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"The user is more important than the advertiser, more important than the developer, more important than anyone else. At the end of the day, it's the user who's going to drive the advertising dollars."
Published in The New York Times on February 28, 2008 and written by Seth Schiesel, the article gives a general broad stroke on the perspective shift in gaming brought on by Nintendo's Wii, whose design and marketing incorporate and magnify the social experience of gaming, setting the console and its manufacturer apart from its competitors.
As Gaming Turns Social, Industry Shifts Strategies - New York Times
"Traditionally game advertisements, whether in print or on screen, have focused, naturally, on showing the game. But as it introduced the Wii, Nintendo devised a marketing breakthrough: Rather than show the game, show the players. In an entirely counterintuitive, brilliant move, most of Nintendo’s ads are now shot from the perspective of the television back out at the audience, showing families and groups of friends having fun together. Nintendo realized that emphasizing the communal experience of sharing interactive entertainment can be more captivating than the image of some monster, gangster or footballer on the screen."
Community Interest Companies - FAQ Annotated
Social enterprises are diverse. They include local community enterprises, social firms, mutual organisations such as co-operatives, and large-scale organisations operating nationally or internationally. There is no single legal model for social enterprise. They include companies limited by guarantee, industrial and provident societies, and companies limited by shares; some organisations are unincorporated and others are registered charities." from ' Social Enterprise - a strategy for success'
A CIC is a new type of company, designed for social enterprises that want to use their profits and assets for the public good. CICs will be easy to set up, with all the flexibility and certainty of the company form, but with some special features to ensure they are working for the benefit of the community.
"A social enterprise is a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or in the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners.
Social enterprises are an exciting and fast-growing sector. Yet some of the legal forms were originally designed for completely different types of organisation. The Government wants to support the sector by creating a modern and appropriate legal vehicle and to help raise their profile.What are the differences between community interest companies and charities?
- Charities must be established exclusively for charitable purposes, but a CICs can be established for any lawful purpose, as long as their activities are carried on for the benefit of the community
- Charities have certain tax advantages that CICs do not have
- In return for those advantages, charities are subject to more onerous regulation than CICs
- The CIC legal form was specifically designed to provide a purpose-built legal framework and a “brand” identity for social enterprises that want to adopt the limited company form
- CICs will be free to operate more “commercially” than charities (e.g. CICs limited by shares can pay dividends to individual shareholders, subject to a cap), but stakeholders in CICs will still have the assurance of community benefit provided by the asset lock and transparency about their activities ability through the community interest report
Why be a community interest company rather than a charity?
There is no doubt that charitable status is exactly right for many who wish to further charitable objectives and it is likely that most organisations operating for the public benefit (and who are eligible for charity status) will choose to be charities, not least for the fiscal advantages.
The sort of people who will want to set up a CIC will typically be entrepreneurs who want to do good in a form other than charity. This may be because:
- They are looking to work for community benefit with the relative freedom of the non-charitable company form to identify and adapt to circumstances, but with a clear assurance of not-for-profit distribution status.
- Members of the board of a charity may only be paid where the constitution contains such a power and it can be considered to be in the best interests of the charity. It means that, in general, the founder of a charity who wishes to be paid cannot be on the board and must give up strategic control of the organisation to a volunteer board, which is often unacceptable.
- The definition of community interest that will apply to CICs will be wider than the public interest test for charity.
- CICs will be specifically identified with social enterprise. Some organisations may feel that consequently this is a more suitable than charitable status.
"Playing on the plural word for "Forum" this new web video network's goal is to bring thoughtful discourse, discussion and debate on a variety of political, social and cultural topics to an online audience. From speeches to book readings, this is not bite-sized infotainment. Not surprisingly, founder Brian Gruber is a former executive at C-SPAN. Still in beta, the site is a loud answer to those looking for substance with their interweb styles." (from AdCritic.com)
Keep in mind that these videos are not merely informative, but vehicles for building value in the brand of each YouTube personality, especially for a YouTube personality like Renetto. He is marketing himself and his "special" status to the corporate community and to the YouTube audience.
He and others are also acting as a kind a quasi-market test for the corporate entities that they have contact with.
Renetto is a "normal" guy from Ohio, who apparently came on to YouTube as one of the mass, but has built a kind of brand identity as the un-official spokesman for YouTube users - with the accompanied scorn and support of YouTubers.
He obviously leverages this to establish relationships with corporate entities as well as other users. This is for his own advantage, and that has a negative connotation for some on YouTube. So there is an aspect of "credibility”, that is unique and complicated in this format of distribution. YouTubers tend to poo poo polished content, or content that is not "real" as much as they tend to go into a frenzied delight over the controversy. It is a distribution channel with its own content expectation and delivery style tensions. How credible serialized content is depends on a delicate interplay of reality and verisimilitude.
I will not have access to the Internet between November 4th and the 18th, because I will be traveling on a sail boat from Grenada to Antigua. Please excuse the blog interruption.
I leave you for the time being with my undigested thoughts on the broad and relevant topic “the evolving nature and aesthetics of creative content”.
First, it covers the evolving structures of storytelling via new media. Examples of new media structures are foureyedmonsters.com and lonelygirl15.com; and interactive television content that is created on the web to supplement traditional shows. Reality TV is obviously interactive but LOST is the best original dramatic example of this interactivity; and then of course, their is the growth of user generated content from channels like YouTube and CNN): What do these new storytelling structures look like? How are these structures similar and different to their predecessors?
Television, can have a relationship with the internet that film cannot. I imagine that the nature of going to the movies will still demand High Imaging that allows for suspension of disbelief...but there is a degrading of image quality and techniques that lower-end digital technologies have supplanted into the aesthetic psyche of many younger viewers – just look at the ads created and aimed at the under 30 demographic. Old tricks. Why is that? Perhaps because they are expert consumers of electronic stories and know it’s manufactured.... They are deconstructing the image.
Another thought, I think of Mark Chiolis’ (Grass Valley) remark to me in my interview with him:
"Today there are a number of thought provoking questions that are being asked. What happens when there is a true RGB 4k (there isn't one today) sensor that rivals, if not exceeds, that of today's film stock? One of the arguments for film is that people like the "look" which includes the grain and movement through the gate. What happens when the "game-boy" generation takes over? Having grown up with "video" is this the "look" they want to see? Will they have a different set of standards to compare to?"
Film (theatrical features) is (are) different. I think they will demand even more heighten realism and I suspect that Digital 3D will become increasingly popular in that format in the years to come (an outgrowth of the gamers demand for a heightened experience).
What are the fundamental relationships that the younger generation seem to be exploring via this new media content and traditional content? Some may say the subject matter is generally solipsistic, passive - an outgrowth perhaps of the individuals solitary communion with the anonymous web or with media itself...but look at the bleeding edge technology and science of virtual reality. Look at the studies of the psycho-physical effects of these media tools on users in medical and defense research. Passive is not the right word to describe this relationship. Interactive is better. But with what (media) and whom (other players)?
I say one cannot understand this generation unless they have a MySpace page and love it. Why? There is a freedom of movement in the field of archetype and symbol that enables both artist and audience to observe without disclosure, absorb without acquisition, and create without the demand for conclusion. The repetition of archetypical representation uncovers both artist's and audience's collective mythologies, thereby revealing: The anonymous is personal.
Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.”
How have television and new media influenced the sensibility and subject matter of creative content. I see the primary relationship that the younger generation is exploring, is with the media itself (I am not talking about the news media, I am talking about media itself). You may critiqued the passivity of video games...but, perhaps that passivity masks an exploration with identity that is not understood by non-participants and therefore disregarded as irrelevant. I say this exploration is powerful and emergent in movies like Adaptation and I Heart Huckabees. This relationship between identity and media is increasingly portrayed as mystical, interactive, and “high touch”. Their is a propensity for role playing, a desire for authenticity coupled with a disdain of truthiness and even traditional ideology. For dramatic content and docu-reality, they create satire and even sarcasm (the mass may also create cynicism, but I would never characterize this generation as cynical. They know the line of complicity runs through each of them).
In some respects, “reality shows” seem like an outgrowth of this propensity for role-playing, a study of the dramas of personality. In deconstructing the “sit com” and “documentary” and even the “commercial brand”, there appears to be an investigation of topics like truth and being.
Regarding lonelygirl15.com. As one writer I spoke with remarked, “Entertainment is always flirting with reality. It seems that things that don't aim to be thought of as real do a much better job. Verisimilitude, it's what it's all about."
Is there a common thread in the subject and structures explored by newer creative content, a post-post modern sensibility? See the NYT’s article, “Brand Underground”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/magazine/30brand.html?ex=1311912000&en=82edb890b1d6c977&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
There are several larger forces manifesting in the recent development of MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach for example. One of them is the evolution of brand: how the concept has extended itself into the realm of branded communities in the digital age. Gamers (the generation under age 35 and including generations X and Y) have grown up in a world saturated by brand so that the phenomenon is now a vehicle for personal expression and identity beyond the ostensible confines of a corporate mandate (well, except their own). Commentators like Rob Walker (The Brand Underground, NYT) have elucidated the social phenomena well, however, they tend to look at the expression as another failed modernist attempt to beat the system. Hand me the cyanide, the revolution is over and we lost!
Boomers are wired to view creativity as a choice between “selling out” or “sticking it to the man” and the quest for the great society as a dogmatic battle between the mediocrity of relativism and the virtue of absolutes. To use former bohemian terminology, today’s generation does not have that hang up. “They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes David Brooks, “because this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” The suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. “The total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
I am a broken record, but like dissident antipoliticians from the former Czechoslovakia, who used satire and absurdity to highlight the fact that in a postmodern consumer society the “line of complicity runs through each of us," this new American generation distrusts political grandstanding and even traditional forms of organized politics. Hence, the popularity of so-called no brow satires like South Park, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show.
The playwright Heiner Mueller once remarked that the potency of theater in his native East Germany was based on the absence of other ways of getting messages across to people. "As a result," Mueller says, "Theater here has taken over the function of other media in the West," before now. While the never ending surface chatter of talking points and double speak on both the left and the right continue to erode the value of words, they also inflate the space between the lines.
None of this mentions how the game generation take globalization for granted and the growing crossover of cultural content from other traditions, “bollywood”, Japanese Anime et cetera.
Excerpts from Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Whose content is it anyway?:
"Media executives are embracing user-generated sites, encouraging amateur talent to upload photos and videos. But, asks Kate Bulkley, who should own the copyright?
Advertising Age - Microsoft Soft-Launches Soapbox to Compete Against YouTube
- Officially in test mode, Soapbox is entering what many see as a supersaturated market, at present led by YouTube, which drew a staggering 34 million visitors in August.
According to the Financial Times, Fox News Corp is looking to establish a social networking site for the mainland Chinese market with local partners.
Here are excerpts from related articles:
MySpace China planned by Murdoch's News Corp
The local partners - which could own up to 50 per cent - would help make the content suitable for a Chinese audience, Murdoch said, though it was unclear whether any particular aspects of the site might have to be curtailed due to government restrictions.
"MySpace is expanding beyond the United States market to Europe and Asia, and is investigating and assessing opportunities in various markets including China," said Chen Yonghong, public relation director for News Corp's Beijing representative office. "It is still at a very preliminary stage."
MySpace in China is likely to have local partners, who would own around 50 percent of the Chinese version, deal with complaints and ensure suitable content for Chinese audience, reported the Financial Times. MySpace is adding about 1.5 million users globally a week and has more than 100 million registered subscribers.
Before News Corp, Paris-based meetic.com, Europe's largest social networking Website, set up its Chinese version in July by working with YeeYoo.com, one of China's leading social networking service providers.
YeeYoo has more than 6.5 million registered users in China.
MySpace Screening Borat in Six Countries - ComingSoon.net
Excerpts:
"MySpace announced today that it has joined forces with to launch MySpace's first international film screening event, Black Carpet."
"On September 20, MySpace members in six countries will have the opportunity to attend an exclusive screening of http://comingsoon.net/films.php?id=12649 (MySpace.com/Borat), the first international event of the Black Carpet screening series (MySpace.com/BlackCarpet). The screening event will be the first time MySpace's global community has simultaneous access to an exclusive event hosted by the website."
"International expansion is one of the most important initiatives for the company and the Black Carpet series illustrates our response to users demanding local and relevant events in their market," said Travis Katz, VP of international development for MySpace. "As we continue our community expansion, this type of programming defines the intimate access and local experiences we'll continue to bring to MySpace users worldwide."
"For access to the MySpace Black Carpet screening events, users must join the Black Carpet profile (MySpace.com/BlackCarpet) as well as the profile of their favorite film to receive bulletins with details on locations and showtimes."
MySpace cowboys - September 4, 2006
Excerpts:
With Murdoch's backing, the site has an astonishing number of projects underway: a Google pact to sell text ads on the site; a MySpace Records label; a VoIP feature to let users call one another; international sites in Britain, Australia, France - with nine other countries in Europe and Asia coming soon. DeWolfe counts 20 new products in the development pipeline. "We think we can extend MySpace around the world and it can be a major force globally," says Murdoch, whose Internet ambitions have helped drive News Corp.'s stock up 18% this year.
PC Pro: News: Google wants its MTV
Google and MTV have begun a flirtation by signing a deal to distribute MTV clips through the Google network. The Official Google blog says that clips from MTV and its associated channels such as VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central will start appearing on a site near you that is part of Google's AdSense programme. It is only a toe in the water but may be the prelude to a much bigger alliance.
It is only recently that MTV has woken up to the threat posed by YouTube. It was widely expected that the new 'Flux' web site would be a rival to YouTube. However, at the moment Flux is merely a shop for selling ringtones and pictures. By teaming with Google, MTV may be hoping to use the Internet giant's muscle to challenge YouTube's encroachment into music video.
Advertising Age - MediaWorks - 'Snakes on a Plane' Rakes in Lackluster $15.25 Million
Excerpt:
The figure, which included $1.4 million from late-night screenings Thursday, was good enough to capture the top spot in an otherwise lackluster frame.
"There was so much inflated hype," David Tuckerman, New Line's president of distribution, said yesterday. "We thought we'd do better."
New Line had stoked the "Snakes" fever for months, throwing open the door for fans to create their own artwork, videos, music and more, using what's usually closely guarded intellectual property. Fans took the bait, starting a groundswell of interest in the movie long before it launched.
The film's website has attracted more than 3 million unique visitors, while fan-created Snakes on a Blog has attracted half a million.
The box office receipts for "Snakes" might confirm what some industry marketers already suspected: There's no real way to equate internet chatter with consumers' intent to see a movie.
"It was very risky and very audacious for New Line to let the audience become part of the filmmaking process, and I commend them for that," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations Co. "But just because people are very aware of the movie doesn't necessarily mean they have a desire to see it. It shows that there's no direct correlation between all that online buzz and ticket sales."
Box office revenues are up about 7% so far this year, Exhibitor Relations figures show, and attendance has increased 3.7% from 2005.
MySpace selects Google search system | Business News | Reuters.com
Excerpt:
News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media said on Monday that signed a multiyear deal to use Google Inc.'s search and advertising system to direct traffic across its network of Internet sites, including the wildly popular MySpace.com.
Guardian Unlimited Business | | MTV hooks up with Google
MTV is to supply segments of its programmes to the thousands of websites and blogs affiliated with search giant Google.
MySpace a launch pad for next-gen media biz
Excerpts:
It's too soon to know the future of paid content downloads on MySpace, having recently launched its first offering: $1.99 downloads of the Fox series "24," sponsored by Burger King. However, paid search represents a considerable revenue-generating opportunity for MySpace and a search partner.
News Corp. sculpting bold plan for growth
Excerpts:
News Corp. in the past 12 months has been forging media's future by buying and riding the likes of social networking leader MySpace.com and video gamer IGN to meteoric heights while also enjoying record performance levels at its core broadcast and cable television, film and print operations, even as they struggle to reinvent their business models.
FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - News Corp to sell films online
Excerpts:
News Corp’s internet properties, including MySpace.com, are to start selling Fox films and television content on a download-to-own basis in an effort to create a foothold in this potentially huge new digital market.
Advertising Age - MediaWorks - MTV Wants to Be Marketers' On-Ramp to the Web
Here are some exceprts:
Around the Google deal, it really is the first time where anybody in the content business can use video and create a new content economy on the internet by marrying a video to an advertisement and allowing smaller owners to place that on their sites. It promises to be a groundbreaking way for content to be distributed and monetized on the internet. We brought this idea to Google. Eric Schmidt and I negotiated the deal and it's the first of many [MTV will] be doing in the digital media space.
USNews.com: Money: MySpace for boomers
Excerpts:Now a new venture, Eons, aims to give baby boomers a place to gather online with other people in the same age group. Jeff Taylor, founder of the popular job website Monster, created this MySpace-like site with features specifically crafted for a 50-plus, Web-savvy user. In fact, you can't even log into the website unless you are over age 50.
LONDON - MTV's college network mtvU has acquired Y2M, the largest interactive network of online college newspapers in the US.
Excerpts and Highlights:
Questions had been swirling for months about whether the upstart, which now dishes up 100 million daily videos, was crossing copyright boundaries by letting its members upload videos with little oversight. What was surprising was that it was an individual who fired the first shot -- Robert Tur, an independent photographer famous for filming the 1992 Los Angeles riots -- instead of a big Hollywood studio or major music label.
EContentMag.com: Group Members Only Launches MySpace Type Technology for Businesses
Group Members Only has announced a MySpace type social networking technology to help corporations solve issues related to collaboration, innovation, communication, and networking between employees, customers, vendors, and partners. Group Members Only was recently launched by a group of business and technology entrepreneurs whose background include Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Oracle, Peoplesoft, and Amazon.com.
Will the growing segmentation and narrowcasting of television and the Internet erode this dominance? How will the intermix of television and the internet contribute to this? I ask myself these questions.
I believe U.S. media and entertainment are undervalued assets in the American economy. It trendy to say that American films are of poor quality and that our media is valueless. Certainly, the media may deserve criticism for becoming in some respects the "un-ratified fourth branch" of American government. However, outside the context of THAT discussion, U.S. media and entertainment industries are the only U.S. sectors that boast a surplus balance of trade with nearly every nation in the world. That deserves some attention, consideration, and respect.
Creative copyright industries will always engender debate as to their cultural and social effect. Since these industries are at the core of the emerging global creative economy we can expect these discussions to become more heated as time goes on: whether the topic be American movies, Disneyland, or cloning. The point I want to make is this: These debates about cultural effect can also overpower our discussions about these sectors' legitimate economic benefit. Many countries may also use these debates as smoke screens to cover up their protectionist policies.
Media heir wants 'Airbus of the web' - Financial Times - MSNBC.com
Excerpts:
Christoph Mohn, the heir to the Bertelsmann media empire, has called for Europe to create an Airbus of the internet, to compete with US giants such as Google and Ebay.
"So far, we have not built up a sizeable internet company in Europe," he said. "It's not good for the European Union. Nano-technology, biotechnology and the internet are the growth industries but in most of these the position is not good for Europe."
Mr Mohn endorsed the controversial Franco-German plan to build a state-funded European search engine called Quaero, saying: "It's a little bit like Airbus Industries. I don't think it requires consolidation [of Eur-ope's internet industry] but it needs co-ordination."
Quaero was launched this year with initial funding of €1.7bn ($2.2bn) to develop voice-based and picture-based search technologies. "[Quaero] is not just about 'let's beat Google'," Mr Mohn said. "It's 'let's build up a competitive internet industry'." Bertelsmann and Lycos Europe are members of the Quaero consortium, which includes Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Thomson and France Telecom.
Ultimately, television can have a relationship with the internet that features cannot. “Features have been able to grab on to what internet can do for marketing and publicity,” says Megan Wolpert, executive vice president of Spyglass Television, when I interviewed her in January this year: “However, TV can do what movies can’t with that relationship, because they don’t need to add a step. They don’t need to say come see us. They just show it. You can show a memoir, a travelogue, a serialized anything on the internet. I think even if you just look at the act of watching a movie versus watching television, it’s more analogous to the act of watching a computer.”
Certainly, the popularity of Reality TV is the outcome of the game generation trend towards interactivity. What is happening more recently, however, is an extension of the relationship between television and internet with show like Lost and VH1 Webjunk. Now MTV introduces MTV Flux a combination social networking portal/television channel.
Excerpts:
Moenk's piece on the game generation's social application of technology and its influences on Web 2.0 design is both insightful and uniquely refreshing. While everyone is talking about marketing on MySpace, Moenk focuses on the effect of the MySpace ethos on business culture as the game generation matures into their productive years.“They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes political columist David Brooks about the game generation. Why? "[B]ecause this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” This suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. In fact, “the total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
This generational amnesia is partly the result of the movement away from traditional forms of social capital towards weaker, and more numerous ties. Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.” Continues Florida:
"What appears to be self-indulgence to conservatives or devices of corporate oppression to liberals in fact turns out to be the result of the rational evolution of economic forces. Changes in taste and lifestyle that at first glance seem superficial and unrelated turn out to be rooted in widespread, fundamental economic change.”Excerpts and Highlights from Moenk's article:
While much of the discussion regarding social networks in the business community is focused on word of mouth marketing and user generated content, this trend has even greater ramifications for the way it will impact businesses internally.
Many analysts are of the opinion that applications of the future will be increasingly web based. While this idea has been met with much skepticism, Microsoft has aggressively begun to shift gears in order to adapt to these developments.
The timing for this is impeccable as Google is currently threatening to eat into their Microsoft Office market share with free web based solutions such as Google Writely and Google Spreadsheet.
Given that there are now web based alternatives to much of the productivity software that we use every day, how does this new generation of tools differ and improve upon what’s already out there? The answer lies, believe it or not, with social networking services like MySpace, social bookmarking sites like Yahoo’s del.icio.us, and peer to peer social networks like the blogosphere.
The most successful of these services are designed to be intrinsically social, while focusing on the utility they provide to individuals. Thus the web not only becomes a great place for individual productivity, but also real time group collaboration and community building around the information that is being interacted with. This balancing of needs between that of the individual and the group perhaps gives us an indication of what was missing in enterprise ‘groupware’ of the nineteen nineties.
In the past few years there has been a fundamental change in the way teenagers socialize which can be credited with two developments: the proliferation of cell phones, and the rapid adoption of the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. The most profound ramifications of Web 2.0 won’t be fully felt nor understood until the MySpace generation begins to enter the workforce in the next few years. The current level of connectivity between students in high school and college is drastically different from anytime in the 20th century or even the first three years of the 21st.
In the Information Age where the adage "it’s not just what you know but who you know" is increasingly relevant towards maintaining a competitive advantage, today’s teenagers are learning and largely influencing the development of new networking practices that are foreign to current business professionals.
While the old paradigm of the web is focused on static information, the new web is developing into a dynamic collaborative medium where the social network is ubiquitous with content creation and information flows from person to person more efficiently with the individual in control of what they see and whom they interact with.
Email may currently be the most used application for collaboration because it is what the first generation of web users are familiar with, but as the MySpace generation begins to enter the workforce they will rapidly influence the adoption of tools that embody the collaborative social practices to which they are growing accustomed.
CinemaTech: From AlwaysOn: `How Far Will Consumer-Generated Media Go?'
New York Times writer, Scott Kirsner, stopped in at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford and posted a report about the panel 'How Far Will Consumer-Generated Media Go". The panel featured YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, the CEO of MP3 Tunes, and execs from Yahoo and Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment.
While I do believe distribution becomes more fluid with the continued evolution of digital technology along all points of the media supply chain, I do not believe that digital technology will democratize film making. Multinational corporations and conglomerates have the scope and capital to market and distinguish their product from the glut of global competitors (whether that competition is created by Chinese manufacturing or American independent filmmakers). Certainly the segmentation or "narrow-casting" currently developing with the expansion of world-wide cable and the internet creates spaces for creative expression produced, say, less expensively with digital technology; however, outside of those exceptions eventually marketed to broader audiences, digital technology will not disturb media firms' control over the organs of distribution. The question ALWAYS remains: Who reaps the benefits of copyright? Is it the content creator or the media firm that owns the intellectual property that the content creator sold to the distributor for a profit?
Indeed, media firms may be held captive at choking points along the supply chain - a consequence of handing their brands over to stars or whomever - but media firms are more apt to forge strategic partnerships or acquire internet portals like Amazon et cetera, then wither away and die. In an economic environment starved for content, the power does shift to the content creator or more specifically, whoever owns the copyright, but corporations are the ones most likely to benefit from this paradigm; because they can exploit their natural economies of scale. The myth of democratizing filmmaking is techno-utopianism. The creative economy needs a mixture of small, medium, and large size creative industry firms.
Excerpts from CinemaTech:
Fox News Corp has a brand. Unlike their competitors, they haven't relinquished it to stars or shows et cetera. They are also the exception because they understand market retention. You may have a political bone to pick with Fox News, but only because you are aware of their brand. MySpace has market retention too, because, well frankly, it's quite addictive. It's the internet version of tobacco.
This idea of market retention is foreign to media firms in an age where most are hyper-focused on "capturing" markets. Media firms spend millions of dollars on marketing only to toss away their branding in a nano-second. All of this is applicable to Fox News Corp. and MySpace. News Corp's acquisition is on the digital ball. Viacom is not far off, but they are trying to build from scratch (with MTV's new social networking site Flux) what Murdoch had but to acquire. While other media firms are looking in their rear view mirror, Murdoch and Myspace are the perfect and timely diagonal expansion. More on that later. In the meantime...
Marketing on MySpace | ForBiddeN fruit | Economist.com
Excerpts:
Advertising Age - MediaWorks - Digitas Brings in Digital VP From Roo
AdAge interviews Greg Verdino as the new Digital VP at Digitas about new media marketing. The segmentation or 'narrowcasting' of cable and internet audiences works for marketing brands like Home Depot or Big Pharma with websites, channels, and specialized social networking sites.
Excerpts:
MTV Think News - Marines Totally Want To Be Your MySpace Friend — And Recruit You
Excerpts:
The courting of the MySpace generation — the site now claims more than 96 million members — is a nod to the importance of tapping the potential of the Internet to reach America's wired youth, according to Major Wes Hayes, Marine Corps Recruiting Command spokesperson.
The site, which features a selection of downloadable Marine wallpaper, also has links to recruiters and, so far, boasts more than 13,000 friends with handles like Promiscuous, Leatherneck and Tha Rock.
"The Marine Corps is always looking for new and innovative ways to make sure our target audience, young men and women ages 18 to 24, are informed about the Marines," said Hayes, adding that the reach into MySpace was not related to the kind of missed recruitment goals some branches of the armed services have experienced in the past few years.
Given the string of highly publicized incidents involving child predators trolling MySpace to meet underage children, the Army pulled its banner ads from the site earlier this year, according to Louise Eaton, media and Web chief for the U.S. Army Accession Command. But the Army kept in touch with MySpace in the interim, and after the site recently issued new security guidelines and assured the Army that MySpace was more secure, the Army is prepping a return of the ads as well as a profile page. "The purpose [of the Army profile page] is to let young people know about the opportunities Army offers," Eaton said.
And why MySpace? "Because young people are there," she said. "We have to go to where young people are." The Air Force advertises on MySpace but doesn't have a profile page, and the Navy has no presence on the site at this point. The Army's profile page is being worked on now by its ad agency, and Eaton said it should be up soon.
"The Internet is a very powerful tool and we see it as a new and innovative way to reach our target audience," Hayes said.
Murdoch surprised by MySpace growth | Tech&Sci | Internet | Reuters.com
The Hollywood Reporter interviewed Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of The News Corp.
Excerpt:
The Hollywood Reporter: DO YOU THINK THAT WILL BE A CHALLENGE GIVEN WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN UP AGAINST BEFORE?
Murdoch: Probably not. It will be a little bit different in each country. The English-speaking world will be easy. We will have to think about going with a slightly different model or architecture in Japan or Germany or some other countries. It will be driven by exactly the same principles. Young people are the same everywhere. They are curious. They want to take control of things. They want to live in their own world.
The Hollywood Reporter: THIS IS A REMARKABLE TIME. YOU HAVE CALLED THIS THE GOLDEN AGE OF MEDIA. WHAT WILL IT EVENTUALLY MEAN TO THE INDUSTRIES YOU ARE IN AND TO YOUR COMPANY?
Murdoch: There are new capital advantages to get things done. You go to these conventions and see all the new technologies being rolled out. But they are all meaningless unless they have content. There is going to be more and more demand for content, and there will be more ways for us to develop more content. And we've got to use these platforms to monetize all of our existing content.
