On Demand

Marie and I were at the mall on Friday, it had been a day of meetings, and we were in a mood to watch a movie.

Trouble is, it was 4.43pm, and there weren't any movies starting till after 6. What? Very strange. And then, there's the question of would the movies on after 6 be ones we liked? It's mass media thinking at its worst.

Wouldn't it be great to combine what's great about the movies (the shared experience, the big big screen, surround sound, fresh popcorn) with what's great about DVDs (you choose them, you start them when you want, it doesn't have to be "the latest", you can see films from years ago).

And it's possible - or at least a pretty good compromise is possible. You could take an unconference approach to your movie theatre, letting people suggest movies, and have the rest vote on when to see them. Sure, it wouldn't be the exact one-to-one experience we desire, but it would be a fun compromise. It would be fun because it's like a game. It would be social because you know the others in the theatre aren't just there for "whatever's on", but they actually chose the film you're seeing.

How would this work? It wouldn't work by charging membership like Fatso. I pay my Fatso membership because it comes to me. I don't go to the mall on a predictable basis. This needs to be something that works as a spur-of-the-moment thing, as well as an ongoing community that could collaborate online.

That was our thoughts standing in the movie theatre. We had similar thoughts at the zoo on Saturday, but I guess animals are less prone to do things "on demand" for us! :)

Cinema has great potential to give me what I really want
(Photo credit: Jonathan Posner)

What Lawrence Lessig said in Auckland (plus notes from ANZA's Welcome to the Future event)

I was going to use a clever headline like "The future of marketing, media and intellectual property" but then realised most people will want to read this post to hear what Lawrence Lessig said in Auckland this Monday.

During the day on Monday I attended an event put on by the Association of New Zealand Advertisers, which had some pretty exciting - and overlapping - subject matter with Professor Lessig's talk.

If you only want to read what Lessig said, skip to the bottom of this post.

First up at the ANZA event, Professor Robert Lauterborn, coauthor of Integrated Marketing Communications (I interviewed the other coauthor back in 2003) presented the changed face of marketing. Not just changing - it's been changing since at least 1993 when the book was written - but it has changed.

Some gems from his session:

"The only source of competitive advantage is superior understanding of the consumer."

He did a before vs after comparison of a typical marketer's role and the standards they were held accountable to.

In the past, measurements were all around compliance and reach: readership scores, buying media by efficiency, absence of errors in advertisements, changes in awareness.

Now, marketers are expected to shift behaviour in a way that ties directly to business results.

To some, including myself, these are the words we've been hearing for years. But Lauterborn emphasises just how hard it is to actually do the new thinking, compared to just talking about it. I think that would apply to social media as well.

In fact, much of the work we're doing at iJump is not about the technology of social media, but about the mindset of getting really close to your customer. Not in an under-the-microscope kind of way, but in a sitting-next-to kind of way.

But I digress.

After Professor Lauterborn we had Russell Stanners, CEO of Vodafone presenting about the new mobile marketplace.

Again, stuff we've heard for years, but now it's actually happening. And it's happening mostly through social networking! In fact, he even mentioned Twitter, which I grinned at as I mentioned on (where else!) Twitter.

Interesting stat: 40+% of mobile internet traffic on Vodafone NZ's network is going to social networks.

Just for young folks? No. 24% of 25-64 year olds in New Zealand are into social networking on their mobiles. One out of every six minutes spent on the mobile internet is in a social networking community.

NZ Post's Chairman John Allen then took the stand, wearing his hat as head of the Australia/NZ leadership forum, strongly suggesting New Zealand needs to partner more with Australia. Great speaker, but not sure what it has to do with marketing.

Tim Flattery of Carat Engage then took the stand and pulled apart the media industry, piece by piece. It's not like he enjoys this - TV is his favourite form of media - but it's just that the foundations are crumbling. Strong resonance with both Prof Lauterborn's presentation, and Lessig's presentation. The system is broken. Who's coping well? Who's reinventing themselves?

Tim gave a few examples of what might be success for the media industry. Hulu, a mandarin word for "keeper of precious things" serves only a fraction of the number of videos that YouTube serves, yet manages to monetise them all. It's truly amazing that NBC, Universal and Fox could get it together on this one. Desperation sometimes leads to wisdom!

Major League Baseball in the states has also managed to win by turning themselves into a media company. Flattery points out that anyone can be a media company now (as the G33k Show guys will attest!), which helps you achieve competitive advantage (a la Professor Lauterborn) by being closest to your customer. It's game-changing disintermediation of the highest degree. Want some more buzzwords?

(To be fair, I'm coming up with these buzzwords as I write, Tim was very good in using human language.)

Finally, Tim shared how he got Baz Luhrmann to whip up some TVCs for Tourism Australia to tie in with the bigger-than-Ben-Hur (literally) epic film Australia. The ads are very good, despite being Australian. Got a round of applause from the audience, even!

Lots of lessons in the behind-the-scenes story, but most of all, according to Tim: "it's only through innovation that you can build a customer base to enjoy competitive advantage."

Innovation. It's important!

Okay, now the part you're all waiting for ... Lawrence Lessig's presentation!

The guy is gifted with storytelling and visual simplicity (as you can see from the photo above).

I missed the very beginning, but here are my notes:

Writing is democratic. A student writing an essay doesn't need to seek permission from the estates of those he quotes. To do so would be unreasonable.

Yet that's exactly the restraint current copyright law is putting on the 21st century form of writing - remixing.

He talked about stages of society and media, starting with the RO (Read Only) society which got the most efficient in around 2000 with the launch of iTunes. It was the nearest thing to the celestial jukebox, where you could access the world's culture for 99c (in the US).

About 2004 emerged the RW (Read-Write) society, where "the public" started talking back, as epitomised by Wikipedia.

YouTube et al just carried the movement along, turning the once specialised art of remixing and remastering into a conversational activity. Lessig talked about call and response creativity, where my lip-sync to a song triggers you and 40 others to try your own.

"It's the modern equivalent of young people getting together and singing a song, but it's not on the corner, not in the back yard, but over digital networks."

Some examples from the political sphere. (Best example, not referenced by Lessig but created here in NZ!)

Importance? It has nothing to do with technique. It has everything to do with how those techniques are now democratised.

In a nutshell, here's Lessig's argument:

• Copyright law is legitimate. We need something to incentivise people to create and profit from their original works.
• Current copyright law is too blunt an instrument for the technology we have. We currently have a Hollywood business model that doesn't allow for the shades of grey between professional content producer and amateur consumer.
  

A comparison: Alcohol Prohibition.

In 1919 the USA prohibited the sale of alcohol, as part of their war against dependence on alcohol. It didn't work. The costs outweighed the benefits. In the early 30s the US abandoned the war, but didn't abandon the fight against dependence. They just looked for other ways to do it.

In the same way, we have a copyright system the costs of which outweigh the benefits. All the current "copyright war" has done is make criminals out of children. As a father, Lessig sees this trend going either of two ways:

1. The kids decide not to do anything illegal (eg file sharing, swapping, remixing) - NOT LIKELY
2. The kids get used to being criminals. Is this a good thing for society? He doesn't think so.

What to do?

Public steps:
1. Change copyright law. Introduce something like Creative Commons to cover the wide varieties of use that don't fall into "Professional Content Distribution" or "Amateur, Not-for-profit Free Use".
2. Engage creativity - find out ways to return a fair compensation to artists without shutting down public discourse and sharing.
A possibility, suggested by Tim Hubbard and Janine Love in terms of the scientific community, that 0.2% of a country's GDP goes to royalties. A worldwide treaty, and how to collect that is up to each country. It's not perfect, but it's an idea to get things started.

Private steps:
This bit is important if you're in business.

Lessig talks about 3 kinds of economies: commercial (eg the supermarket), sharing (eg a friendship) and hybrid (a bit of both).

For example, Flickr is primarily a sharing community, but Yahoo! makes money from the result of that social interaction.

Other examples include Second Life, Yelp, and Wikia.

Amazon's a business coming from the other end of the equation - a commercial economy which is discovering the benefits and added value of a sharing economy. It's a hybrid.

Lessig quoted Steve Ballmer as saying "every successful internet business will be a hybrid."

There are 3 kinds of hybrid:

1. Darth Vader. (eg Star Wars Mashups) aka sharecropping - in other words, the creator/collaborator gets no benefit. "You create the content, we own it" (Star Wars Mashups appears to be no longer there, but TV3's terms and conditions for user-submitted content are another great example.

2. Ostrich. (eg Google, YouTube). "You create the content, you own it. We don't care, we'll just put ads around it. We're just here to serve."

3. Souza/Che ... Sousa wanted to ban "infernal talking machines" in the early 1900s because he feared they would take away our ability to create, instead just making us passive consumers. Che was a revolutionary. So what's a Sousa/Che business model? Something like Flickr that lets the creator own their own creation, and licence it.

In short, we need to find and use tools that help us respect creators of content AND value freedom.

---
Lessig ended with a question. If you were in the Soviet Union, when would be the right time to convince you that communism wasn't working. 1976? Too early, things are going ok. 1989? Too late, if you haven't seen it for yourself by then, you never will.

It's like that with copyright today. What stage are we at? How will legislators see that things need changing, and that solutions are at hand?

What can we in NZ do? Carry on the conversation. In the US the conversation has been captured by the Hollywood lobbyists. Unfortunately the interests of "the people" have no lobby group or PR agency. But together, maybe we can raise awareness of new possibilities with our own government, and lead by example.

Eight time-saving tips to get your life back

1. Get
2. Back
3. To
   
4. Work
5. And
6. Stop
7. Reading
8. Blogs
   

What's the role of oratory (etc) in a conversation age?

(Warning 1: Pseudo-academic language ahead, from a writer who should know better)

(Warning 2: The actual point of this post is right at the end. Persevere. Or cheat and skip right to the end)

Things are changing. That seems to be the intro to every article I write these days. Mostly because it's true.

The biggest change I see - whether it's in the world of business, leadership, media or even religion- is from one-way message delivery, to two-way message discussion. It's the age of conversation.

Evidence?

In business, witness the proliferation and popularity of books like We Are Smarter Than Me (to which I was one of 3000-odd contributors!) and Join the Conversation.

More specifically, leadership is being deconstructed as an idea. It's early days for this, but the book I'm currently reading, Leadership for the Disillusioned, outlines one academic's efforts to discover a leadership that liberates rather than enslaves. Most of that is done in a dialogical way.

Media has been slowly becoming two-way for about 15 years or more, beginning with talkback radio and now extending to the many channels available on the internet. Now it's becoming mainstream as newspapers, TV and radio make it easier to converse with them through the internet.

And in religion, at least in Christianity, people are simultaneously pressing forward and rediscovering their roots. The book So You Don't Want to Go to Church Anymore portrays a way of thinking that is outcome-focussed, rather than programmatic. It exposes many of the religious institutions we take for granted as driven by guilt and fear, a diagnosis I endorse, having been part of several churches and wondering what we were doing wrong. Fortunately, the book posits a simple but profound answer.

So my question is ... what happens to the old one-way methods?

I know the new barely ever completely replaces the old. Television didn't wipe out radio, for instance, but it did redefine it.

So, what will the next century or so hold for:

• Political speeches
• Blockbuster movies
• Sermons
• TV commercials

?

Why did I write this post? Mainly because I got home from BarCamp last week - one of the most genuinely interactive conference experiences I've ever had - and I really really really really wanted to see a good movie. A real movie. A two-hour long, popcorn movie. And it made me think, will we have movies in twenty years? What will they look like? So there you go.

Now it's your turn. Please comment! :)

Mobile- the next mass media?

Faster Future: Publishing possibilities now and beyond: Mobile as the 7th Mass Media

Thought-provoking stuff about the future of media. I was talking with my mum (who doesn't own a computer or a cellphone, and lives out of coverage area for all but 2 TV channels in Auckland) about online media (as you do). I said things start to get mainstream when they get simple.

Trademe's an example (and I actually got that in a discussion with Kevin Bowler, CEO of Yahoo!Xtra). He said it's simple enough for mums and dads to use. That's the beauty of Web 2.0 - you don't need to understand that AJAX stands for whatever it stands for to use it.

So with cellphones... when they get actually simple to use - which the iPhone seems to promise - it's entirely possible they will become the next mass medium.

Bring it on. We could definitely use some phones/browsers/minicomputers/messaging devices that are easy to use.

Friday's unfocused blog post

Okay, so I'm breaking all the rules of blogging here. This post is random links to the news I'm catching up on, because I haven't sat down and read the news properly all week.

On iTunes at the moment: "Come let us go back to God" - by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, as featured in the Coen Bros' version of LadyKillers.

In the news:

• Very sad news for the New Zealand music industry.
• Finally Google has read my mind and added a PowerPoint-like program to their online docs suite. However it's too late for me; I've discovered, fallen in love with and bought Keynote.
  
• Speaking of Google, they are so taking over the world. The last episode of Diggnation mentioned Google 411 in the US - no money in it, but it kind of ruins it for other players. And last night at the Auckland Entrepreneurs Meetup, Ian Mitchell mentioned Google's purchase of radio and TV stations. Are they becoming... Microsoft?
  
• Congratulations to Idealog for being finalists in the MPA Magazine Awards. They got finalist for best business cover for the August 2006 cover, for best business magazine, best relaunch or launch, and Adrian Clapperton for magazine design.
  
• Congrats too to Graham Medcalf for his finalist position for best business editor at Marketing Magazine.

Now on iTunes, the Finn Brothers with "Disembodied Voices".

• While the congratulations are flowing, big ups to Clemenger BBDO for being Best in Show at the CAANZ media awards. Kind of cool to see a social marketing message winning - or is that just the cynical ad industry assuaging their guilty conscience for pushing fatty foods and alcohol onto an unsuspecting culture? Just kidding.
  

Bum Rush the Charts

The people are flexing their power today, or tomorrow, depending on your time zone.



Bum Rush the Charts is an attempt by "all of us" to show the music industry that we don't freakin' need them! How do we show them that? By putting an independent artist at #1 on the iTunes store charts.

This is so Generation C! The power of many motivated individuals taking things into their own hands. Wonderful!

So today's the day, and there are detailed instructions at http://bumrushthecharts.blogspot.com/. If you're in New Zealand, it'll cost only $1.79. Only trouble is, the iTunes store isn't working right now. Does this mean the project is a success and the servers are overloaded?

I previewed the track and it's great. Just one little comment to whoever chose the band - to make it a little more inclusive, could we have an artist that doesn't have soft-porn cover art next time?

Good news all around for TV/film production industry

NZ Creative Circle Blog: OMNILAB ACQUIRES OKTOBOR

Although some of the commenters on the blog are struggling to understand what "vertically integrated content development and media service" means.

Duh. It obviously means...


...umm...

...hm.

Sounds interesting, anyway.

Christian virtual ghettoes - why?

Thanks to Russell Brown's Hard News, I've recently discovered two Christian web resources, GodTube.com and Conservapedia.

Conservapedia claims Wikipedia is biased, anti-American and anti-Christian; that's why they need to reinvent the wheel (while copying the design verbatim from Wikipedia).

While the site looks lame, I can understand the perceived need to set up your own game if - and that's a big if - the claims of bias are true, and if you have enough volunteer power to create something as extraordinary as wikipedia. Otherwise, just do an ordinary website, don't call it a wiki.

But GodTube - why?? As far as I know there's no rules against posting explicitly Christian material on YouTube. It's a very nice, slickly presented site, but it makes me think of what a mistake Christians make when they lose track of the mission - to love God and love your neighbour - and instead set about building a deeply irrelevant subculture.

I heard a brilliant sermon recently on the Emergent Podcast about "finding our God in the other". It asks, why are Christians uncomfortable participating in conversations we cannot control? It's an honestly asked question, partially answered in a respectful, challenging and thought provoking way.

TVNZ on-demand non-Mac friendly - phooey!

It never mattered much before whether web services were Mac-friendly - until I got a Mac!

So it's interesting to see the progress so far on TVNZ's OnDemand, as reviewed by Throng.

PS: (Added the next day) Discovered the review was by a 14-year-old who found their way into the not-yet-launched service by guessing the address. Generation C, take a bow!

(Two-headed hat tip: David Farrar and Public Address System:Monitor)