This will be given to attendees at the Future of Media Summit 2008 next week in beautiful glossy print format to take home. If for some reason you are NOT attending the Summit, you’ll have to settle for a digital version with small print-outs of the spreads (unless you happen to have a large-format printer handy…) :-)

This year we’ve taken a slightly different approach, moving away from providing statistics, and focusing on developing three frameworks to help people think about the future of media and engage in constructive conversations at the Summit. We’ve always found we get a fantastic response to our frameworks, so we focused on this as a way to create value with the report.

Future of Media Report 2008 (pdf 1MB)

A quick overview of the report contents:

WELCOME

An introduction to the report. The full text is at the bottom of this post.

MEDIA: A GROWTH MARKET

Contains our prediction that the global media and entertainment market will grow from US$1.7 trillion this year to US$5.7 trillion in 2024 (in 2008 dollars) – released in this report – as well as information on current growth trends in advertising.

7 DRIVING FORCES SHAPING MEDIA

Detailed descriptions and charts on seven massive trends that are changing the media landscape.

See here for the 7 driving forces shaping media framework as a stand-alone chart.

FUTURE OF THE MEDIA LIFECYCLE

A framework examining how the media lifecycle flows from the sea of content, through media engagement, to our personal clouds, and through the precipitation of participation back to the sea. It looks in detail at what will happen in the home and mobile arenas in media participation.

See here for a detailed explanation of the framework and the stand-alone diagram.

FUTURE OF MEDIA: STRATEGY TOOLS

A spread looking in detail at the Flow Economy framework as a tool for developing strategy in media-related industries, as well as snapshots of the role of scenario planning and game theory in media strategy.

This will be released as a stand-alone document shortly.

MEDIA SNIPPETS

Ten provocative pieces of information on the media industry, giving insights into global trends.

The report also includes an overview of some of the work Future Exploration Network does for its clients.

We hope and expect that the report will get similar attention to the last two years’ reports (well over 100,000 downloads and an enormous amount of commentary and attention). We look forward to your thoughts!

FUTURE OF MEDIA REPORT 2008: WELCOME

We are entering the media economy. The traditional boundaries of the media and entertainment industry have become meaningless. Today almost every business and social activity is a form of media. An increasing proportion of our social interactions happen across media channels. Every organization is now a media entity, engaged in creating and disseminating messages among its staff, customers, and partners to achieve business objectives. As the physical economy becomes marginalized and economic value becomes centered on the virtual, media encompasses almost everything.

At the same time, many media organizations are experiencing severe challenges, as content proliferates, audiences change behaviors, advertising revenue erodes, and new competitors emerge. Others are prospering as they tap swiftly growing sectors, leverage amateur content creation, tap the power of social networks, and scale production costs. Meanwhile adjacent industries such as telecom, financial services, mobile phones, consumer electronics, professional services, and even automobile are becoming media participants.

Each year Future Exploration Network runs the Future of Media Summit, linking Silicon Valley and Sydney with video and cross-continental discussions, and launches an accompanying report. The striking impact of the 2006 and 2007 Future of Media Reports means this year’s report has a lot to live up to. We are confident the new frameworks and ideas we are contributing will again provide substantial value.

Over the last years we have helped many media organizations develop and implement effective strategies. We thrive on helping companies to create the future of media. However it is also exciting to take these issues and conversations into a broader sphere. Welcome to the conversation.

Ross Dawson

Chairman

Future Exploration Network

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.

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:

By 2020, all Australian media will be fighting for time and attention in a market open to the world. Cultural borders will not exist.

We will be saturated with choices about what to watch, listen to and experience; it will be like trying to hold back the ocean with a broom.

…

In 2020, there will be so many new choices and voices in media – but how many of them will be Australian? Will we be seeing more our own lives reflected – or less? Who will tell the Australian story?

The ABC will. Within this kind of world, it will be up to the ABC to ensure the Australian accent is not lost, and that distinctive local and the national stories about our people and our lives are still told, still screened, still heard.

….

The Australian media environment in 2020

Confident predictions about the shape of the media in 2020 are difficult, given the pace of technological change, but the following broad trends can be expected:

• Increasing availability of content. Multichannel television and high-speed broadband connectivity provide audiences with exponentially greater choices of media content from providers anywhere in the world, bypassing local content regulation.

• Increased range of media forms and delivery platforms. Audiences expect to access content across an increasing range of devices and contexts.

• Personalised media. Audiences expect increasingly personalised media experiences, including time- and platform-shifting of content consumption.

• Participatory media. A growing proportion of the public is interested in active engagement with media content creation, ranging from voting and forum discussion, through to collaboration in content creation.

• Audience fragmentation. Greater content choice and delivery platforms fragments audiences, but screen-based content delivered free-to-view will continue to aggregate the largest audiences, particularly around major events, sport and high quality entertainment.

• Increasing concentration of media ownership. As the media environment becomes increasingly global and converged, larger media firms seek greater scale.

• Digital production. Low-cost, professional-quality digital production equipment allows cheaper production of content, at the same time as the cost of high-end production increases as major media organisations seek to differentiate their output.

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.

Source: Techcrunch, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Comscore

I haven’t looked at the PwC methodology, but presuming the raw data here is valid and comparable, this creates up some very interesting insights. The first question is why is the UK outspending other countries by so much, and why is Australia in second place?

I’ll think about and research this more, but some early speculation: UK’s advertising industry is probably more influential than in any other country, and has taken a strong lead in bring advertising into the online space. The BBC’s lead in digital content provision has helped not just to bring people online, but also to get them engaged in video and rich media. Australia’s online advertising space is dominated by the major media players more than almost any other developed country, and its advertising sales teams have been effective at both getting clients to advertise online, and to pay premium prices (compared to the many low cost advertising

Another interesting statistic is that Canada spends little more than half the US per capita in online advertising. Possibly US advertisers accessing the Canadian market are not accounted for in these figures. Canada was in fact the first country in the world where broadband overtook dial-up in number of users, in 2003.

Definitely interested in any insights anyone has into these statistics and the disparities between countries!

Major online media players

* The well-publicized challenges of NineMSN (the Australian 50/50 jiont venture between Microsoft and PBL Media) are partly company-specific, and partly a reflection of the difficulties of the incumbent position.

* Australia’s major media companies have done far better than their international peers in dominating online news (and other aspects of the online space including classifieds). Blogs and micro-publishing are now finally taking off, taking market share from the majors, leading to the major online publishers losing readers in a growing market. The long tail is the natural distribution of readers, and it has always been inevitable that the majors would lose their dominant market share.

* In media conglomerates that are experiencing revenue challenges in traditional channels such as TV, newspapers, and magazines, expectations for growth in the online business are often unrealistic, leading to disappointments when budgets are not met.

* PBL Media, which owns 50% of NineMSN, is 75% owned by private equity company CVC Capital Partners. Private equity companies, for reasons including their debt structure, are often biased to short-term over long-term revenue, relative to their listed company peers. This leads to pressures on management and staff, which can make attracting and retaining staff more difficult when other companies are enjoying participating in a rapidly growing market. The 50/50 ownership structure doesn’t make things easier.

Web 2.0 in Australia

* The last year’s proliferation of Web 2.0 applications has seen Australia catching up, and there are now a number of real international successes, but it is not playing beyond its weight.

* Ambitious Australian start-ups often need to seek overseas funding, and many are establishing bases in Silicon Valley.

* Success in online ventures – indeed in all business today – comes from trial and error, and Australian culture currently holds innovation back by seeing failure as bad.

[UPDATE:] The complete list of the Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications is now up.

See Future of Media Summit 2008 website for full details.

Note that there is an early bird offer for the Sydney Summit until June 16, then full price applies.

There’s too much to cover in one blog post, so I’ll be providing more detail on everything that’s happening in coming days and weeks. However some of the key features of the event include:

* Simultaneous events in Silicon Valley and Sydney merged seamlessly by video, online discussion, and cross-continental panels and conversations

* Highly participatory Conference AND Unconference formats at both Sydney and Silicon Valley events

* Discussions on global media strategies, future of journalism, future of privacy, and the future of TV and video

* Peer video discussions by participants across continents (world-first)

* Prediction markets on the future of the media before and during the Summit to tap collective wisdom of event participants and global media leaders

* Future of Media Summit blog for insights and discussion by all speakers and participants

* Detailed content and analysis, including the Future of Media Report 2008

We have a fantastic cast of confirmed speakers and quite a few more to be announced in the coming days.

A few of the confirmed speakers are Mark Scott, Managing Director, ABC; Mark Dorney, CEO, Macquarie Media Group; Loic Le Meur, CEO, Seesmic; Chris Saad, Chair, Dataportability.org; Hugh Martin, General Manager, APN Online; J.D. Lasica, Co-founder and Editorial Director of Ourmedia; Wendy Hogan, Managing Director, CNET Networks Australia, with many other great people on board. Check out the Summit speakers page for more details.

See the Summit agenda for the innovative structure on both sides of the Pacific, with a wide variety of approaches to engaging people in the future of media, including ‘unconference’ formats.

One of the most exciting aspects of the Summit is that we will be implementing prediction markets for the future of media to stimulate thinking about where the industry is heading. More details soon.

Strategic Partners announced so far for the event are Tandberg, which is providing the high-definition video link between the events, and Burson-Marsteller, which is our global PR partner for the Summit.

As every year, we have a Future of Media Summit blog for all speakers and participants – this is now an ongoing blog which includes my own blog posts on the future of media, and shortly will kick off with a wealth of other content, including thoughts from speakers and participants, and updates on the Summit.

And of course, after the success of our Future of Media Report 2006 and Future of Media Report 2007, which have together been downloaded close to 200,000 times, we will launch our Future of Media Report 2008, with all sorts of new and interesting insights into where the industry is heading.

More on all this soon. Hope you can make it!