Mike Butcher

Does the UK’s creative sector actually know how to make sense of the opportunities the Internet provides?

I asked myself this question while chairing a panel about the opportunities for SMEs in the brave new world of “Web 2.0″ last night.

It was an event by Cass Creatives and InSync. Cass Creatives is a joint initiative from Cass Business School’s Department of Management working with iKnowHow, while InSync is a showcase programme for London’s audio-visual and digital media sectors.

Somewhere between 50-70 people crammed into the Zero One venue in Soho to hear a panel on “Digital Utopia – Fact or Fiction”.

The premise of the debate was this: the so-called Web 2.0 environment looks like it could create new opportunities for creative SMEs. The old adage of ‘build it and they will come’ never really worked until we had the likes of Google, and more specifically enthusiastic bloggers to talk up and promote new digital projects and businesses. This is the ’social media’ people keep banging on about – the ability to get noticed, so long as what you do gains approval by enough people talking online.

A lot of big online businesses have actually started out with altruism at their core. Craigslist, Myspace and, even Google (which famously said “Don’t be evil”) started out as pretty simple projects designed to give people a platform. They are now, of course, million or billion dollar businesses.

The speakers included:

Andy Bell, Managing Director, Mint Digital which will launch Bloombox – a Web 2.0 platform that enables broadcasters to leverage their media profile to create user-generated shows. Michela Ledwidge, filmmaker, MOD Films, who is currently in post production on her first 35mm film production, Sanctuary. This will be unique in that elements of the film will be released under a Creative Commons license for re-mixing by the online community. Sameer Padania, manager, Interworld Radio, and Editor of Africavox is currently working on a project researching relationships between mainstream and ethnic media in the UK. Martin Stiksel, co-founder, Last.FM, is working on a Last.FM, a online community of music fans who collaboratively rate music.

However, despite this eminent panel I got the feeling from the audience that they didn’t quite ‘get it’.

One questioner asked “Yes but how do we make money and sell our content online?’. This seems fair, but largely missed the point of what the panel was talking about.

What is going on right now online is different to what happened six years ago. Today, anyone can create online content and get the online community to rate it, talk about it and distribute it. The affordability of online tools and widespread broadband has created a totally new market.

Some examples: YouTube.com is a new way for film and video makers to distribute short-form video. Google Video does the same but even allows you to sell it. iTunes and iPodder now allow anyone to create an audio or video podcast and have it distributed to a large potential audience very easily. Blogger, Typepad and any number of blog hosting services allow anyone to write on the Net and be discovered. RSS aggregators and mashups are allowing good work to bubble to the surface.

Even at the simplest level, emailing your friends and asking them to link to or tell other people about your online work can work wonders. Moblog UK for instance was created just by the founders emailing their friends and a handful of key influencers.

The simple fact is that today, even the kids in the street can create and edit pretty interesting creative works. Sure, this is still a step away from actually creating a business, but without getting out there and trying, nothing will ever happen.

There is an issue about culture here. In the US, entrepreneurs are respected MORE if they have tried and failed a few times. In the UK, it seems you only have one chance, hence why so many potential businesses never start because people are just too afraid of screwing up and attracting ridicule.

But guess what? That old world needs to die. Creative people need to get out there, start working with clever online developers and just seeing what happens.

Click to download a short interview with Jon Snow at the Media Guardian Changing Media Summit. We asked him about his view that the media should collaborate with bloggers.

Simon Waldman spoke at The Media Guardian’s Changing Media Summit:

“People will place a lot more value on an engaged audience. This is a real value to media owners. Increasingly you’ll be judged by the level of engagement with your audience.”

“That’s our challenge. We know how to publish a fixed/closed entity in print and online but this new world is now much more open and decentralised.”

Chris Dobson, general manager, sales and trade marketing, MSN International spoke at The Media Guardian’s Changing Media Summit.

PVRs are a big change in media, he said in a speech which concentrated on the power of online advertising to a largely mainstream media audience and understandably pushed Microsoft’s position in the market place.

Tivo already over 10% penetration in home. Projection in the next 3-4 years is that it will reach 50%. Similar to VCR revolution. But most people with Tivos skip ads – a big problem for the US TV networks.

Online media won’t overtake TV, but collectively it will change the landscape, he thinks.

Multi-tasking in the home is growing, so search results peak for keywords after a TV ad is run. Consumers are using online as the interactive part of TV. Teenagers, are the best example of this. Their ability to take in messages form any angle is key.

Meanwhile print is in trouble, and in peaked in 2000, and thats gone on a slide since 2002. The print world is waking up to the fact they have content.

Murdoch was “still in denial” a year ago – his epiphany was in April 205 (Newspaper conference quote).

23rd Sept the New York Times slashed 500 jobs because of the Internet.

Google is a household name in UK and they’ve never spent any money on advertising.

MSN spaces is up to 25m members without any ads (global or UK?? he didn’t say. I suspect global).

Day-parting in TV advertising concentrates on evening peak times, but research shows that online means it’s easier for TV brands to reach people at work.

% Day after recall: TV fragmentation in US shows brand recall has been dropping since 1965.

Microsoft thinks ultimately there will be no difference between online and off line in the future and is investing in ‘digital convergence’.

Devices like TVs will be “repurposed”.

Broadband is driving the online advertising revolution. Correlation is tied at the hip with broadband.

Todays consumer is “intelligent, empowered, sceptical, connected, time pressed, has no loyalty, and is ahead of the curve.” They are ahead of the ‘conservative’ media industry.

He made a big play about Ajax and Microsoft Live.

Vista got delayed because Microsoft wasn’t happy with security.

There was $45bn worldwide online advertising by 2008.

Online for the consumer in control breaks down into information, which needs to be accessible from anywhere.

He says he migrated form Hotmail to Windows Live, which preloaded every contact I had on my PC (interesting that they talk up the security aspects then, since this smacks of the sort of this Plaxo does, and very annoyingly).

HEADLINE:

Microsoft.com is planning to take advertising in the next few months, as part of a rebranding of all the Microsoft products.

TV media planners or buyers are not talking the same language of media revolution however.

In 2000, online was a 1% medium. IN 2004 online became larger than radio. MSN thought by 2006 it would be third behind TV and newspaper, but it happened in 2005.

Note that “Get it” is coming back as a buzz-phrase – sprinkled liberally thoughout his speech.

Internet IS a mass medium, is almost too measurable, and is ‘always prime-time since the consumer is always in control.

The creative industry has been slow to to embrace online. and thinks online does not have impact – he thinks they are wrong.

The new rules of engagement are: search has relevancy built in as the keyword generates the advert, and the same is true of display. However, the notion of behaviour targeting is a “new movement” (Ed: actually this is not new, as Doubleclick tried to do this in the late 1990s but was stopped because of privacy laws in the US.)

He thinks there is big change happening in media, but not in the media industry.

Guy Phillpson of the Internet Advertising Bureau spoke at The Media Guardian's Changing Media Summit.

He said the IAB doesn't push any one publisher when talking about online advertising. The IAB has large and smaller members, he said.

"We're format agnostic about it. We talk more in terms of disciplines like rich media advertising, not about platforms."

"If there's something [and advertising format] that's proprietorial then a publisher might get mentioned."

Carolyn McCall, chief executive, Guardian Newspapers Ltd confirmed today that the Guardian Unlimited is on course to make a £1m profit online this year. She was speaking at The Media Guardian’s Changing Media Summit.

This is not bad given that the majority of this will be purely from online advertising.

However, the start-up costs for Guardian Unlimited were in the region of £10m…

Hugh Macleod, spoke about how he had worked with Thomas Mahon, bespoke Savile Row tailor, to launch English Cut.

He says having a blog was much easier to "control the conversation" than going through mainstream media – especially after being strung along by some national newspaper journalists, attempting to get media profile.

Since they launched the blog, inside 6 months he saw a 300% rise in sales.

Tom Coates, ‘tech development’, London, Yahoo! said this (paraphrased):

The shift is in helping people create content and make use of it. The content they produce is part of an environment which is greater than the sum of it’s parts, and the hosting company can turn that into a larger resources, so I’d probably put that as what social media ‘is’.

People may be reluctant to stick ads onto user generated content but you can get lots of loyalty to a site and one of the common services in UGC sites is is bumping up the most popular content to the top of the pile. People could also be selling rights to photos so others can make other products, like posters etc.

Buying social media sites is an expensive way of going about it.

Jon Snow, presenter, Channel 4 News spoke at The Media Guardian's Changing Media Summit.

He had a lot to say:

He doesn't see any problem with new media I just see and "erosion of crap." In the end the webmaster is a key figure of any organisation. Utter gold dust can come flying your way.

"Old media used to be so one-way and irresponsible. Now we have a way of introducing material that we would never have had before,."

He mentioned an SAS men who could be brought into a show because they'd emailed in, whereas before it would have taken "endless lunches."

3G mobile phones with video are great.

Doctor Ali Fadil – a GP in Faluja who gave Chanel 4 news video into the barbarity of US troops.

Snow gets 20 direct communications a day at least. He has no worries other than time management.

We're into a new world and the only issue is how we manage it.

I can't see the secret society surviving. We're entering an unprecedented period of anarchy and it's fantastic.

The media's problem is merely to know how to use this stuff.

Transparency is an issue. There should no longer be a one-way street in media activity.

Blogging, vlogging etc is often considered an extension of the day-job in media firms, but there is a danger of "stopping being a journalist and just becoming a transmitter."

You can't con all of the people all of the time, otherwise we wouldn't be here.

Libel is a strong consideration. The lawyer has grown in stature beyond recognition. And is now a massive presence in our newsroom. Libel is a huge aspect and we have an repressive system. All the web has down is power the existing system.

Snowmail has to go through lawyer now.

There was a weekend when Amazon outed book reviewers by mistake and the same applies to Comment is Free – they know who comments.

Click to download a short interview with Jon Snow at the Media Guardian Changing Media Summit (see Mediabites.com for coverage). I asked him about his view that the media should collaborate with bloggers.