Any hooo Ive just checked out the winners of the 2009 webbies http://www.webbyawards.com and in almost every category one or two British companies have been nominated. Ov course this is dominated by the wonderful BBC and the guardian, both of which are excellent, but a few smaller UK companies have crept in.

Some of the really great winners who deserve recommendation are lister here

• http://www.keithtyson.com A magical experience in trendy black
• http://animoto.com awsome fun … quite a good laugh and .. a cool idea from the amazon cloud
• http://kids.tate.org.uk/ This is just great, a good place to play around with with your kids on a rainy day

Ov course I have to say bad luck to Dave for missing out on a award with spelling Bee … I was routing for you man !

Looking at this from a media and marketing point of view you can apply basic tools to the “non smoking” product. Let me introduce you to the adoption life cycle.

1. unawareness of the product
2. awareness of the product
3. belif in the product or solution
4. attitude to view product favourably
5. intension to commit to product
6. commitment to product

If you want people to do something new, then you have to help move them along the 6 point adoption cycle

What marketers do is segment their target demographic into these groups, Specific tactics can be employed to address each group. Target the bottle necks if most people dont know about the product then educate them (1 to 2), for those that know about it instill a belief in the products effect (2-3), and so on.

This method was used to make drink driving socially unacceptable, to increase sales of ipods and to rebrand the conservative party

The crazy thing about marketing the “non smoking” product is that exactly the same tactics were used to market somking to us in the first place.

The girl in this picture is in a buisness district of london and she is carrying the sony book reader.

This poster reads “A bomb won’t go off here because weeks before a shopper reported somone studying the CCTV camerars”.

This poster has been made by a professional media company, and has been placed in public places throughtout Britian. The chosen image is deliberatly amature and familiar so that you the viewer will engage with it. Quite simply it feels like you are in the image, doing an every day thing. The CCTV camera and the lamp post have an equal placement in the photo. Both objects are shown as depicted as benevolent helpers to our society. This poster is designed to invoke an emotional reaction. You look at the picture, not noticing the physical environment. Then as you read the text you realise that our society is at risk, and you feel fear, then as the cerebral message is delivered you realise that its safe because of CCTV … phew!

This poster reads “Secure beneth watchfull eyes”. Again this poster is very clever. The image shows an eye with the london transport logo in it floating above a typical london city scape. The design is in the style of art deco and suggests some kind of modern shiney metroland. The floating right eyes hover over us like friendly flying saucers.

Whether you believe CCTV is a natural progression for the bureaucratic need to protect our society from groups that have marginal interests or a state sponsored invasion of privacy is not important. What is clear is that state funded organizations are spending considerable money trying to show you that CCTV is being deployed to make you safe.

Filing behaviors such as tagging, categorization and placement within a hierarchy are a cost on your time and therefore a form of waste.
However, If the time to recall the item being stored is reduced by more than the cost of filing then it’s a worth while activity.

Hierarchical solutions to information storage have a high upfront investment in waste (the hierarchy itself), where as denormalized “broad and flat” solutions have a low initial investment in waste.

The reason that there is a swing towards the later solution is because modern search engines have a greater semantic understanding of the content and can recall faster, offloading the manual input needed by the operator onto a machine.

If you look to the future you will see that there is a massively increasing number of web based features for authoring and collaboration. These are either very low cost or GPL products. The idea that we would choose not to use this functionality and ignore efficiencies and cost reductions that it offers is unrealistic, the idea that a single supplier can meet the demand for all this new functionality is also unrealistic.

To have more business agility and lower costs a company must embrace a heterogeneous environment.

If you work for an ISP you may have access to the bandwidth usage metrics, and if you have seen them (as I have) you will notice that people are seriously into the iPlayer. The basic consumer TV behavior of settling into a TV programme is still there but the method of programme selection and distribution is totally different.

If you work for a telco and you dont manage to get your existing TV audience into the new streaming delivery then you will loose it to your competitors. As someone who has spent the last 15 years working in TV I dearly want this to not be true, but the tide has changed?

If you asked everyone
“Are there any adverts that you enjoy?”
the answer would also be yes (probably not so loud)

If you were to ask if there are any web adverts that you enjoy the answer would be a very loud “no”.
People do not enjoy them and do not react to them. Only a moron is going to have a purchasing decision influenced from something that is trying to get in the way of what they are reading.

The simple fact about web page adverts is that they are S*!T
If you want to attract someone, then you have to put something in it for them, the advert must create an emotional response.

The Content Creation link in the media value chain is where the content originates. The content creators are the musicians, artists, actors, web designers, games developers, coders, photographers, journalists, authors and critics.

As this group is so vast it is difficult to clearly identify the products and companies that they use however here is some of the key tools and services that are used by the more professional members.

Apple Mac
Apple have traditionally marketed their products at this group, hence the apple focus on highly visual user interface and easy to use design.

Adobe
The recent acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe consolidates their desktop media creation product suite.

Sony
The range of digital cameras has for a long time been the industry standard, however they are facing tough competition from new manufacturers who are providing high quality equipment at a lower cost.

Yamaha
This company provides a vast range of music focused content production equipment that range from beginner to expert.

There are also a number of new on line forum style services that provide tools and support for content creators. These are becoming increasingly more important.

Content ownership has not traditionally been in the hands of the content creator, and has normally been in the hands of a studio or commercial content organization. Modern technology has caused this step be come separated from both the content creator and the content publisher. The success of devices such as the “buffalo terra station” are testament to this

The content owner has a number of different needs, mainly licence and rights management and storage.

These have traditionally been handled by using a physical archive and product catalogue however there are new online products such as getty images and 3d02, that facilitate this.

It must be noted that the content owner and the content creator are increasingly the same person or company. This can be seen in the provision of products that facilitate both content creation and storage (sites such as eblogger).

The distribution and aggregation link in the value chain is the professional production of high quality content and the also the recycling, repackaging and re-branding of either user generated content or stock content.

This link is fulfilled by the studios, the web design and software companies, the TV production companies, games manufacturers, film companies and record labels.

Again on a world wide scale this is a vast group, with large notable organizations providing some exciting and high quality products. There are also millions of other smaller companies who perform the same role.

All of these organizations feed a whole ecosystem of different industries. Some examples of these are the professional production tool hire companies, event venues, filming locations and studios, moderators, event organisers, agencies, vehicle hire and recording studios.

Consumers will be most familiar with the brands that are within the distribution link in the value chain. These are brands such a UPC, Sky, the BBC or iTunes.

The providers of this link in the chain can roughly be divided into four groups

Internet Service Providers – These are the companies such as UPC, KPN and BT who sell bandwidth to consumers. Some of these organizations also have content delivery platforms.

Telecommunications companies – The traditional telephony provider is now behind a device that is capable of delivering high quality audio and normally also has a good screen. This has transformed this type of provider into a content delivery platform.

Broadcasters – These organizations acquire content, reassemble it into a linear stream and distribute it via radio frequency or satellite or cable. They sometimes make content and sometimes are also funded via the government. Some broadcasters provide devices that allow the consumer to view content and allow the broadcaster to derive revenue from the consumer.

Again this is a huge sector, that in turn feeds a whole ecosystem of providers, some of the companies that operate in this sector are so large that they can achieve a cost reduction by owning studios, networks, device manufacturers and infrastructure.

After deriving revenue directly from the consumer the players in this part of the value chain can also derive revenue from advertising sales. This gives rise to a whole raft of advertising companies, consumer behaviour monitoring and retailing companies.

Some of the type of companies that sell into this sector are
Satellite providers – Eutelsat, globcos
Call centre providers – Accenture, StarTek, NuComm
Network providers – UPC, Global crossing, BT, AT&T
Device manufacturers – Thompson, Pace, Apple, Nokia, Seimens, Samsung
Advertising platform providers – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo
Web technology and other high tech providers – Sun, Microsoft, Google
DRM and encryption providers – Microsoft, NDS, Nagra
Government

The media industry is all about you … the consumer. Every TV show, radio channel, book, magazine, computer game and web site has been market to you probably by a professional organization that derives revenue from you or from a provider within this delivery chain. It is also important to note that products you buy are also marketed to you via the same channels.

In addition to charges to the distribution companies that are a number of other companies who derive a revenue directly from the consumer. These are

Device manufacturers such as Nintendo, Apple, Nokia, Phillips, Sony. All of which provide an ever increasing range of products targeted at fulling your media consumption. Products that do this well and have effective DRM will normally hide the cost of the device in the media consumption however products that use open standards tend to be higher cost and place greater emphasis on style and usability.

Device accessories is also another lucrative source of revenue for many companies. As computing becomes ubiquitous and more and more mundane objects become intelligent you will see media consumption devices and fashion merging.

Payment brokerage is an important part of the consumer offering. Small content creators and content aggregators would prefer to derive revenue directly from the consumer without the cost of distribution. The payment brokerage (such as pay pal) offers the consumer protection, and offers the content producer a quick way to monetize their content.

In 1993 there were 50 large US media companies. Acquisition and merger have consolidated this number down to just 6 very very very large media organizations (such as Time warner, news corp, disney, viacom, and so on).

All of these organizations are heavily investing in web technology and Internet media distribution. We can expect to see of these companies merge with an online provider.

Google revenue is derivative from advertising placed on or around media consumption and is a revenue share with the content owner or distributor. However this is a limiting revenue source; we can expect to see Google acquiring content or content companies thus allowing them to derive 100% of the revenue.

Google is also investing in cable TV and mobile operating systems possibly as frameworks for them to hang advertising business. Interestingly Microsoft are giving up their content provider aspirations and are adopting Google like advertising business model.

The sony book reader is the must have Christmas gift of 2008 (possibly a little overpriced in the UK) . This new media device will open up a new platform for the sale of electronic books. Sony’s and Waterstones hope is that this will be to books what itunes is to music.

Broadcast and post-production automation is high on everyone’s agenda. This goes hand in hand with the exploitation of the back catalog and provides a new high tech market for production and broadcast companies. This is offset by the production cost dropping massively with new cheap cameras and open source software leading to an exponential increase in the amount of content.

Think Bandwidth! Bandwidth! Bandwidth! all this content and content consumption is driving demand on bandwidth up and up and up.

Is Interactive TV dead? the answer is no. far from it.
It just that’s its not on TV its on the iPlayer or VOD instead. And guess what … all the old iTV patents are still applicable. Acquisition of a failing iTV company that owns patent in this area is now being seen as an investment for the future.

Advertising is the engine of the media industry, so with the users being able to fast forward, skip and generally avoid the adverts where is the revenue going to come from? A short term solution is advertising pretending to be content, either in the form of product placement or in the form or well made watch able adverts.

The amount of community generated content has exploded, and this explosion has only just begun. In the near future we can expect to see every piece of human art, cometary and information in video, audio and written form. The number of undiscovered but talented directors, artists and actors is vast. These people will find that youtube is the simplest route to their audience.

The evil overlord of the media industry is the “Minimum Guaranteed Return” if you buy content from a studio, then they will set you a MGR that you have to meet when reselling the content to the public. These MGR’s are falling (mainly due to the change in audience behavior). This will make a big difference to the VOD offering of the content aggregator.

Home shopping channels are dying if not dead, people that have the internet … don’t home shop.

The days of the closed platform are over, mobile operators, cable TV companies games console companies are working how they can open their platform and still derive revenue.

The media market in China is now opening up. It is not uncommon for a TV Show to have 100 million viewers! figures that are unheard of in Europe and USA. Traditional mass media companies that are trying to avoid the change to new media are venturing into this new market.

Content owners that fail to recognize this are in big BIG trouble.

The back catalog is no longer an expensive burden requiring highly trained film archivists and specialists. It is instead a rich mine, full of hidden gems, and precious artifacts. But as the market becomes saturated the window of opportunity for the exploitation of this catalog … is closing, content owners need to digitize, index and sell their content while the price is still high.

The diversity of content is ever increasing. Lectures, animations, talks and TV programs are being distributed on nearly every conceivable subject can be consumed ondemand and online. Subsequently new amateur and semi professional content brands are appearing, often with massive following. Media aggregation based companies are keen to own and exploit these new brands.

Is is a safe prediction that the daily news papers will be dropping their print versions soon, and as this is this is as a reaction to social change rather than a driver it is also very unlikely that we will be seeing a repeat of the Wapping dispute.

The music industry is the pensioner of the media world, its nicely tucked up in its woollen blanket watching the world go by from the bay windows of its retirement home, it occasionally gets out of its chair and shakes its rhythm stick at a metaphorical youngster, for example associating music purchase with another retail purchase, or threatening to sue illegal down loaders or even putting on a big stadium gig. Music exec’s have to face up to the fact they must change their delivery format. Last.fm is an example of where they are going.

Note that apples recent announcement that they are going to remove DRM is a massive leap forward (especially if yo like live music)

There have been many developments to enable media consumption on the cell phone. Nearly all of these initiatives are in failure mode, however the media distribution organizations and hardware manufactures are only increasing their efforts. There is a very high reward for the company that unlocks this potential market.

Just beware … in no other sector is Sturgeon’s revelation more relevant than media .