Friday, September 25, 2009

Distribution

Once upon a time, distribution used to be a controlled, expensive and very restricted activity. Suddenly it is unrestricted and a perception has developed that there is an increasing demand for triviality. With a hope that people will buy into this on their mobiles. Buying a series of 5 minute dramas seems like a producers dream. Cheap plentiful content with very little need for sustained writing, can be written and donated by contributors and the random hit and low cost guaranteeing a return.

Is not fantasy the suspension of disbelief? As everyone in the universe attempts to attract a following on the momentum of a digital tidal wave of media access, it is a mistake to commodify availability to the exclusion of a cultural progress.

It is inevitable that overreach into false entertainment will eventually suffer competition of actual genius. The television formats were false regimes, but suitably gripping content was required to sustain decor for advertising.

It is not that people want or need insubstantial content. It is that the medium is not the same medium. Will the advent of rapid broadband world wide change our perception of privacy?

Friday, September 18, 2009

Content vs Social

Is there a war on between content and the social connectiveness illusion we call social networking? My experience tells me that there is a friction between reporting facts and creating a fictional society in relation to news media. Fictional society? Magazines are well familiar with "fictional society" making up stories that keep up hooked usually about the king and queen of the celebrity planet, where-ever that is.

Frankly, socialising with the kinds of people who contribute to the newspaper is not my idea of fun. The idea of doing it behind a non-de-plume, to me, is plain dishonest.

Creating a fiction or a character to interact with the likes of Twitter lends itself to a business application in the same way as being a Facebook artist or a myspace artist, but which is best? All are. But should an artist be spending all their time creating social networks or creating art?

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

What newspapers should be doing

The Wire

Twenty years ago, worked with a system that linked all the newspapers in New Zealand over a modem network. This was a "packet switch network" - what we worked with before TCP/IP changed how most networking works and created the Internet.

There is a continual friction in the evolution of computer software between central control and remote intelligence. Networking wise. You either have lots of intelligent nodes with their own databases interacting, or you have a design where the bulk of the data is held at one or more central locations.

Both have been shoved aside for the client-server model that works for data exchange by building protocols at the correct level of a stack.

But have we lost something in translation? More important for the media industry, is there an answer in news presentation that is a) not expensive and b) instantly more interesting than what passes today as online news.

What distinguishes news from plain old blogging? Factuality.

News is all information, no muddled thinking about it.

Blogging is all muddled thinking about it, no real information.

So the way to distinguish media "you should read" from media "you should ignore" the media giants have formed a sort of closed information cabal where they share propriety information, or IP if you like. Much of what you read in your local newspaper is similar to what is published in a local newspaper half way across the world.

Facts are just facts. Writing is the art however that a newspaper is selling. The best writing should evolve with a news brand instead in award winning news sites we get snips. Like radio news. Skims over the surface.

"The Web is not a medium for long articles because people's attention span is short..." is just marketing bollocks. The web is not a visual medium. It is hardly just for the consumption of idiots. It is ultimately the greatest economic and academic asset we have.

To evaluate business requirements based on human behaviour is the wrong business model and then charging for what drags the most eyes is really how you run a sports channel.

The news is a differentiated media. It employs entertainment (mainly sports) to gather the larger audience. No longer really reading news, we are instead led by an unexpressed desire for a staged entertainment experience while listening to short pithy headline delivery with surface analysis or interviews.

The news media adopts a media player clip approach to video ("as that is what works on the web, its all eyeballs"). Nothing wrong with that. Like the Apple I, it is a stage of media evolution.

On the other side there is youtube.com and thousands of similar user posted video sites. News does not appear to work on these sites.

Mashing the two together to provide public news bulletins will be done wrong hundreds of times badly before an accurate model for public contributions selectively rewards great content capture. Will this mean a vast network of ipod nano carrying part time journalists? Only when something happens while the reporter is there. But too much shaky low grade video, and it loses its edge. Becomes just more blogware.

It is hardly a business model.

But mashing together the idea that contributors are a competing community who have a market with news rooms is a business model.

To enforce copyright to save the "music industry" is deemed impossible as sharing undermines the economic model. The musicians are turning the economics of the industry upside down by being so cheaply visible on the web.

The real need for record companies is to finance large scale tours, large scale distribution/promotion and provide audio upgrades. Technology will make MP3 an obsolete and hated format. Compressing all the art out of music is just criminal. It is like selling thinned down paint. Bad copies of music are the worst disservice to the artist.

Apple have saved the computer audio industry. The FREE iTunes experience means being able to hear the music. Erase all MP3s and use complete music formats!

Delivering news over the web as a business model is not the same as music. Not at all. Both have made evolutionary blunders in the transition.

"Free" is only best if we did not have an economy. iTunes replaced the old music economy with a greater one. Music is an archival medium. If it can be continually improved, over the net, there is still a rational for music companies who respect or buy artist copyrights.

News delivery is a hot instant medium with many archival background accumulations which can be repackaged and sold as for example Time Life books.

The opportunity for the news media is not just becoming a clearing house of public opinion. It is creating the full framework of an accurate, reliable reportage and matching democratic discussions to political trends with a history machine that is far more focused on detail than the television can be and delivering engaging video on the spot within seconds of real time events.

For the sake of the business model the net should spell an end for syndication. The networks of 20 years ago are no longer appropriate. They now produce bland undifferentiated news stories.

Different titles, different content. The iTunes of journalism will be invented and absorb those who believe the way ahead is to charge for content.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The Future of Advertising

" The websites we visit, the online links we click, the search queries we conduct, the products we put in virtual shopping carts, the personal details we reveal on social networking pages - all of this can give companies insight into what internet ads we might be interested in seeing."

"While Congress has waded into internet privacy issues before, this measure could break new ground, as the first major attempt to regulate a nascent but fast-growing industry that represents the future of advertising."

Privacy is going to be regulated in the US and that may well affect the internet as we know it. If the likes of doubleclick and other media click measurement is able to intrude into our "privacy" to then work out what to sell to us, we have the philosohphers stone instead of attraction.

There is no magic formula to human interest. It is an instinct. The advertisers (the old school advertising agencies and campaign magicians who can, with a single image, influence a percentage of behaviour) do not crave intimate details of your preferences in order to sell. It is the wrong equation.

It is as though the internet has made everyone forget what drives people. It is not what we did yesterday, our normal habits - that territory is the burnt out old fields we must plough to return value. And when you are marketing "intimately" (selling into the areas already marked "SOLD") and to everyone, are you not risking customers who may not attach themselves to the brand, so much as be made less interested as the more exposure to the common, the more interest is going to wane.

And what is "private" anyway? Which bill board you read as you whisk past them on a train is your own business, but which newspaper you read on line or distinct patterns of habit, how often you play an online game for example, or do things that privacy is there to protect. For example, you become a little curious about a subject and use the internet to dip your toes. Do you want a salesperson on the phone inviting you buy what you are just a little curious about? Of course you do not.

Advertising is attraction.

That is the basic law, and if you forget it it is easy to remember, A = A

Your advertising is bait to attract interest. Interest is instinctive. You show interest in things that correlate to enhanced survival and part of our survival algorithm is being surprised by change.

The secret is to BE NEW. Not to dredge up all those things we are getting bored with. The advertising industry can either FOLLOW what we do, or INNOVATE and SURPRISE.

It is all very well for everyone in the world to hammer on your door with a better dish washing liquid. But that is not the future.

It is new ideas. New ways to wear them. New things to excite and attract interest.