Launching the Future of Media Report 2007!

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The annual Future of Media Summit held simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco (the Future of Media Summit 2007 is on next week) is as much about providing new content, research, and insights as it is about an event. Last year the Future of Media Report 2006 certainly succeeded in its objective of sparking debate and discussion on the future of media, with over 70,000 downloads, commentary generated in seven languages from over 20 countries, and use of our content in magazines across three continents and in at least one government submission on the future of media.

This year we are following the example of last year, creating an entirely new report that looks at different angles and perspectives on where the media landscape is today and where it is going. The Future of Media Report 2007 is now officially launched – download it here.

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Future of Media Report 2007

Some things you’ll find in the report:

Eight Developments in Media July 06 of June 07. Examples of key developments, including industry transactions and acquisitions, layoffs, new channels, intellectual property, and consorship.

Shifting Global Advertising Channels. Data and commentary on shifts in advertising spending, and a comparison of ownership of the online classifieds segment in the US, UK, and Australia.

Comparison of Fastest Growing Properties and Internet Access. Exclusive original research from Nielsen//NetRatings, comparing uptake of new media properties in the US, UK, and Australia, and different online browsing behaviors across nations.

Key Elements of Media Business Models. Following the extremely popular Future of Media Strategic Framework from last year, we have created four complementary frameworks looking at Scalability, Value of Distribution, Value of Advertising, and Media Personalization. These can be applied to understanding emerging media business models. Each of the frameworks is explained in detail.

Media Industry Network Analysis. An analysis by Laurie Lock Lee of the recent acquisition of Southern Broadcasting Corporation by Macquarie Media Group, and insights on the impact on the Australian media industry landscape.

Media Transactions. A list of media mergers and acquisitions of at least US$1 billion over the last 15 years, putting the massive surge in recent media industry activity into context.

Download the complete Future of Media Report here.

Please feel free to pass on word or comment. As with all our work, the Future of Media Report 2007 is released on a Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to post it, use it and build on it as they please, as long as there is attribution with a link to the Report on this site or to this blog. The framework is intended to be a stimulus to conversation and further thinking, so if you disagree on any aspect, or think you can improve on it, please take what is useful, leave the rest, and create something better!

We’ll be releasing parts of the Future of Media Report separately over the next days and weeks.

Attendees at the Future of Media Summit 2007 in Sydney or San Francisco get a very nicely printed copy of the Report, so get along! Hope to see you there.

The Imperative of Service Delivery Innovation

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Service Delivery Innovation will be a critical theme for professional service firms over the next five years. Technology reconfiguration, the use of global talent, and changing demands from local and global clients all contribute to the necessity of finding new ways to deliver services. While commoditization is a reality that must be addressed in how professional service firms function, being able to bring the best possible resources to create unique solutions for clients means premium pricing will absolutely still be possible.

SAP recently engaged me to write a White Paper and speak in a webcast on Service Delivery Innovation. The webcast is primarily for the US market, on July 12 at 1-2pm Eastern Time. Description as below and contact details for registration on the SAP website.

At this informative Webcast, you’ll discover how a service delivery innovation program can help you improve service quality, boost innovation, increase efficiency organization-wide, establish internationalized systems and processes, and collaborate with services and materials partners. And you’ll get unique perspectives from Ross Dawson, CEO of Advanced Human Technologies and bestselling author of Living Networks.

The White Paper on Service Delivery Innovation is not yet launched. I’ll post details on this blog on how to get the White Paper when it is out.

Participate in the Future of Media Summit blog!

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The Future of Media Summit participant blog was recently launched. This is a forum for speakers, partners, and attendees at the Future of Media Summit 2007 to discuss the issues covered at the Summit before, during, and after the event. When you register for the event you will be given a login and instructions to post on this blog (If you have registered recently you will receive your login shortly. Click here for full details on the blog, including how to get a login if you cannot physically attend either the San Francisco or Sydney events).

Last year we only launched the participant blog for the Future of Media Summit 2006 at the time when the actual event kicked off, so we garnered a range of comments during the event itself, then a very healthy and extremely interesting discussion between the event participants in the month after the event.

Check out the Future of Media Summit blog before, during, and after the event – this is where speakers will be providing pre-event insights and perspectives, participants will be live-blogging, and discussion will be engaged after the event.

Also associated content, including the Future of Media Report 2007 and other research will be posted here.

The most recent post on the blog is a reposting of an extremely interesting blog post from Anne-Marie Roussel on collaborative filtering, a topic I believe will be central to the Future of Media. Anne-Marie, who manages Microsoft’s entertainment portfolio (Zune, Xbox, Video), will be speaking on the San Francisco side of the Future of Media Summit.

Huge rise in social media in Australia: Future of Media research release

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IT Wire has just written an article about the press briefing we did earlier this week on the research being released for the Future of Media Summit, titled Social Networking Shows Explosive Growth in Australia. They’ve largely used our press release in the article, so thought I might as well provide that below, even though it was mainly a teaser for what we covered in the briefing. More details of all of this will be available over the next week or two leading into the Summit.

A brief summary of today’s release of research findings (4 July, 2007):

From Nielsen//NetRatings:

How bandwidth affects media usage: Low Internet bandwidth in Australia is playing a major role in the lower time spent online by Australians, and in how their media consumptions habits differ from other countries. Average home user connection speeds in Australia are 21%-43% of the speeds in comparable developed countries.

The rise of social networking online. In the year to May 2007, growth in use of YouTube by Australians was a massive 239%, resulting in 20.6% of online Australians accessing the site each month. That still leaves us far behind our peers, with 30.2% of Americans and US and 25.5% of British accessing YouTube. Australians are behind in the use of blogging platforms, but close to the lead in usage of Wikipedia.

Read more →

New approaches to user-generated content for broadcast TV

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Great news – Dan Fill, Head of Multiplatform Production for ABC TV, will be speaking at the Future of Media Summit 2007 on the Sydney side, on our opening User Generated Content meets Mainstream Media panel. In this newly created role, Dan oversees the strategic development of multiplatform content creation experiences across all platforms. Prior to joining the ABC, Dan was the Vice President Interactive of Decode Entertainment in Canada, where he developed a number of multiple projects for Console, Interactive Television, Broadband, public broadcasting screens and mobile.

To provide some context for attendees at the Summit, Dan has provided three very interesting examples of what ABC is currently doing in the user generated content space. The intention is that this is just the beginning of a major thrust into this area.

Zimmer Twins:

https://abc.net.au/zimmertwins/

Zimmer Twins is an online tool that allows kids 8-12 to create broadcast quality animated movies online using a simple tool. Since launching about 2 months ago, over 30,000 short movies have been created. A selection of the best of these are being voiced over with professional actors and will air on ABC TV and ABC 2.

Life @ 2:

https://lifeat2.typepad.com/

ABC TV is part of a multi-year series that follows a group of 11 children at various stages of their lives. The television component is a series of documentaries that air every two years. The first LIFE @ 1 aired last year. To keep the interest in the kids and to follow their development, we have a website that continues to update throughout the course of their childhood. Right now we are in year 2. As part of our offering, we allow our audience to also upload their own audio, visual and text blogs about their own Aussie kids and they can track their own development. It’s sort of a competition to be 12th child in the series, but it is also a great ugc blog space.

The Global Warming Swindle:

https://www.abc.net.au/tv/swindle/

This is a controversial documentary produced for Channel Four in the UK, the program refutes Al Gore’s film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ . Because of the nature of the program we anticipate a lot of feedback from the audience. We have set up a video feedback forum that allows users to submit their own thoughts as video responses in addition to the science blogs and user polls and forums.

Emerging media business model frameworks

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Today we ran a press briefing on the Future of Media Summit, featuring a sneak preview of some of the research and content that will be included in the Future of Media Report 2007. Last year the Future of Media Report 2006 attracted excellent interest, with now over 70,000 downloads. This year’s report should be even more interesting than last year’s.

The centerpiece will be a number of frameworks that together are useful for thinking about how effective business models for emerging media. Today I’ll share one of those frameworks, with a couple of others coming over the next days before the release of the final report. We’ll also shortly release some of the findings from Nielsen//NetRatings, who as a research partner of the Future of Media Summit has come up with some fabulous global comparative data.

Our framework below shows the differences in business model required for the three major parts of the overall spectrum of media, from the head to the “long tail”.

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A few initial comments on the framework.

Audience focus. Mass media only accesses broad audiences, whereas further down the tail highly selective niche audiences, by geography or interest, can be garnered.

Advertising models. At different levels of scale, dedicated, aggregated, or combined advertising sales models are appropriate.

Cost of content creation. Cost of content creation can be taken as a given, requiring a certain audience size or revenue, or considered as a variable to match revenue.

The most important take-away of this framework is that there is no right or wrong place to be on the curve, simply that advertising or other revenue models and content creation mechanisms need to be aligned with the audience. As related frameworks to be included in the Report will show, going for niche audiences can attract stronger revenue relative to costs. A “multi-niche” model which is effectively monetized can be more effective than traditional mass media approaches, by allowing sharing overheads and sales efforts, and gaining more value from highly targeted audiences. Scaling costs and overheads and extracting premium revenue is as viable a strategy as increasing audience size.

Update on Future of Media Summit 2007

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The Future of Media Summit 2007 is rapidly approaching. Lots of exciting developments lately on this – it promises to outdo the great success of the inaugural event last year.

In particular, some recently confirmed speakers at both the Sydney and San Francisco sides of the event include:

Anne-Marie Roussel, Director – Strategic and Emerging Business Group, Microsoft. Anne-Marie is responsible for Microsoft’s entertainment portfolio, including Xbox, Zune and video. Anne-Marie has a great blog.

Mitch Ratcliffe, a doyen of the online world, who among other claims to fame co-founded Buzzlogic, and has now moved on to establish Tetriad LLC, which is shortly coming out of stealth mode.

Martin Hoffman, CEO of Loop Mobile, which has a very interesting mobile social network Kink Kommunity with an international presence. Martin used to be CEO of Australian online giant NineMSN.

Hugh Martin, who has recently been appointed General Manager of APN Online Australia, will be the chairman of the Sydney side of the event. Hugh was formerly Editor of News.com.au, and has won a Walkley award for journalistic excellence.

The full list of speakers is here.

Time is running out, so register now for the Sydney of San Francisco events, whichever is more convenient for you!

Lots of associated content coming soon, including the Future of Media Report 2007.

The rapid progress of personalized advertising and the changing role of creative

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Yahoo! has just announced a new product, SmartAds, that enables advertisers to create customized advertisements on-the-fly to be relevant to the individual viewer. As revealed in an article in the New York Times, the advertiser gives the visual and text components of the advertisement to Yahoo, as well as access to its inventory, so the advertisement can promote specific products relevant to the individual that are available from a local outlet, such as a car dealer or branch of a chain store. The targeting is based on Yahoo’s at-times deep information about its audience, which is a critical advantage in these kinds of initiatives. The ads are being launched with three major airlines and several travel aggregators.

While this is being branded “behavioral targeting”, that depends on the richness of the data that Yahoo! has available, and is largely limited to people’s online behaviors. However this initiative illustrates just one element of a powerful and long-term trend towards greater personalization of advertisements. The other day, in discussions with a large national advertising assocation, I talked about how online is changing the role of creatives in agencies. Moving beyond user-created advertising, the next phase will be creatives having to create campaigns that can be customized on-the-fly depending on who is viewing it, when, and it what circumstances. SmartAds is only integrating data into a given advertisement. Certainly what is new here is the breadth of data which is being used, and how this is being pulled together. However personalized advertising has a lot further to go, where the actual advertisement and creative is tweaked for the individual.

Our Future of Media Report 2007 will be released next week, shortly before the Future of Media Summit 2007, held simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco. In the report we will include some frameworks on models of personalized advertising, drivers of the value of advertising, and how these can be applied in creating new media business models. Keep posted!

The IPTV landscape

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SmartInternet CRC, which was one of our partners for our Web 2.0 in Australia event, has recently released a very interesting report titled IPTV: Order, Chaos and Anarchy, examining the state of IPTV. The author is Mark Pesce, noted for being the co-inventor of VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) (which I was a big fan of when it came out – I wrote about it in my first book which came out in 2000) and his immoderate thoughts on the future of media – in other words an extremely credible commentator on an often muddied field.

Mark defines IPTV as “delivery of audio-visual programming via packet-switched networks,” which as he points out, doesn’t in itself help us understand what forms this will take as it matures. Mark picks out three key forces:

* Centralization, driven by commercial issues and incumbents

* “Hyperdistribution” allowing anyone to create and distribute content

* Social activists and entrepreneurs reinventing broadcasting as a peer-to-peer medium

In the report Mark covers issues including Internet bandwidth requirements for the evolution of IPTV, government policies, the role of BitTorrent, IPTV on the Microsoft Xbox 360, Joost, and the role of democracy. Well worth a read.

Prometeus: In the media revolution, experience is the new reality

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David Casaleggio, a media and network consultant based in Milan, let me know about an extremely interesting short video he’s created on the future of media. He has created versions in English, as below, and also subtitled in Japanese and Spanish (recognizing the global nature of media markets).

A few highlights in the second half of the clip:

In 2020 Lawrence Lessig becomes the US Secretary of Justice and declares copyright illegal.

Devices that replicate the senses are available, and reality is replicated in Second Life. Everyone has an Agav (Agent Avatar) that finds information, people and places in virtual worlds.

In 2022 Google launches Prometeus, the Agav standard interface.

In 2027 SecondLife becomes Spirit, where people share their experiences and feelings. Memory selling becomes normal trading.

In 2050 virtual life is the biggest market on the planet and Prometeus finances space missions to find new markets.

In conclusion: “Experience is the new reality”.

A nice thought-starter on where we might be heading…