In January this year, on the eve of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, I wrote an op-ed for Germany’s leading daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung titled “Sinnfabriken” (which you can roughly translate as “meaning factories”; also see this interview on the Werteindex blog.). The title was meant to be catchy, but my thesis was more earnest: Revisiting milestones of the history of brand theory, I argued that brands can now evolve from enablers of sales to arbiters (and in fact, producers) of meaning. The underlying thought experiment was to posit that we have entered the “meaning economy” in which the mission of business is no longer just to create profit and jobs, but to create meaning – spiritual, intellectual, and emotional experiences that help connect the individual to society and vice versa. Transcendence instead of transactions, simply put. Along with this, I tried to make the case for an appreciation of intangible assets, the “soft power” of companies, with their brand as the most tangible factor.
I received some very positive, encouraging responses to the article, but of course not everyone agreed. Why should, of all societal actors, companies bear the responsibility to recharge a largely secularized society with spirituality and meaning? Isn’t that just another cynical trick of the “masters of persuasion” to lure consumers into buying stuff they don’t need? Well, maybe it is, but the reality is that the power of brands is undisputable. What we buy reflects (and even determines) who we are, and most of us spend the majority of our lives at work. So when it comes to meaning, why not start with the institutions that have the strongest influence on our everyday lives?
The question also came up in an interview I gave to German public television (ZDF) in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, and the interviewer insisted on the dangers of entrusting companies with our spiritual and intellectual well-being. These are legitimate concerns of course and the risks are real, but if we manage to change the nature of the game and create new parameters of success in business, perhaps we can truly change companies’ behavior over time. If we make business leaders aware of their responsibility as “chief meaning officers,” if we give them the tools so that their companies can create an added value of meaning with every single traditional transaction they make, then we can maybe indeed generate a completely new business paradigm (and a critical mass of adopters) that can very well deal with a few free riders. Other questions I faced ranged from how to distinguish meaning from CSR and whether Europe’s humanist heritage might present more fertile ground for this new notion of business. I could tell the ZDF-reporter wasn’t fully satisfied with my answers, and neither was I. My jet-lag aside, it was one of those interviews that raised more questions than answers, and it is always humbling (and motivating) to realize the power of an idea but also the gulf that still exists between this idea and a cohesive philosophical framework. I have my work cut out for me.
Later that day, I gave the closing keynote at the Annual Congress of the Federal Association of German Market Researchers (BVM), as part of a session with the fantastic Michael Braungart (of the EPEA Institute) and Erich Joachimsthaler (of Vivadi Partners). Titled “Meaning Factories,” it presented my key theses in 20 minutes, and I was delighted that the audience seemed very attentive (especially given that the German national soccer team was to kick off its Euro quarterfinal a couple of hours later). If you’ve been to Germany, you will know that Germans are notoriously glass-half-empty people. A deep mistrust in all-too-smooth plausibility and in all-too-simple formulas is the companion to most public debates, mixed with a lust for the argument and for revealing self-acclaimed truth-tellers as impostors. If you are an emperor without clothes, a German audience will make you feel really, really naked. I am glad to report that I left the stage with my clothes on.
Here are the slides from my Berlin talk (in German):
A lot has been written lately about the changing profile of the CMO, a role which faces an increasingly complex set of stakeholders and expectations (“10 Great Expectations: What CEOs Want From Their CMOs”) as it is engulfed by empowered consumers, big data, digital media pervasion, and accelerated technology innovation cycles. While CMO tenures have slightly increased to an average of less than four years, the role remains a hot seat. Technology savvy, analytics prowess, and strict ROI measurement are almost unanimously heralded as the key attributes of a successful marketing leader. The CMO is expected to be a business strategist, innovator, and change agent, while at the same time also acting as the brand evangelist, inspirational communicator-in-chief, and cross-functional collaborator. Tough one. How can today’s CMO succeed in times of hyper-connectivity when long-held beliefs are shattered, audiences are transient, and “software is eating the world” (Marc Andreessen)?
The Futurist CMO conference, hosted by former Wipro CMO Jessie Paul and her indefatigable team in the high-tech cluster of Gurgaon, near Delhi, last week, discussed this very question. Paul Writer, the name of Jessie’s venture, is devoted to fostering the Indian marketing community, and provides online and offline forums for a lively exchange on emerging marketing trends. Their newsletter is a fantastic resource for marketing professionals worldwide, and the equally sophisticated conference gathered some of India’s brightest marketing minds (from brands such as Coffee Day, Citibank, Essar, Reliance, Godfrey Phillips, NIIT, Aircel, Makemytrip.com, IBM, and Capital Foods) for an exhilarating two days of thought-provoking presentations and panels.
In my presentation in Gurgaon, I took a slightly contrarian view, outlining the idea of Smart Brands to debunk the four big marketing myths of strategy, control, consistency and data. I proposed a super-flexible portfolio of readily adaptable initiatives instead of a single-strategy approach, argued for understanding marketing as a state of permanent crisis only to be tackled with a deliberate design for the loss of control; made the case for unpredictability as the new consistency, and contrasted Big Data with Big Intuition. My talk spurred an animated debate. One attendee objected: “If we follow your advice, we will never have a seat at the table.” But which table do you want to have a seat at, and at whose mercy? Our expertise runs broad not deep, and by the nature of our role we are comfortable with ambiguity and paradox, can make sense of disparate information, and turn data into meanignful stories. We are the "air traffic controllers" of the connected age, as Pinstorm’s Mahesh Murthy aptly put it. It’s time for us marketers to determine our own fortune and capitalize on our unique strengths: insight, intuition, and imagination.
I had the great pleasure of speaking at The Great Indian B2B Marketing Summit in Bangalore yesterday, organized by Jessie Paul, the former CMO of Indian outsourcing juggernaut Wipro, author of the book “No Money Marketing,” and founder of Paul Writer, a marketing consultancy cum hub that runs an influential online CMO Roundtable and other formidable programs to facilitate the exchange amongst the Indian marketing community. The program was quite an eclectic mix of topics, ranging from social media and digital marketing trends, to market development, to marketing leadership, to personal branding.
The two latter topics appeared to be the most popular, based on the audience’s response. Jessie herself provided a good overview of the main tenets of personal branding, and her session was a great reminder of the importance of creating a “personal brand map” to identify (following models by Geert Hofstede and Jim Collins) one’s “values, heroes, symbols, and rituals,” and derive one’s unique brand promise at the intersection of “passion, excellence, and profitability.” In addition to establishing personal thought leadership platforms tailored to the respective career level (entry-level execs may want to focus on processes, best practices, and creation; mid-level execs on opinions, forward-looking statements, HR issues, and organizational vision; whereas CXO execs typically address industry frameworks as well as macro-economic and policy issues), Rajeev Suri, CEO of Liqwid Krystal, offered some helpful advice for aspiring marketing leaders: 1. Stay close to the leadership; 2. Stay close to the money; 3. Never get into cruise control.
None of those are easy, and I can certainly empathize with Sangeeta Sundaram, head of marketing and communications at Capgemini India, who remarked that “marketing is notoriously over-stretched and under-resourced.” But then again, as Kiran Mani, head of industry sales for Google India, pointed out in his presentation: “Effective marketing does not have to cost much.” Jessie, with her penchant for “No Money Marketing," would agree, and ad agency executive Jon Bond goes even one step further, as quoted in a recent Fast Company article: "Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it."
While that is a perfectly viral line from a Twitter and SEO viewpoint and might cheer up some CMOs in light of dwindling marketing budgets, it of course posits an existential threat for advertisers and other marketing services firms. "Creating more work for less money is the big paradox," says Matt Howell, president of the Boston agency Modernista, in the same Fast Company piece that depicted a rather gloomy scenario for today’s Mad Men (“Mayhem on Madison Avenue”). Both client and agency side are facing a more and more strenuous battle for attention and engagement in the light of fragmented media usage, always-on connectivity, and social media: "The irony is that while there have never been more ways to reach consumers, it's never been harder to connect with consumers," explains Brad Jakeman, now chief creative officer at Activision, the gaming company.
No wonder new models are popping up left and right. Forrester calls for “Adaptive Marketing,” and the Harvard Business Review (HBR) recently ran a comprehensive report on “Social Media and the New Rules of Branding." In one of the report’s articles, McKinsey’s David C. Edelman suggests that marketers need to respond to today’s more nuanced customer journeys. Far from systematically narrowing their choices, Edelman argues, today’s consumers take a much more iterative journey of the three traditional customer journey stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and spend more time in the additional stages of enjoy, advocate, and bond. Edelman’s main revelation: If the bond becomes strong enough, consumers enter an enjoy-advocate-buy loop that skips the consider and evaluate stages entirely.
That all makes sense, but it strikes me as unlikely that tomorrow’s marketing innovation will come from reading a McKinsey piece in HBR. These days, domain expertise ages quickly, and doing is replacing saying. Marketers increasingly have to develop added-value ancillary products, services, and apps in order to sell their core offering. Traditional marketing is disrupted by disruptive marketing, which itself is disrupting interruptive advertising. Yet - in the best tradition of Clayton Christensen’s “innovation dilemma" - yesterday’s win can become tomorrow’s burden as disruptive viral campaigns are quickly absorbed by an army of me-too’s. Benchmarking, best practices, and new theoretical frameworks often just eclipse a lack of imagination, a lack of customer empathy, and a lack of courage to be creative: “There is no one to copy, no one to follow,” says Richard Branson.
And yet here I was at a marketing conference sharing my own playbook. Jessie had invited me to present on “What B2B Marketers Can Learn from Design-Driven Innovation for B2B,” and I definitely enjoyed my role as the somewhat eccentric outlier in the line-up. I was surprised how many people in the audience knew frog when I conducted a mini brand audit at the outset of my presentation, and I was flattered by their interest in frog. I took the attendees through a quick overview of frog’s history, philosophy, and approach, before elaborating on the seven design principles that I thought might be applicable for B2B marketers. The subsequent Q&A yielded some incisive questions, although, as usual, I wasn’t able to answer the “ROI of design” one satisfactorily. If anyone can, drop me a note. Oh well. Sometimes you just need to believe (or have a stellar sales team).
Our friends from the Norman Lear Center, one of the world’s leading think tanks and research institutions devoted exclusively to entertainment, is celebrating their 10th anniversary in style – with a list of ten good reasons why TV, the last remaining mass medium, is good for you: “We've heard the arguments: How TV is bad for us, how it's linked to violence, the obesity epidemic, the dumbing down of culture. At the Norman Lear Center we've made it our business to study entertainment -- televised and otherwise -- and believe that whatever its downsides, TV also has much to contribute to a healthy, connected and well-informed society.“
"10. TV Can Change Policy After an episode of ER was shown to Congressmembers, the Patient Navigator Act was passed. And an episode of Law & Order: SVU that shed light on pesticide testing prompted an official response from the EPA.
9. TV Can Keep You Company As humans, we crave connectedness. Studies have shown that those who suffer from loneliness find comfort in parasocial relationships with favored TV programs and TV characters.
8. TV Can Tap Into Our Better Selves Fonzie got a library card and requests for library cards increased over 500% nationwide. When Hollywood, Health & Society worked with the CBS show Numb3rs on an organ donation storyline, a study found that viewers of the episode were more likely to become registered organ donors.
7. TV Can Make Us Smarter Over the years, popular television has grown in complexity from simple narratives (Bonanza, anyone?) to multi-threaded storylines featuring 15 or more characters (Lost). In his book Everything Bad is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that these complexities in plot, storyline and character have actually made us smarter.
6. TV Can Break Down Barriers Following the 1965 Watts Riots, then CBS broadcast journalist Joe Saltzman produced Black on Black, a primetime documentary about what it meant to be black in Los Angeles.
5. TV Can Motivate Us TV viewers are learning important civic lessons from government-themed dramas like 24 and Law & Order, according to a Lear Center study.
4. TV Can Bring People Together In today's fragmented media markets, shared televised experiences are few and far between. Televised events like the Super Bowl, the Olympics and the World Cup give us a rare opportunity to share a moment in time with the world.
2. TV Can Empower Entertainment-Education posits that what we watch can amuse as well as educate. When South Africa's soap opera Soul City featured a key character as a victim of domestic abuse, it spawned the grassroots "Pots & Pans Campaign." Soul City's creator received the 2009 Everett M. Rogers Award in 2009.
1. TV Can Save Lives For better or worse, viewers absorb what they see on TV, including health information. Studies indicate enormous potential for TV to serve as health educator. The Sentinel For Health Awards recognize achievements of TV storylines that inform, educate and motivate viewers to make choices for healthier and safer lives."
Silver Fish Hand Catch! As the social web’s echo chamber is gushing about Wieden+Kennedy (W+K)’s masterful Old Spice campaign (actor and former football star Isaiah Mustafa wowing viewers with his smooth-talking delivery in video replies to hundreds of online queries or comments tweeted to him by web users),first spoofs are manifesting its pop-cultural credentials, and the meta-story is increasingly becoming the story ("how did they do it?"), both practical and philosophical questions arise. The jury is still out on the campaign’s commercial impact (various news sites and blogs are reporting that sales have fallen by 7%, which various other news sites and blogs dispute). I’m more interested in the campaign as a cultural phenomenon and its lasting implications: Is it a one-off nifty idea or are we witnessing the emergence of something bigger than that, a whole new paradigm for marketers and content producers, as Mashable claims?
Without a doubt, several things are remarkable about the Old Spice campaign. First of all, the numbers: A total of 183 individual video responses have been posted to the Old Spice YouTube channel, and to date the videos have attracted more than 38 million individual views. During the campaign, the Old Spice channel was the most viewed channel on YouTube, and it is now the third most subscribed channel ever on the site’s “sponsor” category. Total upload views for the channel, a metric that includes the original TV ads, currently stand at over 92 million. The final video reply, addressed to “everyone,” has amassed 3.3 million views and over 20,000 comments alone. As of today, the brand’s official Twitter account has grown to 92,000 followers.
Secondly, the campaign has exposed a key ingredient of viral content - disruption, in the form of a classic “What If” proposition that challenges conventional views: What if the main character of a commercial suddenly takes on a life on its own and starts directly responding to viewers?
Thirdly, Old Spice has probably been the first campaign to be both hyper-individualized (Mustafa's individual replies to Twitter users) and hyper-social (spreading virally as people have forwarded and embedded the replies). In fact, the very personalization of the responses has made them so unique and worth sharing. And all of that at hyper-speed: Seldom before has an advertising campaign produced so many highly personalized pieces of content in such short amount of time.
Lastly, the campaign has beamed us back into an age of Mad Men superpower, perfectly coinciding with the imminent launch of the new season of our favorite TV series this weekend. Ironically, though, rather than by relying on traditional persuasive ad-power Mad Men’s clout has been restored by an ad agency using social media of all things. Or, to be more precise: Transmedia. After already toying with them for their 2008 “Somebody Else’s Phone” campaign for Nokia, W+K borrowed the principles of Transmedia again for Old Spice – but this time augmenting them to much more visible effect.
Consider Transmedia a variation of social media. The term is commonly attributed to Marsha Kinder, who premiered it in her 1991 book Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Communication scholar Henry Jenkins (author of Convergence Culture, formerly at MIT, now with the Annenberg School in L.A.) then made it popular by crafting a theory of “Transmedia Storytelling” in a Technology Review essay, depicting it as a cross-platform narrative where each platform adds something meaningful to the fictional world – whether it’s more back story, deeper stories for secondary characters, the interactive dimension of a game, or new opportunities for the fans to participate in telling the story. More specifically, Jenkins laid out the “Seven Core Concepts of Transmedia Storytelling”: Spreadability vs. Drillability, Continuity vs. Multiplicity, Immersion vs. Extractability, Worldbuilding, Seriality, Subjectivity, and Performance.
Over the past ten years or so, Transmedia has again and again been considered the “next big thing” without ever really breaking through into mainstream. Battlestar Galactica, the Batman series, or The Matrix were sporadic examples of innovative Transmedia entertainment plays, but only as of late, the proliferation of games, social media, and mobile platforms has given rise to a more widespread adoption of the concept.
Transmedia is now increasingly popular for content producers who are facing economic pressures to maximize their assets across platforms. The NBC series Heroes is often cited as a watershed moment, and Tim Kring, its creator, is widely seen as the man who made Transmedia plausible for a mass TV audience. Kring is also one of the forces behind Conspiracy for Good, a large-scale cross-platform movement that attempts to use Transmedia to support social causes – Lina Srivastava calls this “Transmedia Activism.” At the heart of the Conspiracy for Good experience is a locative event over the course of three weeks in London, starting in mid-July and running until August 7th. Another recent example of Transmedia Storytelling is the comic franchise The 99, Naif Al-Mutawa’s vision of Muslim superheroes that he has extended to multiple media formats. Moreover, Wired UK recently hired agency Six to turn its latest issue – featuring a cover story on Transmedia – into a transmedia Alternate Reality Game (ARG). There are even some who call the iPad “the world’s first transmedia device” – a questionable notion given the rather retro lean-back mode of consumption that the iPad encourages.
Before this backdrop, the Old Spice campaign is arguably the most comprehensive use of Transmedia in an advertising context to date, and it serves as the blue print for what I call “transformats.” I would pinpoint their three main characteristics as follows:
- Transmedia: Transformats use a multi-modular presentation of narratives that extends the story across various media and allows a social web-enabled “audience formerly known as the audience” to participate in the story development. In the case of Old Spice, it went full circle: from YouTube to Twitter and back.
- Transcendent: Transformats transcend not only the original medium but also the original story, creating new meaning beyond the conceived plot. In the case of Old Spice, the main protagonist was given a life on its own and the power to directly interact with members of the audience. Thus, the story became an open-ended conversation, and the initial message faded amidst a chorus of issues (user-)generated by the cultural fabric of the social web.
- Transformative: Transformats advance marketing best practices and lift the state-of-the-art. Key here is that the design of the marketing program itself is the story (see meta-marketing), or at least an integral part of it. Case in point: The majority of coverage on the Old Spice campaign heralded its innovative quality, and many stories were background stories that shed light on “the making of.” Perhaps that’s the most powerful thing about innovation, from a marketing perspective: True innovation always is a story in and of itself.
Transformats may indeed constitute a whole new framework for state-of-the-art marketing. They may span even more media (TV, social web, movies, radio, print, AR, etc.), zig-zag more artfully between virtual and real world, and incorporate more gaming mechanics that incentivize users through “achievements” modeled on behavioral economics. Besides advertising, transformats may also have a place in media outlets: Imagine direct video responses from reporters to readers’ comments or interactive maps that enrich stories by pulling in user-generated real-time data and commentary, as a hybrid of professional and citizen journalism. Or reporters who post their intent to run a story and publicly ask for input and feedback (a moderated WikiLeaks, if you will, where readers can follow the genesis of a story). Or articles that readers can “park” after the morning read of their print newspaper, just to pick them up in the evening on their TV screen (as envisioned here by the NYTimes R&D lab). All of this would make the newsroom of the future a social media-savvy, super-convergent, real-time multimedia production studio, with the release cycles of stories shrunk to almost zero, and various media and engagement modes extending their life cycles to X.
It doesn’t require too much imagination to see transformats also play a seminal role in transforming education, healthcare, civil society, and even politics. Already, Gwynne Kostin, director of new media and citizen engagement at the General Services Administration, examines on GovLoop how to “adopt ‘Old Spice’ success to government” by embracing what she extrapolates as the campaign’s main tenets “speed, planning, talent, and trust.” While this ambition appears to be perhaps a bit of a stretch at this point, the overarching trajectory is evident: In an economy where attention is as scarce as commitment to action, stories that transcend their original storyline, set new standards for their genre, and engage people across various media can make a difference. As the complexity of our societal challenges is increasing, our solutions are becoming more open-ended. In other words: To tackle X-problems, you need to have X-conversations. Old Spice was just the beginning.
From “marketing in the age of streams” to the “Googlization of media” to “situational awareness” to “location, location, locaton” to “business becomes social” to “private becomes public” – in their latest report, Edelman’s digital mavens Steve Rubel and David Armano provide a solid overview of the six key digital trends to watch.
If you worry about social media pushing the boundaries of privacy on sites like Facebook these days, then you may want to be mindful of what is looming on the horizon next – because ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ What we are sharing (mostly voluntarily) today is mainly a cocktail of sociographic data (birthday, birthplace, location, education, memberships, hobbies, etc.), convictions, intentions, and activities. Soft stuff, really, if you think about it; information that can conveniently be tweaked and entirely made up at your fingertips online, as needed to enhance your social credentials. It remains a virtual currency in a virtual world.
“Hard” privacy data looks different, and we have not been sharing it much to date. It cannot be easily fabricated or altered because it is literally an existential part of our individual lives, and as such becomes only social through the act of sharing. Radical Transparency in its most radical notion extends to those human areas that are most personal, and it doesn’t take much imagination to pinpoint the most sacrosanct of them: our genetic code and our dreams; the very physical and the very meta-physical fabric of our selves.
As for the latter, movies have long envisioned the intrusion of others into our utmost private spheres. Think of “Strange Days,” “Minority Report,” or “Memento,” which all riffed on memory-theft or manipulation. And now the director of “Memento,” Christopher Nolan, has a new mega-project out, “Inception” (the film opens in the US on July 16), in which the main protagonists are dreams. In an interview with the New York Times the director describes the radical thought experiment underlying the film, the idea of multiple people sharing the same dream: “Once you remove the privacy … you’ve created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences.” Web sites such as Dreamstop or Whispy are already delivering on that vision, albeit in poor execution. Someone needs to come up with a less esoteric way and a better business model for social networks based on dreams. How much wasted creativity could be harnessed if there was technology allowing us to make the subconscious transparent, as a social “dream feed”?
An even “harder” and more integral data set of ourselves is the genetic code that we all carry. The temptation to “socialize” this very foundation of our individuality will be hard to resist. It is only an incremental step, technically, but a huge leap, of course, morally, from sharing personal health records to making publicly available the source code of one’s life performance. But as the cost of getting personal genomes deciphered is plummeting, it seems fair to assume that this information will sooner or later populate the social web (on sites such as 23andMe). In a recent special report on “The Human Genome,” the Economist somewhat pragmatically deliberates the implications of this new brave world of bio-transparency. Referencing Stewart Brand, the American futurologist, who famously coined “Information wants to be free,” the magazine posits that “One of the lessons of the new biology is that it is all about information.” It claims that “Everyday genomics is coming, ready or not” and that there is “no hiding place.” “There will be mistakes on the way, and suffering, too,” it concedes, “But technology, once invented, cannot be unlearned.” The article closes with another one of Stuart Brand’s memorable quotes: “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” That might be required indeed, especially if you consider sharing information about our genomes to be the precursor of sharing actual genes – the real deal.
My colleague Fabio Sergio has written and spoken extensively about the subject of smart bio-feedback, raising some provocative questions around his vision of “your heartbeat becoming the conversation” – a body-to-data interaction model that turns our bodies into messengers, into “pulsating active nodes on The Network.” By the same token, sharing our dreams and DNA will make our bodies and souls the ultimate social media of the future. As a result of it, publicness will emerge as the only possible human modus vivendi – sharing ergo sum; see my genes, see my dreams, therefore I am. Privacy won’t be dead. But everyone who chooses to live a public life may ultimately gain the ability to live a more fulfilling, healthier life.
Now this is just brilliant. Adobe has found the only possible way to respond to the lack of love it is getting from Apple – EVEN MORE LOVE.
To counter Steve Jobs' recent rant that Flash wasn't "appropriate for mobile devices" (justifying its ban from Apple products like the iPhone and the iPad), Adobe launched a new ad campaign today in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and several other newspapers and online news sites. The ad sports the headline "We ♥ Apple" and continues with: "We love creativity," and "We love flash," but "What we don’t love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the Web."
What’s so interesting about this campaign is that it bridges traditional media with social media, making advertising conversational (again). There’s already a ton of buzz on Twitter and blogs about the ad.
Edward Boches has described it most aptly: “Adobe’s ad (...) becomes just one more reminder that social media isn’t something separated from traditional media. Even more importantly it’s further proof that our consumers don’t simply read, they create, distribute and best of all, amplify. We may not all have a subject as juicy as the rivalry between Adobe and Apple. But it doesn’t mean we can’t use our offline efforts to “start” conversations. After all, there’s nothing to join if someone doesn’t initiate it.”
“Journalism is not a profession anymore, it’s an activity,” I heard someone say at a conference in Paris a few weeks ago. Assuming that’s indeed the case – with news breaking on Twitter, commentary provided by popular bloggers, and both distributed via aggregators and social networks – you can imagine newsrooms becoming panic rooms, and the gatekeepers of the public turning into the horsemen of the apocalypse in private.
The profession’s common objection to the burgeoning social web paradigm is “We may all be publishers, but we’re not all editors.” But that claim can be easily countered: Do we still need editors? “If the news is important, it will find you,” asserts Marissa Mayer of Google, and she refers to the emergence of hyper-personalized (maybe also hyper-local) news streams that you can opt into without an intermediary and that come to you via one of the myriad social channels. Just one data point: In January 2010, visitors to nytimes.com spent an average 14 minutes on the site, whereas Facebook users stayed on Facebook.com for an average of seven hours. This begs the question of what’s more important to the newly empowered news consumer: Speed or credibility? Social aggregation or expert curation? Location-based delivery or correspondents on location?
Moreover, content farming (i.e. Demand Media) and other forms of on-demand journalism (i.e. Spot.Us) are fundamentally challenging the agenda-setting oligopoly of traditional media. Then there is the rise of the Mobile Internet: A recent Morgan Stanley report forecasts that it will have outgrown the Fixed Internet by 2015. And of course there is now the iPad and other tablets.
The future of journalism will be social and mobile, whether you like it or not, and it might likely require cross-platform storytelling. Consequently, news organizations are not only rushing to launch tablet versions, they are also shifting their expectations towards reporters: “Aggregating and curating content with attribution should become part of a BBC journalist’s assignment; and BBC’s journalists have to integrate and listen to feedback for a better understanding of how the audience is relating to the BBC brand. If you don’t like it, if you think that level of change or that different way of working isn’t right for me, then go and do something else, because it’s going to happen. You’re not going to be able to stop it.’” Said Peter Horrocks, Director of Global News, BBC.
In light of all these trends, innovation is no longer an extracurricular activity for newspapers; it has become a mandatory task for rescuing the profession of journalism. “Innovate or die” seems to be the only real option. Or, put more mildly: If newspapers don’t just want to age (and ultimately die) with their traditional readership, how do they render themselves relevant for future readers, that is, the generation of digital natives, and their vastly different media consumption habits? (see the random sample of interviews below, polled on the streets of Munich: “How do you receive your news?” – in German).
The good news is that the future of journalism doesn’t have to look all that grim. Every abundance creates scarcity, and for every asset given away for free there are assets for which you can charge. Whether these assets will still be content, well, that’s another question – one of the many questions we asked in an all-day digital innovation strategy workshop that frog held last week at the headquarters of Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest newspaper, in Munich. The paper is read throughout Germany by 1.1 million readers daily and boasts a high circulation abroad. Attendees of the workshop included, among others, the paper’s managing directors as well as the managing editors of the print and online newsroom (which are – unlike at many other news outlets – still separated at Sueddeutsche). The discussion was animated, critical of buzzwords and easy solutions, with lots of food for thought for both sides, and ultimately very encouraging.
With its stable circulation and ad revenue, its strong brand, and its immense popularity both among readers and journalists (Germans call it a “Leitmedium” – an agenda-setting publication that in recent surveys was even ranked ahead of the venerable SPIEGEL in terms of “authority”), Sueddeutsche Zeitung is uniquely positioned to view the digitization of content and the transformative principles of the social web less as an existential threat but a historic opportunity to reinvent journalism.
