This is a great presentation complied by Seth Godin featuring some thought provoking ideas that will be really useful in 2010.
I particularly like slide 15 on vision, slide 26 on poker and slide 47 on THNX.
What matters now
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Monthly Archives: December 2009
Look beyond the horizon
I want to think about two recent posts made by the brilliant Seth Godin and how they apply to the way the publishing industry should think about evolving to meet the needs of the distant future not simply look at what we will be doing around the corner.
Most of us assume a single range of focus that we care about. And it’s usually right around the corner, or even closer. Is that the place to be focusing your brand or your business or your life?”
How far away is your future?, Seth Godin, December 27, 2009
If you want to know if a ship is going to sink, watch what the richest passengers do.
Amazon and the Kindle have killed the bookstore. Why? Because people who buy 100 or 300 books a year are gone forever.
“If your ship is sinking, get out now. By the time the rats start packing, it’s way too late.”
It’s not the rats you need to worry about, Seth Godin, December 28, 2009
Godin has a way of distilling ideas that are difficult to grasp into that which make perfect sense, he has certainly done that here.
With hardcopy periodical circulation still in a decline that is irreversible (they’ve abandoned the newsagent. It’s over, as Godin might say) what value will these publications have in 10 years time? What will the audience look like? What will the editorial teams look like? Where will they be working from? Who will they be reporting to? In 3 months even in a year the answers to these question will be the same as you would get tomorrow. In 10 years time the answers will be very different. It’s those answers we need to be thinking about now in order to evolve faster than those against which we compete.
The decline is too steep to be the end of a normal life-cycle, 2009 has been a 10 year storm, a fundamental innovation needs to occur to recover. As Steve Ballmer said in June “I don’t think we are in a recession, I think we have reset,” he said. “A recession implies recovery [to pre-recession levels] and for planning purposes I don’t think we will. We have reset and won’t rebound and re-grow.” All content consumed will be digital, we can [only] debate if that may be in one, two, five or 10 years,” added Ballmer.
There are already opportunities that might be presenting the green shoots of growth, but they are already here, they’re just around the corner if we want them (iphone apps etc). We should not just be looking around the corner for the answers but over the horizon.
Natural selection applies in business as it does in nature, the first to evolve and meet the new requirements of the environment in which we compete will win, the others will die.
Digital brand value
Reading David Hepworth’s blog recently this passage stuck out for me in his post They’re investing in “digital magazines” and ignoring the elephant in the room
When you were selling a page of advertising in a glossy magazine you were selling two things: access to the readers and access to the environment of that particular title. Once you take the content out from between the covers you are no longer getting the benefit of that environment. There’s a legendary piece of research done years ago which showed people the same outfit in Vogue and the Daily Express. Respondents thought that the first dress was worth far more because it was in Vogue. They used to call this The Presenter Effect.
David Hepworth, 2009
Reading more about The Presenter Effect on the PPA website it is clear that the stronger a reader’s affiliation with a publication as a brand is, the higher the level of endorsement the publication gives the advertisement. However “the size of the effect will vary according to the circumstances – such as the strength of the advertised product’s personality, the strength of the magazine’s own branding, and the characteristics and experience of the reader.”
With the transient audiences that consumer websites suffer the affiliation between brand and advertisement surely suffers and will continue to suffer without the bounds of a controlled environment, which might consist of a front and back cover.
Digital content isn’t packaged or accessed in a way that lends itself to being traditionally authoritive, this may need to change if the same sort of commercial opportunities like homepage takeovers and advertorials are to contiue providing value to advertisers. The alternative is that all audience aligned advertising will migrate to targetable platforms like Facebook.
As The Presenter Effect demonstates though, even if an advert is targeted on Facebook becuase Facebook’s brand is so devoid of value and authority it does not carry the additional value that is gained from advertising on a content based branded website. This is why we will have to make our brands in some way portable and able to provide our audience multiple touch points, which they control.
There is still a massive amount of value to aligning advertising with a branded content provider. As we move forward to find new converged digital platforms on which we can create new brand aligned commercial partnerships we should keep in mind that our brands are incredibly important. We are not and should not become faceless content agregators, which don’t have the unique voice and personality advertisers can borrow.
2010: A year that demands productivity
Budgets have been cut, teams restructured and roles changed for thousands of workers in the publishing industry. Are we all clear on what we are doing or are we distracted and constrained by the additional packaging processes we are now burdened with?
I’m reading my second Seth Godin book at the moment, Small is the new big, which contains this post originally made on his blog in 2005. It is entitled “Godin’s Leveraged Effort Curve” and explains how as our career progresses we spend more time on packaging what we are doing and less time actually doing it.
An insightful web designer spends just a few minutes a day actually doing insightful web design.
“The baseline level of talent in most professions is pretty high, and the really exceptional people shine only rarely.
There’s too much overhead. A doctor needs to fill out forms, meet salespeople, answer phone calls, travel from hospital to hospital, manager her staff and every once in a while, see a patient. And most of those patients are run of the mill cases that a medical student could handle.
“As you get better at what you do, it seems as though you spend more and more time on the packaging and less on the doing.”
Seth Godin, 2005
It’s an interesting post and one which I feel I can easily identify with.
With this massive change that has occurred over the past 12 months the amount of packaging knowledge workers have to plough though in order to deliver their valuable insight has grown to the extent at which we are engaged in a game of pass the parcel in which the knowledge is packaged with so many layers when it is finally unwrapped it seems disappointing.
To improve the productivity of knowledge workers in the publishing industry we need to reduce the overheads and ship knowledge with a single layer of packaging which can be easily removed and even recycled.
2010: Think about audiences rather than users
“How many users have we got?” How many UK users have we got?” How many page views do we get per UK user?”
From a reporting point of view this is fine but from an editorial and production point of view this is a year to stop thinking about users and start thinking about an audience.
The mindset we are in when thinking about users is nondescript, impersonal, cold and distant. We need to do something to readdress this relationship.
The problem exists across the online publishing industry, because we are now so used to reporting ‘user’ numbers our products are developed to serve the need to build these user numbers and not foster an audience of readers and viewers. Users find our content through a search engine, decide if it’s what they are after, quickly read/watch it then leave, most likely returning to Google to start another search. My worry with this sort of user behaviour is that there is clearly no engagement with the brand, which we would traditionally have seen with an audience that perhaps subscribed to a magazine or picked up the same newspaper everyday.
The future of all brand aligned commercial or digital subscription activity will be built on the solid foundations of an engaged audience. With this in mind I believe the transient users entering from and exiting to Google are losing value faster than an investment in the Dubai property market.