent content and resources.

As part of SmartCompany’s media partner role in the Future of Media Summit 2008, SmartCompany is running a free webinar this Thursday where I will be presenting on Six Driving Forces Changing Media, in conversation with Amanda Gome – click through to register.

The framework I present in the webinar will be in the Future of Media Report 2008 (following the extremely popular Future of Media Report 2006 and Future of Media Report 2007), so this will in effect be a sneak preview for the webinar audience. I’ll put it up in summary form on this blog shortly after.

Other special content being developed for the Future of Media Report 2008 include a Future of Media Participation framework (I think this might turn out be our most popular framework yet) and a Future of Media: Strategy Tools spread. Coming soon!

Mark Pesce wows the Personal Democracy Forum: see Mark at Future of Media Summit 2008

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Mark Pesce is one of my favorite media visionaries. Back in the late 1990s I was a big fan of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), which was co-invented by Mark. I proposed using it as a tool for concept representation, among other applications. Mark has since focused largely on the media space, doing some great work. I wrote about a report on IPTV by Mark last year, and his insights at a conference on public affairs we both spoke at a month or two ago.

Mark will be speaking at our forthcoming Future of Media Summit 2008 in a couple of weeks on the Future of TV and Video panel, which will be run between Silicon Valley and Sydney. I’m particularly looking forward to this panel, which will uncover how existing broadcast and cable TV is intersecting TV and video on the Internet to form an entirely new landscape.

Mark spoke earlier this week at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York. A review of the event in The Huffington Post described Mark as “the best speaker at PDF”. A brief excerpt:

In the morning the digital ethnologist Mark Pesce gave a bracing corrective to crowd wisdom. Speaking from a sociological and philosophical perspective, Pesce talked about the hyper connectivity that the internet provides. We are being asked to believe this will help political campaigns, he said. We are asked to believe things and politics will be different. “Bullshit.” Under an iconic image of Barack Obama, Pesce’s PowerPoint presentation showed YES WE CAN HAS. In other words, the fact that Barack Obama now has over a million friends on Facebook (mentioned frequently at PDF) may not be such a happy portent.

What do you think will happen in media? Participate (and win!) in the Future of Media Prediction Markets!

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We have just launched the Future of Media Predictions Markets, run in conjunction with the Future of Media Summit 2008. These will tap the collective wisdom of participants at the Summit in the US and Australia, as well as other media leaders globally. Anyone can participate in the prediction markets.

The predictions will be used during the Summit itself to help generate more pointed discussions and specific views, and to garner international attention and coverage for the Summit.

For those who haven’t come across prediction markets before, they mimic financial markets to aggregate a large group’s opinions on what will happen (see Wikipedia definition and Prediction Markets Cluster). Specific questions are posed on what will happen, and participants place bets on the outcome by buying and selling in the markets.

Our partner for the Future of Media Prediction Markets is Inkling Markets, one of a handful of commercial providers of prediction markets. Their clients creating public markets include CNN to predict the 2008 presidential elections, while many companies such as Cisco, Chrysler, O’Reilly, Procter & Gamble, and Wells Fargo are using their prediction markets for internal applications such as product development and sales forecasting.

In the Future of Media Prediction Markets we have just launched five markets:

* Which IPTV channel will generate the most revenue in 2009?

* Will Yahoo! exist as an independent company at the end of 2008?

* When will the New York Times stop printing on paper?

* What will global digital advertising revenue be in 2010?

* Will The Bulletin be relaunched in Australia by 30 June, 2009?

If you have opinions on any of these topics, go to the Future of Media Prediction Markets and make your opinion heard!

Register on the site and you will be given $5,000 to place your bets on the markets. Either buy or sell whatever predictions you think are mis-priced. As the markets move with further participation (and maybe changing circumstances), you will make or lose money. As the markets evolve you can trade actively by buying and selling positions.

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Let us know if you have suggestions for prediction market topics other than these initial ones. We’ll be expanding the range of questions as more participants join.

See you in there – may the best media futures trader win!

Mark Scott, Managing Director of ABC, at the Future of Media Summit: thoughts on the future of media

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The Future of Media Summit 2008 is designed to have a far broader reach and impact than for just those who attend. Part of the way we do this is to get contributions from the speakers beforehand on the Future of Media blog and websites, setting the scene for deeper discussions on the day, and providing context for those who can’t make the Summit.

The CEO Panel on predictions for the future of media will be held at 1:20 – 2:00pm in Sydney, just before the Unconference session, and will be the final session at 8:20 – 9:00pm in Silicon Valley, over drinks. Panelists for this session include Mark Scott, Managing Director of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Mark’s pre-event contribution is two papers:

* A recent op-ed on the role of the ABC in 2020 that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.

* The ABC in the digital age – Towards 2020, about the ABC’s shift to digital media.

The ABC shares with a few other organizations such as the BBC and CBC the special issues of public broadcasters in a rapidly shifting world. The papers describe the evolving role of publicly funded media in a world awash with information, and the steps the ABC will take to fulfill that role, including the new digital channels it will implement.

Below are a few excerpts from the papers that are particularly worth highlighting in the lead-up to the Future of Media Summit:

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UK and Australia lead the world in online advertising per capita

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Techcrunch has just published a very interesting analysis of valuations of social networks. Here is its methodology:

Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report ) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132.

I have charted the figures of interactive advertising spend per Internet user from this data below.

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Source: Techcrunch, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Comscore

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What marketing executives think about your privacy

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An article in Forbes titled What Privacy Policy? quotes data from a study by the Ponemon Institute, summarized below.

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What it shows is distinctly fairly different attitudes and perception from privacy and security executives at large organizations, compared to those of marketing executives.

At the Future of Media Summit 2008 held in mid-July in Silicon Valley and Sydney we’ll be looking at the future of privacy and targeted advertising. Broad behavioral advertising requires either dominant players that have the breadth of relationships that they can serve relevant advertising to many viewers wherever they go on the Internet, or sharing of detailed information and profiles between market participants.

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