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A web app in 10k? Surely not!
When @stueccles first encouraged me to enter the 10k apart competition (to create a web app in under 10 kilobytes) I wondered what was really possible in only 10k. After a little tinkering I realised quite a lot.
Introducing the 10k Feed Board
Drawing inspiration from the recently released Flipboard app on the iPad I set about building an app that allowed you to browse Flickr photos and Twitter searches. You can configure a set of panels with different search criteria, choosing from either a Flickr search, Flickr set or a Twitter search. The app then makes use of Yahoo’s YQL service to retrieve the data and populate the panels for you to navigate around. It takes advantage of the new localStorage feature of HTML 5 compliant browsers to persist your queries, meaning that you can come back time and again without losing your search terms. The drawback here, of course, is that you need a modern browser for it to work – Sorry all you IE users – looks like you’ll have to upgrade to a proper browser (IE9 Dev Preview,Firefox or a WebKit browser)!
Take a look at the 10k Feed Board here, your votes are appreciated! ;)
Beyond the 10k limit
With the competition’s 10 kilobyte restrictions I had to limit the content types to Flickr photos and Twitter searches but I will be taking the concept further to include RSS and Atom feed content – it will then become a nice new way to consume all your feed content.
I will also shortly be blogging about the technical aspects of the app – localStorage; how to consume YQL data; and the associated problems of dealing with multiple feed types.
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Customer Development: a few tools and resources (or how to become an excellent stalker)
Following on from Justin’s post last week on the empty hamburger dilemma, I’ve been doing some research into what tools and resources are out there on customer development, and who’s using them. Unsurprisingly, it’s the usual suspects who have been putting this methodology into practice: start ups and the people advising them. As Justin pointed out, it doesn’t look like this approach has been adopted by agency land yet, primarily because their source of dollar is the client not the customer, which tends to derail their priorities.
But how can we take some of the lessons that have been learned and implemented by the start up community and apply them to the agency worldview? Here’s a few thoughts pulled together from what other people are already doing.
1. How to find your users
The first step in the process of customer development is finding them. Cindy Alvarez, Product Manager at KISS Metrics, has some useful thoughts on this over on her blog. Adopt a diverse approach and and don’t be snooty about the methods you use (Facebook ads anyone?). It certainly makes sense to set up a Google Alert and trawl through Twitter for mentions of keywords relating to your problem/solution. If you are working for a pre-established brand, as we often are at Made By Many, she suggests putting out a call on Craigslist and equivalents to find customers of the brand and their competitors. As you do more research you’ll start to map where it is that your users hang out and what channels they are comfortable communicating through – Twitter, forums, comments on blogs, Facebook, plain old email. Basically you are a glorified stalker. You’re also a bit like a bee gathering snippets of user nectar from each point you touch down on, which then feeds back into your hypotheses about your problem/solution. Read full post
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What Customers Want
(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Obvious)
(also know as ‘The empty hamburger dilemma’)
Most new products and services fail. This is a depressing reality to swallow, however I am amazed by how few people ask why this happens. Or worse still all the people who have an in-built assumption and acceptance that most new things should fail. This shouldn’t be the case.
Here is a sad graph showing total product failures.
Why all this failure? Read full post
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5 things I’m thinking about right now
A somewhat intentionally late entry to the question of “5 things you’re thinking about right now“:
1. The Opposite of Foursquare
Foursquare is huge, check-ins are big, but I wouldn’t play that game or use that service. Whilst the idea is sound and people will still use the service, I find the concept of what the network looks like to FourSquare so much more interesting. When I check-in on Foursquare, what does that look like? And how does the map of London, for example, change during the day as people check in and drop offline.
Given that a lot of people are not going to use Foursquare because each contact with the network compromises their privacy and reveals more and more information about them, I think there’s a hard limit to how successful the idea can be. However, the opposite of foursquare, focussing on the shape of the network rather than the individuals connecting to it, removes that limit. Each time I check in, rather than just appending my +1 to a long list of identical entries, I disrupt the fabric of the network and make it better. I think a lot about the way “massively multiplayer” games are anything but, and flatter to deceive on the promise of joining a virtual, alternate world. Flipping the idea of Foursquare and looking at the network as a constantly evolving organism has a lot of potential for fun, games and stories, and that’s what I’m thinking about right now.
2. The Half Life of Hardware
Specifically, of course, games hardware. Consoles. We’re at a point where the Xbox 360, Wii, DS and PS3 have been on sale for around five years and there are no signs of a subsequent generation of hardware being released. Clearly, launching an expensive piece of hardware at the current time would be foolish, not least because it would fragment the games market and potentially ruin the huge community that has built up around the online services offered by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. However, all the major consoles must be close to the end of their expected lifetimes, and given that there are no clear plans for new hardware to come out, it’s interesting to see how the manufacturers are responding as their consoles go beyond the red line, as it were.
As computer processors got faster and faster, CPU manufacturers were involved in a Gigahertz race until they went about as fast as they could before it became a fruitless task. At which point they branched out into multiple cores, faster RAM, smarter graphics and anything else that differentiated themselves from one another. Nintendo, with the Wii console, took the first step in pulling back from the race to better graphics fidelity and branched out with a different input mechanism (the Wii-mote), as well as creating a hugely successful, truly mainstream gaming device in the shaped of the DS, and were rewarded massively for doing so.
Now, as Sony and Microsoft look to emulate the success of the Wiimote controller with their own Kinect and Move products, the DS has fragmented their product line with the DS, DSi, DSi XL and 3DS. Either they’re one step ahead of the game again, or they’re about to introduce massive confusion into their product line.
3. Practical, Physical Things
At a recent Made By Many get-together almost everyone expressed an interest in making physical, connected things. Fun devices like the s2h watch have influenced our thinking, and from reading the other 5 things lists, we’re not alone in that.
However, once you break down what the connected things you want to build should do, it’s hard not to build an iPhone/Android app instead. A smartphone houses so many sensors these days, and comes with distribution and payment platforms as part of the infrastructure, that it would be foolish to build something that attempts to compete on just one of those feature sets. But then there are games like Rock Band, Guitar Hero and my personal favourite, Buzz!, a game which ships with a big, red, game-show buzzer.
Physical, connected devices are still exciting, and there’s reason to keep thinking about building something with them, but it might just end up as a big, obvious button that connects to something more interesting, a MacGuffin for play.
4. Casual, Responsible Gambling
A personal interest, and specifically in Europe. My guess is that the gambling companies are looking at rise of sharing, social applications on the internet and are trying to figure out how to tap into that. It’s not about building the Twitter/Facebook/Foursquare of betting, but the niche networks of friends that exist across those services, and the competitiveness that arises when you make things personal.
Moreover, with gambling banned in the US, it’s a great opportunity for startups in Europe, such as Smarkets, to iterate their ideas and build themselves into a significant force. When, and not if, the US legalises gambling, the same European start-ups will be in a great position to take advantage of a huge market with a well-tested gambling platform.
5. The Return to the Internet as a Delivery Mechanism
Rather than the Internet as the destination, that is. I think we’re reaching a point where the need to be “online, all the time” has faded. Perhaps it’s the novelty, but I’d like to think that we’re going to exhaust the desire to be as up-to-date on everything as possible, to be consistently ahead of the news and to know everything your friends are doing as soon as they make it public.
From here on in though, maybe we’ll all be connected whilst doing something else. It’s Reverse Continuous Partial Attention – the opposite of being online first and foremost, and doing everything else in the moments in-between. It would be nice to think that in future we’ll be more involved in doing things in the real world, and pervasively connecting to the internet only to update ourselves and our friends. The real-time internet got plenty of attention, but asynchronous just works better and fits ourlives. I think this connects with 1 too, imagine everbody offline and doing things but checking in and disrupting things.
Bonus ball, Health Apps
I’m not really thinking about this, but someone smarter than I mentioned that the demise of Woolworths will hit the health and fitness DVD market hard. And that makes sense – it’s a seasonal business with most of the DVDs sold in January as people plan to get fit again, but with no Woolworths on every high street to (glumly) sell them, where are people going to buy them?
I’d love to know if all of the C-list celebrities who tend to film these DVDs have been told not to put on their lycra leggings this year. Maybe all fitness filming sessions have been canned for the time being. I suspect not, though, because I imagine we’ll see a huge influx of health and fitness apps on the iPhone and iPad to compete with the already large number of fitness ‘games’ available on the Wii come the New Year.
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Service principles for the post-modern news organisation
Service principles illustrate the way a service creates, captures and sustains value for customers and shareholders.They’re a useful benchmark in making decisions, (eg. ‘‘Should we retain a proprietary or open service platform?’. ‘Does this process deliver value to the customer or simply make life easier for the business?’).This is a heavily adapted set of service principles we created for a client, a specialist financial newspaper behind a paywall (hence the first two principles) which we think might work for any news organisation making the treacherous journey from industrial to post-modern media. We’ve called this organisation The Newspaper.The list must have lots of holes – are there any big ones? – and is much too long – how should we shorten it? - and shifts between strategic and tactical issues – does that matter?1. Shape the business model to sustain print subscriptions, but not at the cost of standing stillOK, this is very specific to subscription services, and reflects the reality that print circulation and advertising still account for the vast majority of revenue. How do you make the transition to new revenue streams without killing the old ones. Digital revenues tend to cannibalise print revenues, yet you need to demonstrate the explicit value of digital. Ask Rupert. There’s more than one answer though: charging a stupidly small amount of money for print for a short period of time is one way, or a stupidly high amount for premium online services is another. However the latter only works in a niche market with exclusive value. Here’s an example of the no brainer ‘get print too’ deal (not our client).2. Launch against yourself (in a strictly controlled way)The Newspaper brand strengthens our ability to create new revenue streams, but The Newspaper legacy restricts our scope for action. We should act to limit these restrictions by thinking creatively, changing culture and ‘failing fast’ in a Laboratory environment (cf.); this will enable The Newspaper to confront digital native start-ups at lower risk to our existing business. Here’s another example of what we mean, from the same source:3. Establish online and mobile as integral components of The Newspaper’s valued services, not just an add-on.This principle has implications for everything we do and especially the way we organise and reward individuals and teams. The value of online content and commercial revenues should be re-evaluated and the status of achieving online financial and editorial success raised. (In other words, don’t save the story for the front page, get it online; and stop the ad team giving away free online ads to sell juicy full page print display)4. Make regular assessments of what lies inside or outside the paywallThings move quickly on the internet and what’s exclusive to The Newspaper one day may not be the next. When charging for content or services, ask: Is it essential for its intended audience? Is it exclusively or first available at The Newspaper? Is it conveniently delivered; does it enable the audience to create value themselves? If none of these apply then the offer has become commodified – put it outside the paywall.5. The Newspaper online is a service as well as a product, and this means treating readers as partners, not consumersService-not-product means that the brand, the services, the organisation (especially journalists and editors) come into more direct and frequent contact with customers and should act as a solicitous and considerate host; it means that The Newspaper is involved in more parts of the value chain between a customer’s desires and their fulfillment, including interactions in which the customer is a participant, not a consumer. This has an impact on design, culture and on resources, especially editorial culture and resources. Here’s an example of services (in green) around different content types (in pink) and their valuable bi-produts (in blue). Remember, the value is in the service around the content, not the content itself.6. Users may create the most valued content for each other.So give them the tools to make it. And add services to your content that enable your customers to increase its value – as above.7. Give customers a voice; their voice has value.Services that enable customers to express opinion (vote, rate, comment, share) create trend data and customer data with value in its own right that can be played back to the audience and/or sold on to premium subscribers, advertisers or corporate customers. And likewise, we no longer have a monopoly of privileged sources or information: our readers may no more than we do, better than we do.8. Services that enable users to personalize and store data encourage loyaltyThe audience has invested time to obtain utility, as well as generating useful customer information with value to advertisers. They won’t want to waste that effort.9. Creating valued niche products is vital to online successThe Newspaper as one big package doesn’t translate online. The Newspaper online need not be one thing for all customers. Digital enables products and services to be packaged and sold and deconstructed with infinite variety, according to need, to niche markets; The Newspaper can and should vary the scope, scale and voice of the proposition for different audiences within the boundaries of quality set by the brand.10. Foster synergies between channels and recognise channel differencesThe Newspaper is the brand champion; the web has infinite depth and breadth; mobile offers ubiquity and convenience. Each product niche can exploit multiple channels. Each channel should point to the others (eg. a permalink for every newspaper page).11. The Newspaper is not of itself merely ‘a newspaper’ – The Newspaper is a brand.The brand offers information and products for the financial professional, the business manager, the private investor and the corporation. The brand can be extended into any area where its qualities – such as inside knowledge, professional network, good with money – have value12. Protect and build the value of The Newspaper brandThere’s a tried and tested set of commercial and professional standards in newspapers – everyone knew the rules (around the separation of advertising and editorial, for example) that preserve the integrity of the editorial product. New principles are needed, and especially around commercial recommendations. Readers don’t mind being sold too, but they’ll buy because they trust you, so it better be the best. Don’t enter into partnerships that destroy the value of the brand.13. Print web first It’s not sustainable to behave as though the newspaper is the one and only place that important news can be published.14. We have unlimited space online, use itThis means opening up the filing cabinet, replacing the news pyramid with the news iceberg – it goes deep down into the waters. Use the web to publish or link to everything you have: background, archive, source material, images – become a curator of themes.15. Connect to the rest of the web openlyThe Newspaper’s content and tools will live as effectively outside its URL as inside. If we make our content available widely, paid or unpaid, we raise our profile and increase our reach internationally and domestically; we also undercut clippings agencies and other copiers. Remember, the value is in the service around the content, not the content itself. So, use rss, third party feeds, The Newspaper API(s) and widgets to give people access to The Newspaper outside The Newspaper.com. And if in doubt, give it out.Our competition isn’t just other newspapersWe’re up against every source of news over every channel and many news organisations act very differently to traditional newspapers, and so we will too, which leads us to…17. Treat competitors as partnersThis is how the rest of the web works. What makes us so different that we don’t have to give, share and collaborate?Service principles encapsulate the way a service creates, captures and sustains value for customers and shareholders.
They’re a useful benchmark in making decisions in unfamiliar territory, (eg. ‘‘Should we retain a proprietary or open service platform?’. ‘Does this process deliver value to the customer or simply make life easier for the business?’, ‘What limit should we place on advertising that interrupts the customer experience?).
This is a remade set of service principles we originally created for a client, a specialist financial newspaper behind a paywall (hence the first and second in the list, which we shouldn’t get too hung up about) and which we’ve since adapted quite heavily to work for a generic organisation we’ve called The Newspaper embarking on the treacherous journey from industrial to post-modern media.
See what you think. The list must have lots of holes – are there any big ones? – and it’s much too long at an unmemorable 15! – how should we shorten it? - and it shifts between strategic and tactical issues – does that matter? How should we reorder them to reflect importance? It’s an unformed lump of clay, published on the principle ‘just get it out there’. Please weigh in, feel free. Here goes:
1. Shape the business model to sustain print subscriptions and build new revenue sources
This is very specific to paid subscription services where there’s a print legacy, and it’s hard to do; it reflects the reality that print circulation matters hugely because it determines the value of the biggest source of advertising revenue. How do you make the transition to new revenue streams without killing the old ones? Digital revenues tend to cannibalise print revenues, yet you might need to demonstrate the explicit value of digital. Ask Rupert. There’s more than one answer as to how to do it: charging a stupidly small amount of money for print for a short period of time is one way, or a stupidly high amount for premium online services is another. . Here’s an example of the no brainer ‘get print too’ deal (not our client).
2. Make regular assessments of what should be inside or outside the paywall
Paid-for news services only work in a niche market with exclusive value. Things move quickly on the internet and what’s exclusive to The Newspaper one day may not be the next. When charging for content or services, ask: Is it essential for its intended audience? Is it exclusively or first available at The Newspaper? Is it more conveniently delivered; does it enable the audience to create value themselves? If none of these apply then the offer has become commodified – put it outside the paywall.
3. Launch against yourself (in a controlled way)
The Newspaper brand strengthens our ability to create new revenue streams, but The Newspaper legacy restricts our scope for action. We should act to limit these restrictions by thinking creatively, changing culture and ‘failing fast’ in a Laboratory environment; this will enable The Newspaper to confront digital native start-ups at lower risk to our existing business.
4. Establish online and mobile as integral components of The Newspaper’s valued services, not just an add-on.
This principle has implications for everything we do and especially the way we organise and reward individuals and teams. The value of online content and commercial revenues should be re-evaluated and the status of achieving online financial and editorial success raised. (In other words, don’t save the story for the front page, get it online; and stop the ad team giving away free online ads to sell juicy full page print display)
5. The Newspaper online is a service as well as a product, and this means treating readers as partners, not consumers
Service-not-product means that the brand, the services, the organisation (especially journalists and editors) come into more direct and frequent contact with customers and they should act as solicitous and considerate hosts; it means that The Newspaper is involved in more parts of the value chain between a customer’s desires and their fulfillment, including interactions in which the customer is a participant, not a consumer. This has an impact on design, culture and on resources, especially the editorial culture that says “put the copy on the spike and move on”. Here’s an example of services (in green) around different content types (in pink) and their valuable bi-produts (in blue). Remember, value lies in the service around the content, not just the content itself.
6. Users may create the most valued content for each other.
So give them the tools to make it. And add services to our content that enable our customers to increase its value – as above.
7. Give customers a voice; their voice has value.
Services that enable customers to express opinion (vote, rate, comment, share) create trend data and customer data with value in its own right that can be played back to the audience and/or sold on to premium subscribers, advertisers or corporate customers. And likewise, we no longer have a monopoly of privileged sources or information: our readers may know more than we do or better than we do, let’s use their knowledge.
8. Services that enable users to personalize and store data encourage loyalty
The audience has invested time to obtain utility, as well as generating useful customer information with value to advertisers. They won’t want to waste that effort.
9. Creating valued niche products is vital to online success
The Newspaper as one big package doesn’t translate online. The Newspaper online need not and should not be one thing for all customers. Digital enables products and services to be packaged and sold and deconstructed with infinite variety, according to need, to niche markets; The Newspaper can and should vary the scope, scale and voice of the proposition for different audiences within the boundaries of quality set by the brand. We might want to create a portfolio of service brands to reflect this.
10. Foster synergies between channels and recognise channel differences
The print edition is the brand champion; the web has infinite depth and breadth; mobile offers ubiquity and convenience. So each product niche can exploit multiple channels and each channel can point to the others (eg. a permalink for every newspaper page).
11. The Newspaper is not of itself merely ‘a newspaper’ – The Newspaper is a brand and that’s where its value lies.
We’ve built a reputation that represents a point of view and a set of values over the past [insert number] years. Under our imprint and around our content we offer all sorts of products and services that fit with our point of view and values. The brand can be extended into any area where its qualities – such as, for example, inside knowledge, professional network, good with money, political nouse – have value. So funnily enough it’s not content that’s king, it’s the brand.
12. Protect and build the value of The Newspaper brand
There’s a tried and tested set of commercial and professional standards in newspapers. Everyone knows the rules (around the separation of advertising and editorial, for example) that preserved the integrity of the old editorial product. In digital, where fact and opinion and product and purchase start to merge dangerously into each other, new principles are needed and especially around commercial recommendations. Readers don’t mind being sold too if they’ve chosen to express an interest, and they’ll buy because they trust us so long as what we sell fits with how they perceive us at our best. In short, we mustn’t enter into partnerships that make short term commercial sense but destroy the value of our reputation (it’s amazing how often companies do this, especially where individuals are paid commissions for short term gain).
13. Print web first
It’s not sustainable to behave as though the newspaper is the one and only place where important news can be published.
14. We have unlimited space online, use it
This means opening up the filing cabinet and putting it online, replacing the news pyramid with the news iceberg that goes deep down into the waters. Use the web to publish or link to everything we have: background, archive, source material, images – become a curator of stories and themes.
15. Connect to the rest of the web openly
The Newspaper’s content and tools will live as effectively outside its URL as inside. If we make our content available widely, paid or unpaid, we raise our profile and increase our reach internationally and domestically; we also undercut clippings agencies and other copier/reusers. Remember, the value is in the service around the content, not just the content itself. So, use rss, third party feeds, The Newspaper API(s) and widgets to give people access to The Newspaper, paid for or free, as we decide, outside The Newspaper.com. If in doubt, we give it out, because we treat people who share and re-use our content as friends not threats.
That’s enough principles [Ed.]
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Backing The Bucket (Follow The Twitter List)
Bud Caddell’s collaborative Kickstarter project has three days to go but his backers have more than doubled the initial target amount $5k. I just upped my contribution to $100 so that I can fully participate in the adventure.
$100 gets you full Editorial Board Membership, a voice in the evolution of the book and access to full interview transcripts. Bud also promises to “set up a place where we can chat together”. A very interesting micro-community of digital thinkers has already gathered around the Kickstarter page, and so I thought it would be useful to create a Twitter List and feed from the backers – it’s called ‘Backing The Bucket’ (sorry for those few who had followed it when I was calling it #imbackingbud – I thought the new name would work better and be more consistent with Bud’s blog posts at What Consumes Me).
You can follow the list at: http://twitter.com/malbonster/backingthebucket
The exercise of creating the list prompted a few thoughts:
- The greater proportion of the people backing Bud have joined Kickstarter specifically to do so
- Although Kickstarter allows users to add a biog, avatar and linkage (including Twitter names) to their profiles most people have not – although it wasn’t that hard tracking them down using Twitter’s Find People search: most of them are *tweeting hard*
- The way in which a community is naturally forming around Bud’s ’cause’ demonstrates the power of Kickstarter projects to create really meaningful – action-oriented – social connections. However, this is currently under-exploited by Kickstarter who could try harder to persuade people to complete their profiles (think about the way LinkedIn nags you for years to do this). I also think that a button that allows you to follow all the backers of a Kickstarter project who are on Twitter would be an excellent and presumably very simple enhancement to make – in other words, auto-creating a Twitter list for each project (where users are sharing their Twitter details).
- There is a massive collective desire to ‘do something’ and not just talk about it – Bud’s project is a lightning rod for this networked inclination.
I apologise if you are a backer and have not made it into the list at this stage – that’s because a few people (around 20) proved too difficult to track down. Please send me your details and I’ll add you.
For those who are new to the idea, I’ll quote Bud – and you should read his various blog posts about it too.
This book will be for anyone interested in creating products that are not just market exchanges, but cultural exchanges – for anyone that wants to build or reshape an organization for doing business in a world gone digital – and for anyone just finding their footing in the marketing industry today. Ultimately, I want the book to serve as the how, not just the why or what, for transformational growth at a time when a commitment to strategic change will reshape the entire business landscape. At the core of the book will be ten new principles for creating, promoting, and distributing products in the future – my ten new commandments for brands and marketers.
It’s really exciting and I’m looking forward to learning a lot and having fun. If you haven’t yet backed him, you’ve got 3 days!
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London cycle hire scheme. Ripe for a mobile app.
Transport for London (TfL) have put out a call for apps to promote London’s new cycle hire scheme which launches at the end of July.
This immediately caught my eye as it mixes two things that I love. Technology and cycling.
TfL opened up their cycle hire API earlier this month to allow access to information around bike hire locations and pricing.
I think this, mashed up with a few of TfL’s other APIs and a bit of smart phone magic would create an amazing mobile app service. It could help promote the scheme, encourage adoption and, vitally, aid TfL in defining future hire station locations and in adjusting and augmenting their current cycle path network.
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News, publishers, print and digital: an update
A couple of weeks ago I had a little rant about the three things I think publishers need to do if they want to thrive in a beyond-print era. The survival of news media is a big issue right now, and so it should be — the quality reportage of news is critical to the health of our society.
In the time since posting my argument, I’ve spotted a few new developments I think are worth sharing. Unsurprisingly, they all have a lot to do with content and the contradiction of digital content: expensive to produce (or at least, the good stuff often is) but more often than not, free to consume. Highly valuable, then, but cursed with a changeable value.
Revisioning an economy around forces like these isn’t going to be easy, but I believe it can be done. Here’s what’s happening, and why I think it matters.
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Somewhere over the paywall: 3 predictions for news media
Two weeks ago, some colleagues and I attended a Frontline Club talk on apps, paywalls and the future of journalism (for a recap, see William Owen’s excellent post). I found the experience very interesting but also very frustrating. I should say up front that this post is deliberately provocative: I am heartsick at the state of the news industry (one I respect and value to no end) and I want to do something about it — or at least start a discussion that does.
Publishers are erecting paywalls all over the place — The Times last week, The New York Times next year — but to what end? By throwing their content behind paywalls, publishers are indulging themselves in a knee-jerk reaction that — I think — will decimate their market share and brand value, ultimately to fatal consequences.
Publishers should be rethinking digital as a universe of potential profit. They should be embracing change and changing with it, but instead they’re freaking out and locking up the content. This just won’t work.
The internet has irrevocably — and nearly globally — democratised information. Content as content is free, and content producers cannot ask consumers to change their behaviour or expectations to meet a bottom line. That’s just not how it works. There is so much good content out there, people will simply decline to pay and move on to a free content source — and there are many.
In order to survive, publishers must change the way they approach the business of content, newspapers, and digital news platforms. Here are my three predictions for the industry.
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“Sometimes you have to destroy something you love”
That’s one of the many stirring quotables from a blog post published last week at John Winsor’s blog.
John is the CEO of Victors and Spoils, the new model (ad) agency that’s applying crowdsourcing models to creativity.
The piece is really quite inspiring, drawing a distinction between the great people and creativity you find in advertising, and the business of that business “which really sucks”.
In the post, John discusses the impact of abundance on the advertising industry. It’s a big theme that we saw Clay Shirky applying to the broad sweep of human history and nature at SXSW this year. In this context, both John Winsor and his guest and recent investor Jon Bond chew over the way the ad industry mistakes abundance for over-supply and commoditisation of their business models. This reminds me of another nugget from the Shirky keynote, which was actually the most re-tweeted line from it:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Both men lament the fact that structures, complexity and fear are blinding agencies to opportunities, but I have to say that neither is holding out a quick panacea – or any kind of panacea – to the legacy players. I don’t think they believe that it’s possible to change things gently and piece-by-piece without really radical renewal, by which I mean epic-scale, biblical, creative destruction. It’s not about tinkering about at the edges any longer. This paragraph nails it:
I love ad people and the ideas part of the business. It’s the “business” of the business that really sucks and brings down the rest of it. Sometimes you have to destroy something you love in order to rebuild it again, and that is what the new models, like Victors & Spoils, will do. There will be pain. But there is no alternative to the slow, painful death that has been eating away at the soul of the business for the past 15 years.
That’s my highlighting – but it can’t make for very happy reading if you run a big holding company, unless of course you don’t believe the hype and think things will sort themselves out just like they always have. I think that’s ignoring the bigger picture. I know it’s hard to imagine chaps, but what’s happening is somewhat bigger than the ad industry.
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Archives
Sites we like
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- Bud Caddell – What Consumes Me
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