Category: Media

A Handmade Thing in a Machine World

There was a curious phrase in the movie The Art of the Steal:

“A handmade thing in a machine world.”

The line was used to describe The Barnes Collection of art, as it was compared to the large institutional museums that we are all familiar with.

This had me considering many of the recent trends in online media. That, while businesses are obsessed with systems – with things that can be managed, processed, and scaled – the following ideas are rare and appreciated more than ever:

  • Authenticity.
  • Local.
  • Community.

This is why the web is empowering individuals. Because many people feel encumbered by the machine.

Why did people react so strongly in favor of the actions of the Jet Blue employee who just couldn’t take it any more? Because many people feel trapped by the systems they are a part of. They want desperately to flex their own muscle, to take initiative, to not have to follow someone else’s rules. What is interesting to me is not the actions that the Jet Blue employee took, but people’s reaction to it.

How are you connecting your brand to your customer in ways that don’t just throw a “product” at a “need.” People often look for deeper connections to a brand. How are you doing that?

This is why social media is revamping how people interact, and how brands reach their audience. Not because it is “marketing,” but because it can allow three things:

  • A more authentic connection to the real people within a brand to the real people in the market they serve. It connects them NOT via commerce, but by a shared interest.
  • It gives people pride and context in their location, allowing them to connect in new ways with people and places that they are surrounded by everyday. It gives them a face in a crowded faceless world.
  • It helps establish and strengthen a sense of community, be it regional or virtual.

A quote I read this morning:

“The world is craving distinction. People are looking for that something a little bit different, that can’t be replicated, and makes us feel special.”
— Emma Bearman

How are you helping others feel special? How are you empowering them to not just to buy a product or consume a piece of media, but to have a unique experience that gives them pride?

-Dan

Are Books, Magazines & Newspapers Dying? That’s Up To You. And Me.

Every day, we choose the future of media, be it books, magazines, newspapers, television, music and the like. Why? Because we vote for it with our actions, behaviors, and purchases.

We are empowered to save media.

Consider this exchange from a recent episode of the TV show Mad Men:

Man: “I’m in advertising.”

Woman: “You’re kidding. It’s pollution.”

Man: “So stop buying things.”

Likewise, the movie Food, Inc described the surprisingly complex system that our food industry has become. The movie concluded with a simple message: that we get to choose the future of our food, because we vote every day with the items we buy at the food store. Do you want food free of pesticides? Simply buy organic. Do you want food that isn’t made by a huge multinational conglomerate? Simply buy food from smaller companies whose practices you prefer.

I spend my days considering how media is changing, how these changes are empowering, and what they changes are destroying. When I wonder if the media is dying, I merely look around my home. I look at my behaviors and actions. Because my life, like all of our lives, are a petri dish of state of media. This is how I interacted with media in the past week:

  • I purchased more than 20 children’s books at a yard sale for $5.
  • I intently read most of the long articles in the most recent issues of The New Yorker and Rolling Stone.
  • I put the most recent issue of Runners World – a tip driven magazine – onto the magazine pile without even scanning through it. (Not a good sign. That pile is a black hole)
  • I returned four books to the library, two were half read, two I didn’t have time to open.
  • I dusted my “need to read” book pile, which currently has about 10 books in it.
  • I checked Twitter, Facebook, and Techmeme.com about 10 times each day. Maybe 20.
  • I reached for my iPad when getting into bed instead of the two books on my nightstand.
  • I spent hours browsing around YouTube on my iPad, sometimes sharing videos with my wife.
  • I downloaded the most recent episode of Mad Men on iTunes ($1.99)
  • I downloaded about 6 Apps to my iPad and iPhone. (all free)
  • I watched one movie on DVD via Netflix and started watching two others via their online streaming service.
  • I bought five used CD’s at a local music store.
  • I downloaded the new Arcade Fire album from Amazon.com for a mere $3.99.
  • I streamed BBC Radio 6 on my computer every day.

What does this say about the future of media that I am building? A few things:

  • Media is interwoven into many aspects of my life.
  • I consume a broad range of media, from digital to print.
  • I create and consume media.
  • The traditional media I consumed was largely free. For the items I did purchase, dollars mostly didn’t flow directly through to content creators or owners.

When I consider the future of books that I am creating, there is a simple fact I need to accept: if my primary source of obtaining books is the library and the second-hand market, then I can’t be surprised if the book industry changes. Because while I have done a lot to embrace books themselves, I have done little to support the organizations that sustain them in my consumption habits. I am not justifying this conclusion, I am simply observing my own behaviors and actions, and trying to understand what they may mean; the effect they have on the world, even if unintentional.

How are you creating the future of media?

-Dan

What Bob Dylan Can Teach Us About The Future Of Media

My life as I know it will soon disappear. Everything I have created in the past 37 years will cease to exist in a few days.

And I couldn’t be happier about it.

This has me considering how media is changing, how businesses are being run, and how we see opportunities and threats. There is a phrase in business I have never been comfortable with: “disruption.” To me, it focuses too much on the negative, too much on what was, not what will be.

Sometime this month, my first child will be born. And when this happens, in many ways, my life begins on that day. For one, I will change. I had dinner last night with someone who mentioned that when you walk out of the hospital with a newborn, the air is different, the sky is different. Every priority changes.

And for my child, everything I have done prior to the day he or she is born is simply a preface – that part of the book you skip over while getting to the meat of the story. Like when you watch a documentary about The Beatles, and they first review the economic status of Liverpool, England in the years before John and Paul met. You are just waiting for them to meet.

For those of you in media, in publishing; for the content creators and writers; for the marketers and business strategists, I wonder:

Are we so busy looking backwards at where we’ve been, that we aren’t focused on what we are becoming? That we are hoping too much that where we are going is where we have been?

I’m re-watching a documentary on Bob Dylan, and pausing it on a photo from his elementary school years. Here is a kid – a normal ordinary kid in a normal ordinary town – named Robert Zimmerman. Even though he has an appreciation for what was, this kid makes a decision:

To BECOME Bob Dylan.

His reasoning for the name change itself: “I just didn’t feel like I had a past, and I couldn’t relate to anything other than what I was doing at the present time.”

So Bob lived fully in the present. And in doing so, reshaped our culture. Even if you weren’t a fan, even if his music coincided with larger changes going on in the world, his influence amplified messages that changed us whether we liked it or not.

Most of Bob’s adult life has been spent becoming – creating his story. I remember he played a show in New Jersey a few years back, and how upset the audience was. Why? He played familiar songs to different tunes, changed tone and timing. The songs were the same, but they were unrecognizable. Bob was living in the moment.

But the audience only wanted to look back. They wanted to recapture something they felt years ago. Bob would have none of that. Bob is still becoming.

Are you?

Are we holding on to what was? To business models that are known and comfortable, serving needs that have since changed? Are we making decisions based on sentimentality – the feeling of holding a newspaper on a Sunday morning – or are we making decisions based on how we live today, with an eye on how we will live tomorrow?

Today is a new day. This is not a threat. This is not without appreciation for the past. It is merely an opportunity to become.

Media Companies Need To Be Developing iPad Apps Today

Yesterday I spoke at the “Custom Media Day” event in New York. About 110 people were in attendance, all from a variety of roles in large and small media companies.

One theme that came up again and again was the iPad. And it is clear to me that the iPad – today – is an opportunity that needs to be addressed. If you wait, it becomes a threat. Media companies should have learned this in the past 20 years – they waited to establish web-centric organizations, product lineups, and revenue streams, and suffered because of it.

Custom publishers have often relied on print media such as magazines as a core part of their business. Sure, we’ve all asked about whether “digital slates” would shift the marketplace, but those questions were often framed in a distant future.

Now, everyone’s perspective is changing. Because of the iPad, we KNOW the future will include this new medium. Those who are more apprehensive are asking “if” they need to address it now, or “when” will the adoption rate be significant enough to begin developing content for the iPad.

Of course, the answer to those questions is: the time is now. If you wait for everyone else to transition their business to include products and content for the iPad, it is not only a product differentiation they have over you, but an organizational differentiation. Start building those muscles from an organizational standpoint – considering how content is different, how sales is different, how interaction is different, how marketing is different.

Do experiments now – even if they are small scale and don’t deliver any business value. It’s better to learn in that manner now, than to wait, and bank the future of your company on your very first iPad venture 2 years down the road.

Here are some ways to consider why the iPad is an opportunity you need to address today:

  • It is a new medium, one that will require different types of products, content, and interaction. Learn what those differentiations are to your current lineup of products and services. Don’t look along traditional lines, such as only judging what magazine apps are doing on the iPad. Look at lots of games, at sketching apps, at productivity apps, at anything that requires interaction. Understand how these iPad work individually, and within the framework the iPad experience. Don’t look at how you replicate what you do now, look at what needs and behaviors make sense to address.
  • Understand how the competition will be able to outmaneuver you before they do. 20 years ago, newspapers would never have considered a free service such as Craigslist a threat. They would have cited bandwidth limitations, internet adoption rates, trust about online commerce, the cost of servers, and the inability for one man to scale a local service into a national phenomenon. And, while they may have been right when it comes to facts on paper, they essentially bet on all the wrong horses. That has cost the newspaper industry billions, taking away a primary source of revenue. Sitting on the sidelines with the iPad simply gives others room to explore and accept the possibilities before you do.
  • The biggest change the iPad will bring is not external to your company. Too many media companies underestimate the challenge of organizational change. This has a huge cost not just in dollars, but time. Most media companies are still grappling with how to evolve for the web. We are 15-20 years into the Internet age, and you still hear about reorganization after reorganization as media companies try to align their offline strategies to online strategies. Don’t underestimate the role of developing the mindset, skillset and organizational structure your employees need. Investing in the iPad will inherently be about investing in your employees.

Thanks!

-Dan

Making Digital Media More Personal

Many people enjoy print books, magazines and newspapers because of the personal meaning and behavior that is associated with them. Even for friends I know who fully embrace digital media, it is hard to replicate the feeling of spending a Sunday morning with The New York Times and a cup of coffee. Or, the feeling of hiding in a nook with a good book, and escaping the world. Hard to do that when reading a book on an iPad, when email, Twitter, Facebook and the entirety of the web, is merely a swipe away.

But I see the gap narrowing between the personal connection we have with print, and the personal connection we can have with digital media.

This morning, I’ve been checking out a new iPad app called Flipboard, which is a “social magazine” that presents social media content in a magazine-like format. See Robert Scoble’s in-depth review here. What I like about Flipboard so far is how it lives up to the iPad’s “lean back” philosophy – that reading magazine content is a casual and personal experience of discovery. A break from the day, not a drive towards digging and sharing in a Twitter-like manic fashion.

As publishers and media companies continue to feel pressure to innovate in the digital arena, while protecting their established revenue models, I want to consider how we establish personal connections with media. I’ve heard the statement again and again that nothing can replicate the feeling of holding a book, of putting it on your shelf, of looking at it for years – a validation and reminder of one’s experience with it. Perhaps this is a cognitive trophy of sorts? Or can we not admit that sometimes our bookshelves are a way to show off to visitors – how smart we are, how varied our interests. That they are physical manifestations of what we feel we know, what we have experienced, what we are passionate about. And let’s face it – nobody cares about how varied or extensive our RSS feeds are. Or how many Apps someone has.

Music has been a passion of mine for (eek!) decades. Beyond the music itself, records and CDs have always had personal meaning to me, which I described in a recent post about physical media vs lifestyle media.

For me, music is no longer about ownership. Instead, it is about experience, sharing, connection to the artist, connection to other fans, and personal filtering, be it by playlist or mashup.

As I play with Flipboard this morning, I am getting the sense that a similar evolution is happening with magazine content. I still subscribe to plenty of magazine – but more and more find myself reaching for my iPad. And with Flipboard, I’m wondering if it doesn’t have to be a choice between one or the other.

And that in the future, my relationship with magazines will be less about that quiet Sunday morning with a cup of coffee, and more about experiencing, sharing, commenting and filtering.

Arguments about the ‘death of print’ seem besides the point to me. I love physical media for all the obvious reasons, including some sentimental ones. But I don’t feel great about dumping a newspaper in a recycling bin everyday when I know I can read it on my iPad. And for all the calls that “printed books will NEVER die,” it seems more like a debate than us really just choosing to make personal choices as we each evolve as individuals.

In my life, I am realizing more and more that media is not about stuff. Quite frankly, I’m tired of dusting stuff. Rather, media for me is increasingly about experience and connection. And I have to say, my life feels fuller because of it.

Thanks!

-Dan