Media Trends 2016

The most enjoyable pieces we pen for this blog are our looks ahead to TMT trends in the next year (they also, coincidentally, happen to be our most popular articles). Do check out our 2015 and 2014 trends, too.

We’ll look at trends in the film industry, TV, telco and tech sector. These formerly discrete industries are now all blurring together. This should come as little surprise to most, after years of the word “convergence” being bandied about; AOL Time Warner was a misbegotten adventure on the back of this thesis. However, what is happening now is that these worlds are clashing. Techies push their platforms (e.g. the Amazons and Netflixs of the world), but increasingly follow in the footsteps of legacy media in creating a stable of content to offer viewers. But those legacy media players are fretting, according to the Financial Times,

According to cable industry die-hards who have the most to lose, the digital platforms have not done much to show they are appropriate guardians of media assets like these. According to cable pioneer John Malone, for instance, they do not do enough to differentiate media brands, they make it hard to get feedback about consumers (if the data are not passed on) and they are not conducive to the kind of advertising on which cable networks have long relied. The result is a giant searchable database, like Netflix.

Star Wars and the status quo

It would be difficult to write about the media sector currently without giving Star Wars: The Force Awakens at least a mention. The movie, which Zeitgeist saw last weekend, was huge fun, though we couldn’t help feeling like we were watching a re-imagining of the original, rather than a direct sequel. As fivethirtyeight notes, the prequels are out there now, and not going anywhere; this film faces a steep uphill battle if it is to redeem the franchise from the deficit of awfulness inflicted by the prequel triplets. The amount of money the film has made, and the critical caveats it has received, point to interesting trends in the film industry as a whole.

The Economist rightly points out how Bob Iger, since taking the reins of Disney from the erratic Michael Eisner in 2005, has made wise, savvy strategic moves, not least in content, through the purchases of Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm. But while most critics were pleased with the latest product to spring from this studio’s loins, there were some reservations. The FT, while largely positive about the film, lamented there was little in it to distinguish itself from the other tentpole films of the year:

What troubles most is that Star Wars is starting to look like every other franchise epic. Is that the cost of anything-is-possible stories set in elastic universes? I kept having flashes of The Hunger Games and The Lord of the Rings. The characters costumed in quasi-timeless garb (neo-Grecian the favourite). The PlayStation plots with their gauntlets of danger and games of survival.

Recent releases are increasingly making their way onto the best-performing list, with increasing speed, too. Three films have crossed the $1bn barrier this year alone

There’s no doubt this is a problem. It’s not per se a new problem, as originality has always been something Hollywood has struggled with. Let’s be honest, art has struggled with originality too; Shakespeare’s MO was derivative, and has there been anything new to say in art since Duchamp? But the fact remains that when studios have the technical sophistication to produce any visual feat, and this is executed again and again in much the same mode, the effect on an audience begins to wane, and everything begins to look much of a muchness (if not outright neo-Grecian).

Also somewhat unsettling is the financial performance of these films. Not so much because of the people who will still turn out in droves to see recycled content, but more the pace at which records are now being broken. The new Star Wars made $100m in pre-sales – a record – and went on to make $248m in its opening weekend, beating the previous holder, all the way back in the summer, Jurassic World. The speedy gains of lucre for such fare are increasing. Titanic took three months to reach the $1bn mark at the global box office; Jurassic World took 13 days, beating the previous record holder, Fast and the Furious 7, which had opened only a few months earlier in April. In the ten years after Titanic, only three films crossed the zeitgeist-worthy Rubicon of $1 billion; since 2008, 17 films have done so (see above graphic).

Such potential return on investment ups the ante for ever bigger projects, something Zeitgeist has criticised several times in previous articles, wary of some of the huge, costly flops that have come and gone with little strategic reflection. The latest Bond incarnation, Spectre, was always going to be something of a safe bet. But with so much upfront investment, such vehicles now need to make all the more in order to recoup what has been spent. Or, as Vanity Fair puts it, “yes, 007 made obscene amounts of money. But were they obscene enough?“. Tentpoles have taken on new meaning in an era of Marvel heroes, and even Bond itself has set new benchmarks with Skyfall, which crossed the hallowed billion-dollar barrier referenced earlier. This quickly begins to seem less earth-shattering when you consider the all-in costs for Spectre have been conservatively estimated at $625m. Even with Skyfall, Sony itself made only $57m in return.

Trend implication: There is a glimmer of innovation in the Chinese film market, where blockbusters are being crowdfunded through WeChat. But in Hollywood, the focus of money on one type of film – and the attempt to capture only one type of audience – logically leads to a bifurcation in the market, with bigger hits, bigger misses, and a hole in the middle,which The New York Times points out is usually where Oscars are made. A large problem that will not be addressed in 2016 is the absence of solid research and strategic insight; studios don’t know when or whether they “have released too many movies that go after the same audience — ‘Steve Jobs’ ate into ‘The Walk’ ate into ‘Black Mass’, for example”. With Men in Black 4 on the way, Hunger Games prequels being mulled, another five years of Marvel movies already slated and dates booked in, look for such machinations to continue. Bigger budgets, more frequent records being broken and a stolid resistance to multi-platform releases. Even Star Wars couldn’t get a global release date, with those in China having to wait a month longer than those elsewhere to see it, more or less encouraging piracy. Let’s just pray that Independence Day 2 gets its right…

TV’s tribulations

Despite all our claims of problems with the film industry, we must concede its financial performance this year will be one for the record books (particularly with some added vim from Star Wars). The TV sector, on the other hand, has had a decidedly worse year. For while Hollywood’s problems may be existential and longer-term, television must really start fundamentally addressing existing business models, today.

The rise of OTTs such as Netflix – not to mention the recently launched premium content service from Google, YouTube Red – has no doubt contributed to a sudden hastening in young adults who have dropped (or simply never had) a cable subscription. In the US, latest data recently reported from Pew research show 19% of 18-29s in the US have dropped their TV / cable service to become cord-cutters (or cord-nevers). The pace of change is quickening, according to eMarketer, who recorded a 12.5% leap in cord-cutting activity YoY.

Cognisant of such shifts, organisations have begun seeking remedy. In November, Fox became the first broadcast network to drop same-day ratings provided by Nielsen to the press, recognising that they “don’t reflect how we monetise our content,” and hoping to “move the ratings conversation into the future”. General Electric meanwhile, is stop advertising on prime-time television, instead keeping its budget for live events. This makes sense as it is this type of programming that typically lures large, diverse and timely audiences to content. Most interestingly, however, Disney, who seems to feature a lot in this post, is launching its own digital subscription service, aggregating its film, TV, books and music assets together. The FT notes it will be “the biggest media company yet to stream its content directly to consumers online”.

With the increasing popularity of OTT platforms, some are trying to get audiences to rediscover the joy of serendipity again. A new company, Molotov, aims to combine “the best elements of schedules, streaming and social media… Even if it does not take off, it neatly identifies the challenge facing broadcasters and technology companies: how can TV be better? And is there still life in the television schedule?“. Its UX has been compared to Spotify, allows a personalised programming guide, as well as bookmarking shows, actors and politicians. Moreover, Molotov also lets viewers know which shows are particularly popular on social media, as well as which of their Facebook friends like particular shows. “The idea”, written in the FT,  “is to be a one-stop shop for audiences by replacing dozens of apps on Apple TV, or indeed an entire cable box”. Indeed, China is struggling with the linear world of television and film, uncertain about how to regulate offensive or violent content in a world without watershed or clear boundaries for regulation beyond towing the political line. For its part, the BBC will be fervently hoping that there remains life in the television schedule. With its Charter up for review, the future of the organisation is currently in question, to the extent that anyone can try their hand at getting the appropriate funding for the Beeb, with this handy interactive graphic.

Trend implication: OTTs like Netflix will continue to gain ground as they publish more exclusive content, though there is a risk such actions lead to brand diffusion, and confusion over what audiences should expect from such properties. Business models for content are increasingly being rewritten; excited as we are that The X-Files is returning to Fox in January, the real benefactor is apparently Netflix. Like it or not (we happen to think it’s a savvy strategic move), Disney’s plan to launch a subscription service online is innovative in its ambition to combine multiple media under one roof, and illustrates the company has recognised it has a sufficiently coherent brand (unlike Netflix) that can make for competitive differentiation as it faces off against other walled gardens. Advertising revenues, like cable subscription revenues, will continue to slide; there’s not much anyone, even Disney can do about that. Such slides though are unlikelt to deter continued mergers on the part of telcos; one in five pay TV subscriptions now go to these companies. Molotov sounds like an intriguing approach to reinventing a product long overdue for a renaissance… will such a renaissance come too late for the BBC though?

The X-Files returns to the Fox network in January, but it is Netflix that will really benefit

Tech opportunities and pitfalls

The tech sector as a whole, which continues to spit out unicorns, was deemed to be heading for a burst bubble, according to The Economist: “There are 144 unicorns valued at $505bn between them, about five times as many as three years ago. Most are unprofitable”. Equally disconcerting for the sector must have been Donald Trump, who has been consistently dismissed by mainstream media types since the summer but continues to roll on through the Republican presidential primaries. In his most recent itchy trigger-finger solution to the world’s woes, he suggested simply turning off the Internet in certain places. Apart from our understanding and appreciation of the Internet as one of the world’s liberating platforms that is one of the most tangible examples of man’s desire to communicate as one, this would apparently also be quite difficult.

Trend implication: Startup valuations do seem to be increasingly on the wild side, and there’s a good case to be made about the double-edged sword of such high valuations that dissuade companies from going public. There may possibly be a correction sometime next year; look for it to separate the wheat from the chaff. And while the idea of turning off the Internet is not without precedent, when did Iran last do something that the rest of the world thought was a good idea to emulate? Depriving people of the internet necessarily deprives people of information. On a macro level this can only be a bad thing. Its technical complexity and ethical murkiness make this an unlikely candidate for impact in 2016.

Amazon is having a rare sojourn in the black of late, with two consecutive quarters of profit. This is a rareity not because of any malpractice on Jeff Bezos’ part, rather because the mantra of the company has consistently been over the years to reinvest revenues into new development. Its brief profitability comes as the company’s cloud services, Amazon Web Services [AWS], become increasingly popular. As the Financial Times notes,

“In the latest quarter, [AWS profits] came to $521m on revenues of $2bn. That is roughly equivalent to the operating income of the entire core North American retail unit — a business with eight times the sales.”

Trend implication: Amazon’s growth may give some investors with a short-term eye succour for 2016 and a more profitable Amazon. But they should not be taken in so easily. Bezos’ long-term strategy remains investment for the future rather than a quick buck.

Facebook has been in the news for things positive and otherwise as it pushes the limits of innovation and unsurprisingly finds itself coming up against vested interests and the remits of regulatory bodies. It must also combat the same issues faced by other maturing companies, that of lower engagement and rising age groups. For example, 37% of users shared photos as of November, down from 59% a year earlier. In the meantime it is deploying some interesting tactical maneuvers, including more prominent featuring of events you are going to go, as well as ones you might be interested in attending. It also suggests events directly into status updates. Other timely reminders, reported in the WSJ, include “On Sept 27, it displayed an image of a crescent moon as a prompt about the supermoon lunar eclipse. In October, it worked with AMC Network Entertainment LLC to remind fans of “The Walking Dead” about the show’s season premiere”.

And while its partnership with Uber – embedding the service directly into its Messanger platform – is to be commended (WeChat’s ARPU by contrast is $7), it has struggled abroad. In India, one of several regions where it has agreed to zero-rated services with operators, net neutrality proponents are lobbying to have its Free Basic services shut down (while also raising noise about T-Mobile’s similar Binge On service in the US). Meanwhile, Whatsapp, the platform Facebook now owns, whose use has exploded in popularity in Jakarta, recently saw its service shut down for 12 hours in Brazil, affecting around 100 million people. Telco operators have been lobbying the government to label OTT services as illegal, but it seems that the government shut the service down in order to prevent gang members from communicating. This provoked much derision.

Trend implication: As Facebook’s audience continues to mature, macro engagement may continue to dip. Data on metrics such as average pieces of content shared by a user per month have not been updated since the company’s IPO. Facebook, as well as other OTT plaforms will continue to struggle in some respects in 2016, as both traditional players (e.g. telecom operators) and regulators seek to contain their plans. Operators in particular will have to increasingly lay ‘frenemies’ with OTTs that may offer value-add and competitive differentiation with the right partnership, yet at the same time eat away at their revenues. Continued security threats, whether cyber or physical terrorism, may mean, that, like Trump’s comments above, services continue to see brief disruption in 2016 in various regions. Net neutrality rulings in the US and Europe will also have an impact on the tech sector at large. It is likely to be laxer in Europe, which The Economist predicts will hurt startups.

Similarly impactful was the recent video of a drone crashing to the ground at a World Cup ski competition this week, which missed a competitor by what looked like a matter of feet and would have caused serious injury otherwise.

Trend implication: Despite such potential for grievous harm, there should generally be a quite liberalised framework for drone use. However, this needs to start with more prescriptive regulation that identifies the need for safety while recognising individual liberty

Oh, and Merry Christmas.

TMT Trends 2015 – Star Wars, Tech Wars & Talent Wars

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*Our 2016 trends for the sector can be found here*

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Our most popular article this year by far was a piece we wrote on trends in the media and entertainment industry for the coming twelve months. That nothing has been written since January that has proved as popular as that is a little disappointing, but it is a good indication of what users come to this blog for.

It’s been an interesting past month or so in the Technology, Media and Telecoms sector. We’re going to attempt to recap some of the more consequential things here, as well as the impact they may have into next year.

Star Wars – And the blockbuster dilemma

Friday saw the release of the first trailer for Star Wars Episode VII, due for release December 2015. CNBC covered the release at the coda of European Closing Bell, around the point of a segment a story might be done about a cat caught up a tree (“On a lighter note…”). They discussed the trailer and the franchise on a frivolous note at first, mostly joking about the length of time since the original film’s release. One of the anchors then went on to claim that Disney’s purchase of “Lucasfilms” [sic] and the release of this trilogy of films, given the muted reaction to Episodes I-III, constituted a huge bet on Disney’s part. This showed a profound lack of understanding. Collectively, Episodes I-III, disappointing artistically as they may have been, made a cool $1.2bn. And this is just at the box office. Homevideo revenues would probably have been the same again, almost certainly more. Most importantly (whether we like it or not), are revenue streams like toy sales, theme park rides and the like (see below graphic, from StatisticBrain). So we are talking about a product that, despite many not being impressed with, managed to generate several billion dollars for Fox, Lucasfilm, et al. With a more reliable pair of hands at the helm in the form of J.J. Abrams, to say Episodes VII-IX are a huge bet is questionable thinking at best.

It can be easy for pundits to forget those ancillary streams, but in contemporary Hollywood it is such areas that are key, and fundamentally influence what films get made. Kenneth Turan, writing in mid-September for the LA Times, echoed such thinking. As with our Star Wars example; so “with the Harry Potter films, and it is happening again with ‘Frozen’, with Disney announcing just last week that it would construct a ‘Frozen’ attraction at Orlando’s Disney World”. It is why studios have scheduled, as of August this year, some 30 movies based on comicbooks to be released over the coming years. Of course, supply follows demand. Such generic shlock wouldn’t be made again and again (and again) if consumers didn’t exercise their capitalist right to choose it and consume it. We have been given  Transformers 4 because the market said it wanted it.

But is this desire driven by a faute de mieux – a lack of anything better – in said market? David Fincher may not have been far off the mark back in September when he mentioned in an interview with Playboy that “studios treat audiences like lemmings, like cattle in a stockyard“. But a shift from such a narrow mindset may prove difficult in a consolidated environment – Variety’s editor-in-chief Peter Bart pointed out recently that “six companies control 90% of the media consumed by Americans, compared with 50 companies some 30 years ago”. Some players of course are trying to change the way the business this works. The most provocative statement of this was in September when Netflix announced a sequel to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, to be released day-and-date across Netflix and in IMAX cinemas. Kudos. It’s the kind of thing this blog has been advocating since its inception. Though not in accordance with a capitalist model, the market is certainly showing a desire for more day-and-date releases. Netflix isn’t a lone outlier as on OTT provider trying to develop exclusive content that goes beyond comicbooks (that in itself should give Netflix pause; about a fifth of its market value has eroded since mid-October). Hulu’s efforts with J.J. Abrams and Stephen King, as well as Amazon’s universally acclaimed Transparent series (full disclosure, a good friend works on the show; Zeitgeist was privileged to take a look around the sets on the Paramount lot while in Los Angeles this summer). And that’s not to say innovative content can’t be developed around blockbuster fare; we really liked 20th Century Fox’s partnership with Vice for ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’, creating short films that filled the gaps between the film and its predecessor. Undoubtedly the model needs to change; unlike last summer, there were no outright bombs this year at the box office, but receipts fell 15% all the same. The first eight months of 2014 were more than $400m behind the same period in 2013. Interviewed in the FT, Robert Fishman, an analyst with MoffettNathanson put it wisely, “It always comes down to the product on the screen. And the product on the screen just hasn’t delivered.” An editorial in The Economist earlier this month praised Hollywood’s business model, suggesting other businesses should emulate it. But beyond some good marketing tactics there seems little that should be copied by others. Indeed, lots more work is needed. Perhaps the first step is merely rising that not all blockbusters need to be released in the summer. Next year, James Bond, Star Wars and The Avengers will all arrive on screens… spread throughout the year. Expect 2015 to feature more innovation on the part of exhibitors too, beyond having their customers be rained on.

Tech wars – Hacking, piracy and monopolies

Sony Pictures faced some embarrassment this week when hackers claimed to have penetrated the company’s systems, getting away with large volumes of data that included detailed information on talent (such as passport details for the likes of Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz). The full story is still unfolding. We’ve written a couple of times recently about cybersecurity; it was disappointing but unsurprising to see the spectre of digital warfare raise its head again twice in the past week. The first instance was with Regin, an impressive bit of malware, which seems to be the successor to Stuxnet, a spying program developed by Israeli and American intelligence forces to undermine Iranian efforts to develop nuclear materials. Symantec said Regin had probably taken years to develop, with “a degree of technical competence rarely seen”. Regin was focused on Saudia Arabia, Russia, but also Ireland and India, which muddies the waters of authorship. However, in these post-Snowden days it is well known that friendly countries go to significant lengths to spy on each other, and The Economist posited at least part of the malware was created by those in the UK. Deloitte, ranked number one globally in security consulting by Gartner, is on the case.

The news in other parts of the world is troubling too. In the US, the net neutrality debate rages. It’s too big an issue to be covered here, but the Financial Times and Harvard Business Review cover the topic intelligently, here and here. In China, regulators are cracking down on online TV, a classic case of a long-gestating occurence that at some arbitrary point grows too big to ignore, suddenly becoming problematic. But, if a recent article on the affair in The Economist is anything to go by, such deeds are likely to merely spur piracy. And in the EU this past week it was disconcerting to see what looked like a mix of jealousy, misunderstanding and outright protectionism when the European Parliament voted for Google to be broken up. No one likes or wants a monopoly; monopolies are bad because they can reduce consumer choice. This is one of the key arguments against the Comcast / Time Warner Cable merger. But Google’s share of advertising revenue is being eaten into by Facebook; its mobile platform Android is popular but is being re-skinned by OEMs looking to put their own branding onto the OS. And Google is not reducing choice in the same way as an offline equivalent, with higher barriers to entry, might. The Economist points out this week:

“[A]lthough switching from Google and other online giants is not costless, their products do not lock customers in as Windows, Microsoft’s operating system, did. And although network effects may persist for a while, they do not confer a lasting advantage… its behaviour is not in the same class as Microsoft’s systematic campaign against the Netscape browser in the late 1990s: there are no e-mails talking about “cutting off” competitors’ ‘air supply'”

The power of lock-in, or substitute products, should not be underestimated. For Apple, this has meant the acquisition of Beats, which they are now planning to bundle in to future iPhones. For Jeff Bezos, this means bundling in Washington Post into future Amazon Fire products. For media and entertainment providers, it means getting customers to extend their relationship with the business into triple- and quad-play services. But it has been telling this month to hear from two CEOs who are questioning the pursuit of quad-play. For the most part, research shows that it can increase customer retention, although not without lowering the cost of the overall product. Sky’s CEO Jeremy Darroch said “If I look at the existing quadplays in the market, not just in the UK, but pretty much everywhere, I think they’re very much driven by the providers who want to extend their offering, rather than, I think, any significant demand from customers”. Vodafone’s CEO Vittorio Colao joined in, “If someone starts bidding for content then you [might] have to yourself… Personally I have doubts that in the long run that this [exclusive content] will really create a lot of value for the platform. It tends to create lots of value for the owner”. Sony meanwhile are pursuing just such a tack of converged services in the form of a new ad campaign. But the benefits of convergence are usually around the customer being able to have multiple touchpoints, not the business being able to streamline assets and services in-house. Sony is in the midst of its own tech war, in consoles, where it is firmly ahead of Microsoft, who were seeking a similar path to that of Sky and Vodafone to dominate the living room. But externalities are impeding – mobile gaming revenues will surpass those of the traditional console next year to become the largest gaming segment; no surprise when by 2020, 90% of the world’s population over 6 years old will have a mobile phone, according to Ericsson. So undoubtedly look for more cyberattacks next year, on a wider range of industries, from film, to telco (lots of customer data there), to politics and economics.

Talent wars – Cui bono?

Our last section is the lightest on content, but perhaps the most important. It is the relation between artist and patron. This relationship took a turn for the worse this year. On a larger, corporate side, this issue played itself out as Amazon and publisher Hachette rowed over fees. Hachette, rather than Amazon, appears to have won the battle; it will set he prices on its books, starting from early 2015. It is unlikely to be the last battle between the ecommerce giant and a publisher, and it may well now give the DoJ the go-ahead to examine the company’s alleged anti-competitive misdeeds.

Elsewhere, artist Taylor Swift’s move to exorcise her catalogue from music streaming service Spotify is a shrewd move on her part. Though an extremely popular platform, driving a large share of revenues to the artists, the problem remains that there is little revenue to start with as much of what there is to do on Spotify can be done for free. The Financial Times writes that it is thanks to artists like Swift that “an era of protectionism is dawning” again (think walled gardens and Compuserve) for content. The danger for the music industry is that other artists take note of what Swift has done and follow suit. This would be of benefit to the individual artists but detrimental to the industry itself. And clearly such an issue doesn’t have to be restricted to the music industry. It’s not hard to anticipate a similar issue affecting film in 2015.

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There’s a plethora of activity going on in TMT as the year draws to a close – much of it will impact how businesses behave and customers interact with said media next year. The secret will be in drawing a long-term strategic course that can be agile enough to adapt to disruptive technologies. However what we’ve hopefully shown here in this article is that there are matters to attend to in multiple sectors that need immediate attention over any amorphous future trends.

Hollywood & China – “To fight monsters we created monsters”

“The film market in China is like an experimental supermarket – with more and more racks but only one product… The viewers don’t care what they see as long as it’s a film. They’ll watch whatever is put in front of them.”

– Zhang Xiaobei, CCTV

LA is “a favourite place for Chinese businessmen to do business”, according to the objective opinion of China’s general counsel to Los Angeles. And that was back in 2011, before China extended its annual quota of foreign films allowed to be exhibited on the mainland. We’ve written before about the relationship between Hollywood and China, which in the two years since we wrote that piece has only deepened. It’s little wonder; EY has predicted China will be the largest film market in the world by 2020. Revenue is being squeezed in the film industry as millennials hang out on their smartphones and games consoles. When they do pay for movies, it’s more likely to be streamed rather than owned. Worse, that stream may be hosted by someone like Netflix, whose burgeoning clout makes negotiations for license fees increasingly difficult. So China provides a timely cash cow; an antidote to Western media fragmentation and fatigue. But at what cost?

China’s economic rise to superpower status has logically meant a rise in its viability as a place to invest in. From infrastructure, where cinemas screens have been springing up at the unbelievable rate of seven a day (as of May this year), to co-productions between Hollywood and homegrown Chinese outfits. These collaborations have resulted in overt references to China in storylines, such as that seen in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, The Karate Kid and the Kung Fu Panda franchise, or the additional scenes filmed for Iron Man 3. This also includes the more recent Transformers: Age of Extinction, which saw not only a large part of the film take place in Hong Kong, but also included local talent and featured a mind-boggling amount of inappropriate product placement from Sino brands. The few production companies in China are also expanding, looking beyond more traditional propaganda fare, as well as to foreign markets, as is the case with China Film Group.

But the film industry in China is not quite as rosy as it appears. Interestingly, there have been few efforts at US talent getting involved in Chinese productions. This may be partly due to the mess that was The Flowers of War, starring Christian Bale, which was reportedly little more than a propaganda piece. And from a content point of view, caution has been the watchword for studios; The producers of World War Z removed a discussion over whether the zombie apocalypse started in China; Chinese villains were edited out of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End and Men in Black 3. Is that really necessary? And while scripts are edited to appear more appealing to China, so are balance sheets. For while Transformers 4 is now China’s highest-grossing movie of all time, according to The Hollywood Reporter, what THR don’t mention was the way the gross is measured. For, says Julie Makinen, a China correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, box office revenue is arbitrarily inflated. She elaborates,

“I think everyone agrees there’s some fudging that goes on… It’s fairly common to go into a theater, say, ‘Hi, I’d like to buy a ticket for Transformers,’ and they say, ‘Great,’ and they print out your ticket for a local romantic comedy. So I’m pretty sure the 20 bucks I just handed over is being counted in someone else’s basket. Things like that happen; a lot of statistics in China are suspect.”

Moviegoers aren’t being particularly discriminating yet because the act of going to the cinema as an event or experience is still a relatively new phenomenon for many. Product placement, which we referred to earlier, while an opportunity for some synergy between film and brands, risks being too commercial and overt if done without context. A recent article in the Financial Times said such promotions in Transformers 4 quickly “start flying faster than bullets from an Autobot’s wrist-mounted Gatling gun”. Apart from bringing viewers out of the fictional narrative into reality, creating a disappointing experience, inappropriate product placement can also cause ire between businesses. (We’ve written several times over the years about product placement, here.) Such an occurrence took place at the end of July when a tourism group in China sued Paramount Pictures for failing to show a logo of the park that the company had paid to be prominently displayed in the movie. The implementation of co-productions between the two countries evidently needs work too. Scenes added exclusively for a Chinese version of Iron Man 3 added little except some questionable product placement as well as the dubious plotline of Tony Stark heading to China, of all places, for medical convalescence. Lastly, the current quota of films to be exhibited in China means that many good-quality US films fail to be seen in the country. Much like bans on US games consoles and the Android app store, Google Play, the result of this has been an explosion of home-grown imitators. In this case, films in China are made that precisely mimic the formula and set-up of popular American franchises like The Hangover, which was never seen by Chinese audiences, thus the extent of emulation isn’t evident. Assuming that eventually the quota will be entirely relaxed, this type of tactic can only ever be a short-term measure.

One of the greatest opportunities the film industry in China has is in part due to one of its greatest weaknesses. Because of historically protracted release windows, and a narrow selection of films making it to cinemas, piracy has been rampant. Indeed, infringement has been widespread enough that the industry has had seemingly no choice but to innovate. We reported back in April how China has relaxed its embargo on foreign games consoles, and, more to the point, how Tencent, in partnership with Warner Bros., were making the latest 300 film available to rent, while the film was still in cinemas in the US. Such forward-thinking is welcome. As well as offsetting any losses from piracy, it also hopefully points the way to a more open business environment in China, at least for TMT companies. Such innovative thinking will need to be extended, however, to the structure of China’s film industry itself, which is reportedly a vertically integrated engine driven almost entirely at the whim of the state.

Just as China’s tastes have held increasing sway over the production of art and wine in recent years, so with film. The middling global box office performance of Pacific Rim found salvation in Asia, and that was all the justification needed for a franchise to be developed. There is certainly much to be gained from investment and co-productions in China’s films industry, especially while it is still relatively nascent, not least of which are the financial returns. How such relationships impact the content itself is another matter. Hopefully some of the approaches China is taking with regard to multi-platform releases might even trickle over to Western markets. Studios should also be wary about putting all their eggs in one basket; CNBC reports that growth in ticket sales for Hollywood films in mainland China hit a five-year low in 2013. Only three US movies made the top ten highest-grossing films in China last year, down from seven in 2012. One reason for the slowdown is a lack of variety. And yet don’t expect the blockbuster formula to change anytime soon; as much as it was born in the USA, it is also what audiences in the worldwide market love to gobble up. (Michael Bay’s films – expertly dissected in the above video – prove that point no end, and it has been particularly driven home recently as Bay himself as well as sometime employee Megan Fox have expressed nonchalance about any negative press from critics, knowing their products make millions despite nasty reviews. Specifically, actress Fox told naysayers to “F*ck off”.) There is a certain amount of momentum behind the two industries’ relationship with one another, but recent productions have shown that future projects should perhaps be treated with a little more caution, particularly as Chinese audiences tastes mature. Last month the film historian Neal Gabler was quoted in the Financial Times, in a point that usefully sums up this piece,

“The overseas market has changed the DNA of American movies… The bigger-faster-louder aesthetic is very deeply embedded in the American psyche. No one else can do it. It’s one of the reason they export so well. It’s so much a part of who we are. But we have been victims of our own success. It’s a Catch-22. The things that make our movies so popular overseas are now larger than the American market can support by itself.”

UPDATE (30/8/14): The production side of the industry continues to evolve, as China’s largest video website Youku Tudou demonstrated on Friday when it promised to produce 8 films for cinema release and 9 to premiere on the internet. Chairman and Chief Exec Victor Koo pointed out to the Financial Times that there was a gap in the market left by Hollywood, “The US film industry is highly developed. It tends to be either blockbusters or franchise films. But in China you’re talking about small to mid to large budgets…”. The logistics of creating a film for online release – more than likely to be consumed on a smartphone – must consider important limiting factors such as, according to Heyi Film chief exec Allen Zhu, smartphones in China running films get “very hot after 20 mins”. Youku Tudou’s plans may seem ambitious – particularly given it reported a $26m loss for the second quarter – but when 18 screens are erected in China every day (last year more cinema screens were added in China than the total in France), it seems a risk some are willing to take.

Luxury still too good for a digital strategy

Chanel is one of the key culprits when it comes to lack of digital innovation

A recent McKinsey report declared that, for businesses, “The age of experimentation with digital is over“. That may be for most B2B and B2C private sector companies, but not for the luxury goods industry. Bemoaning the woeful development and investment in strategic initiatives for luxury brands online is something this blog has done once or twice before. There are understandable reasons why the industry has been reticent to commit to online retail, based on customer insight (the assumption that HNWIs don’t like to shop for something without being able to see and touch it for themselves) and conflicting priorities (physical store expansion into China and more experiential events has been the name of the game in recent years). But with a China slowdown mooted, particularly in the area of luxury gifting, and no real concrete research to show that HNWIs aren’t just as digitally savvy as their less liquid counterparts, there becomes less and less justification for what are, across the industry, woeful examples of digital strategy and innovation.

It can’t be easy for profitable businesses like LVMH, with an eye on quarterly earnings, to make drastic investments in the online space. Luxury’s brand equity often comes from provenance and tradition; a company’s roots are in its founding stores, the connotations of Milan, Florence, Paris, etc. They also worry about their neighbours; a flash-sale site or, worse, one full of counterfeit knock-offs, is always just a click away. From a logistical point of view, there is also the issue of back-end infrastructure to contend with. For several years, PPR (now Kering) ran much of its e-commerce business through Yoox, as we’ve talked about before. It would be wrong to single out those in luxury. L2 Thinktank recently tweeted with much excitement about Bacardi’s “cocktail discovery site” that worked seamlessly across web, mobile and tablet. Well, forgive us if we don’t leap for joy in an ecstasy of delirium, but this is 2014, that should be the minimum deliverable. Still, luxury is a sector in blatant need of redirection.

eConsultancy eviscerated many luxury brands’ online presences in a recent article

Burberry is lauded by many as an outlier in this world of luxury goods, a company that has truly embraced digital. For all the talk of such innovation though, the website itself is utterly dominated by a rote e-commerce site, as are its social networks such as Google+. It is the physical stores where technological innovation has been injected. And this is supposedly the company pushing the rest of its peers forward. It comes as little surprise then that eConsultancy published a superb piece at the end of April excoriating the sector, leaving no brand unscathed. Headlines included, “painfully slow load times“, “awful UX” and “not making much effort“. But the worst and most perplexing atrocity had to be the above screengrab on the purposeful hiding away of an e-commerce platform, one that was presumably quite expensive to source and implement in the first place. We can’t overestimate the necessity of having a clear user journey through to purchase, just as it would be difficult to overestimate the amount of luxury good companies that are guilty of this sin for which Dolce & Gabbana have been singled out for here.

On this note, Gucci’s recently relaunched mobile site – replacing among other things a tablet site that had been left to wither since 2010 – was welcome news to us, as it seemed to be also (logically) to those wishing to actually part with their money on Gucci wares. L2 in May reported the news, saying that the new site now accounts for 27% of all traffic, a 150% YoY increase. Sounds good, except that means traffic through the mobile site in 2013 was a miniscule 0.18%, right? Terrible.

There are signs of hope. Gucci’s move to invest in a new mobile site, though monumentally belated, is a welcome one. As more brands cotton on to the importance of online, the Financial Times recently reported on the moves many are making to secure ‘.luxury’ suffixes, in the wake of IPv6, if only to avoid the complications of cybersquatting. And Michael Kors, which seems only to be going from strength to strength every quarter, has praised its own social media presence for “driving international sales”. We’ve almost entirely focused on fashion brands here, but other companies within the luxury sector are getting the message loud and clear. Take the auction house Christie’s, a legacy company if ever there was one, having been founded in 1766. Not only have they dedicated time and energy to investing in major online auctions, they have also recently created a new sector vertical of ‘luxury’ within the house itself. New thinking might well take new talent, it will also take C-suite buy-in, as well an acceptance that digital commerce is an integral part of business now, no matter how exclusive your product is.

Tech’s impact on business and culture in 2014

It would be impossible to capture the disruptive influence the latest digital technologies are currently having on the world in a single blog post. But what Zeitgeist has collated here are some thoughts and happenings showing the different ways technology is changing our lives – from the way we do business to the way we interact with others.

Last night saw a highly enjoyable occurrence. No, not the Academy Awards in general, which as ever moved at a glacial pace as it ticked off a list of predicted favourites. Rather, it was a specific moment in the ceremony itself, when host Ellen DeGeneres took a (seemingly) impromptu picture of herself with a cornucopia of stars, tweeting it instantly. The host declared she wanted the picture (above) to be the most retweeted post ever. The previous holder was none other than the President of the United States, Barack Obama, whose re-election message saw over 500k retweets. It took Zeitgeist but a few minutes to realise that Ellen’s post would skyrocket past this. Right now it has been retweeted 2.7m times. Corporate tactic on the part of Samsung though it may have been, Zeitgeist felt himself feeling much closer to the action – being able to see on his phone a photo the host had taken moments ago several thousand miles away – and the incident helped inject a brief air of spontaneity into the show’s proceedings. Super fun, and easy to get definitive results in this case on how many people were really engaging with the content. But can we quantify how much Samsung and Twitter really benefited from the move, beyond fuzzy marketing metrics? Talking heads on CNBC saw room for improvement (see below).

Former WSJ.com Managing Editor Kevin Delaney leads discussions on Samsung and Twitter’s presence at the Oscars last night (click to watch)

The big news of late in tech circles of course has been Facebook’s $19bn acquisition of messaging application Whatsapp. Many, many lines of editorial have been spilled on this deal already. In the mainstream media, many commentators have found the price of the deal staggering. So it’s worth reading more considered views such as Benedict Evans’, whose post on the deal Zeitgeist highly encourages you to read. Despite the seemingly large amount of money the company has been acquired for – especially considering Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for a ‘mere’ $1bn – Evans sagely points out that per user the deal is about the same as Google made in its valuation when it purchased YouTube. So perhaps not that crazy after all. The other key point that Evans makes is on Facebook’s dedicated pursuit to be the ‘next’ Facebook, or conversely to stop anyone else from becoming the next Facebook. With a meteoric rise in members (see image below, as it outstrips growth by both Facebook and Twitter), Whatsapp was certainly looking a little threatening.

Whatsapp’s number of active users skyrocketed to 450m in no time, outpacing both Facebook and Twitter (Source: The Economist)

The worry for investors is how Facebook will monetise this platform, when the founders have professed an aversion to advertising. Is merely ensuring that Facebook is the ‘next’ Facebook a good enough reason for such acquisitions? Barriers to entry and sustainable advantages will be few and far between going down this route. The Financial Times, in its analysis of the acquisition, points out that innovation is quickly nipping at the heels of Whatsapp. CalPal, for example, is one example of a mobile application that lets users message each other from within an app. In the markets, there has been a relatively sanguine response to the purchase, but only because of broader trends. As the FT points out,

“External forces have also helped to push the headline prices of deals such as WhatsApp into the stratosphere. A global excess of cheap money, along with a scarcity of alternatives for growth-hungry investors, has boosted the stock prices of companies such as Facebook and Google.”

One of the most visibly exciting developments in technology in recent years is the explosion of the wearable tech sector. But it is Google’s flagship product, Glass, that has met with much ire and distress. An excellent piece of analysis appearing in MIT Technology Review last month hit the nail on the head when it identified why Glass was having trouble winning people over. The article rightly identifies the significant shift in external appearance inherent in making the switch from a device that needs to be taken out of a pocket as makes it clear when it is being interacted with (you need to cover half your face with the product to talk to someone, for example). The article also details the savvy approach Google have taken to the distribution of their product. It’s always sensible to try and mobilise the part of your base likely to be evangelists anyway, so as to build advance buzz before a full-blown release. But to get them to pay for the privilege, as Google are doing with their excitable fans, dubbed Explorers, is a stroke of genius for them. However, the key issue, and what the article states is an “insurmountable problem”, is that “Google’s challenge in making the device a successful consumer product will be convincing the people around you to ignore it”. It is this fundamental aspect of social interaction that is worrying many, and now Google is worried too. As detailed in the FT, the company has acknowledged that the product can look “pretty weird”. Recognising it has a “long journey” to mainstream adoption, it published a list of Dos and Don’ts. Highlights include,

“Ask for permission. Standing alone in the corner of a room staring at people while recording them through Glass is not going to win you any friends… If you find yourself staring off into the prism for long periods of time you’re probably looking pretty weird to the people around you.”

It indicates that Google may have a significant ‘Glasshole‘ problem it needs to attend to. The case may be overstated though. One of the problems may just be that potential customers have yet to see any practical uses for it. This is beginning to change. Last week, Virgin Atlantic announced a six-week trial of both Glass and Sony smartwatches. The idea will be for check-in attendants to use the devices to scan limousine number plates so that passengers can be greeted by name and be instantly updated on their flight status.

In the arts, digital technology has inspired much innovative work, as well as helped broaden its audience. David Hockney, one of England’s greatest living artists, recently exhibited a series of works produced entirely on his iPad at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. He is far from alone. Last week’s anniversary issue of The New Yorker featured work from Jorge Colombo on its front cover, again produced entirely on an iPad. Such digital innovation allows for increased productivity as well as new aesthetics. When done well, art can also involve the viewer, encouraging interaction. Digital technology helps with this too. Earlier in the year The New York Times covered how the New York City Ballet redesigned part of their floor in a new scheme to attract new visitors to the ballet. The result, roughly life-size pictures of dancers arranged on the floor, has seen great success, and an explosion of content on social media platforms like Instagram, where users have taken to posing on the floor as if interacting with the images (see above). It’s a simple tactic that now reaches a far greater audience thanks to new digital technologies.

A recently published book, ‘Now I know who my comrades are: Voices from the Internet Undergound’, by Emily Parker, seeks to demonstrate the ways in which digital technology has made helped to coalesce and support important activism in regions such as China and Latin America. But, as The Economist points out in its review, the disappointing situation in Egypt puts pay to some of the author’s claims; there are limits to how productive and transformative technology can be. In business, these hurdles are plain to see.  A poll taken by McKinsey published last month shows that “45% of companies admit they have limited to no understanding on how their customers interact with them digitally“. This is staggering. For all executives’ talk of the power of Big Data, such technology is useless without the proper structures in place to successfully analyse it. We also perhaps need to think more about repercussions of increased technological advances and how they influence our social interactions. In the recently opened film Her (starring Joaquin Phoenix, pictured below), set in the very near future, a new operating system is so pervasive and seamless that it leads to fraught, thought-provoking questions on the nature and productivity of relationships. When does conversation – and more – with a simulacrum detract from interactions with the physical world? These considerations may seem lofty, but as we illustrated earlier, the germination of such thoughts are being echoed in discussions over Google Glass.

So technology in 2014 heralds some promise for the future. Wearable tech as a trend is merely the initial stage of a journey where our interaction with computing systems becomes seamless. It is on this journey though that we need to make sure that businesses are making the most of every opportunity to streamline costs and enhance customer service, and that individual early adopters do not leave the rest of us behind to deal with a bewildering and alarming new way of living. One of our favourite quotations, from the author William Gibson, is apt to end on: “The future’s already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed“.

The “Jaws” of death? – Rethinking film industry strategy

Steven Spielberg on-set for “Jaws”. The Leviathan gave birth to the summer blockbuster

This past week, Zeitgeist had the pleasure of enjoying a new adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado about Nothing”. This adaptation was not performed at the theatre but at the cinema. It was not directed by Kenneth Branagh or any other luminary of the legitimate stage, but rather by the quiet, modest, nerdy Joss Whedon, who until a few years ago was best known to millions as the brains behind the cult TV series phenomenon “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (full disclosure: Zeitgeist worked on the show in his days of youth). Whedon was picked to direct a film released last year that can, without much difficulty, be seen as the apotheosis of the Hollywood film industry; “The Avengers”. A mise-en-abyme of a concept, involving disparate characters, some of whom already have their own fully-fledged franchises, coming together to form another vehicle for future iterations. “The Avengers” became the third-highest grossing film of all time, and it is a thoroughly enjoyable romp. Moreover, to go from directing on such a broad canvas to shooting a film mostly with friends in one’s own home – as with “Much Ado…” – displays an impressive range of creative ingenuity.

Sadly for shareholders and studio executives’ career aspirations, not every film is as sure-fire a hit as “The Avengers”, try though as they might (and do) to replicate the same mercurial ingredients that lead to success. Marvel, which originally conceived of the myriad characters surrounding The Avengers mythology, was bought in 2009 by Disney for $4bn. Disney for all intents and purposes have a steady strategic head on their shareholders. They parted ways with the quixotic Weinstein brothers while welcoming Pixar back into the fold. They were one of the first to concede the inevitability of closed platforms release windows – something Zeitgeist has written about in the past – they are debuting a game-changing platform, Infinity, which might revolutionise the way children interact with the plethora of memorable characters the studio have dreamt up over the years. However, such sound business strategy could not save them from the uber-flop that was 2012’s “John Carter”, which lost the studio $200m. This summer, the rationale for their biggest release has been built on what appears to be sound logic; taking the on- and off-screen talent behind their massively successful “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, and bringing them together again for another reboot in the form of “The Lone Ranger”. The New York Times said the film “descends into nerve-racking incoherence”; it has severely underperformed at the box office, after a budget of $250m. Sony’s “After Earth” similarly underperformed, suddenly throwing Will Smith’s bullet-proof reputation for producing hits into jeopardy.

These summer films – “tentpoles” to use the terminology bandied about in Los Angeles – are where the money is made (or not) for studios. As an industry over the past ten years, Zeitgeist has watched as these tentpoles have become more concentrated, more risk-averse and therefore less original, more expensive and more likely either to produce either stratospheric results or spectacular failures. Paramount is an interesting example of a studio that has made itself leaner recently, releasing far fewer films, and relying on franchises to keep the ship afloat. Edtorial Director of Variety Peter Bart seems to think there’s a point when avoiding risk leads to courting entropy. It’s an evolution that has escaped few, yet is was still notable when, last month, famed directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas spoke out publicly against the way the industry seemed to be headed. Indeed, the atmosphere at studios in Hollywood seems to mimic that of a pre-2008 financial sector; leveraging ever more collateral against assets with significant – and unsustainable – levels of risk. The financial sector uses arcane algorithms and has a large number of Wharton grads whose aim should be to preserve stability and profit. Yet even with all this analysis, they failed to see the gigantic readjustment that was imminent. In the film industry, Relativity Media’s reputation for rigorous predictive models on what will make a film successful is rare enough to have earned it a feature in Vanity Fair. So what hope is there the film industry will change its tune before it is too late? Spielberg pontificates,

“There’s eventually going to be a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen of these mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground and that’s going to change the paradigm again.”

Instead of correcting course as failures at the box office failed to abate, studios have dug in harder. Said Lucas,

“They’re going for gold, but that isn’t going to work forever. And as a result they’re getting narrower and narrower in their focus. People are going to get tired of it. They’re not going to know how to do anything else.”

Such artistic ennui in audiences is admittedly sclerotic in its visibility at the moment. “Man of Steel”, another attempt at rebooting a franchise – coming only seven years after the last attempt – is performing admirably, with a position still firmly in the top ten at the US box office after four weeks of release, with over $275m taken domestically. It’s interesting to note that audiences have been happy to embrace the new version so quickly after the last franchise launch failed; though actor James Franco finds it contentious, the same has been true with the “Spider-Man” franchise relaunch.

Is M&A finally out of vogue in the Media and Entertainment sector?

Part of the problem in the industry, some say, is to do with those at the top running the various film studios. In “Curse of the Mogul”, written by lecturers at Columbia University, the authors contend that since 2005 the industry as a whole has underperformed versus the S&P stock index, yet such stocks are still eminently attractive to investors. The reason, the authors say, is that those running the businesses frame the notion of success differently. They argue that it takes a very special type of person (i.e. them) to be able to manage not only different media and the different audiences they reach and the different trends that come out of that, but more importantly (in their eyes) to be able to manage the talent. They asked to be judged on Academy Awards rather than bottom lines. The most striking thing in the book – which Zeitgeist is still reading – is the continual pursuit by said mogul of strategic synergies. This M&A activity excites shareholders but has historically led to minimal returns (think Vivendi or AOL Time Warner), often because what was presented as operational or content-based synergy is actually nothing of the sort. It’s a point Richard Rumelt makes in his excellent book, “Good Strategy / Bad Strategy”. Some companies are beginning to get the idea. Viacom seemed an outlier in 2006 when it divested CBS. Lately, News Corporation has followed a similar tack, albeit under duress after suffering from scandalous revelations about hacking in its news division. A recent article in The Economist states,

“Most shareholders now see that television networks, newspapers, film studios, music labels and other sundry assets add little value by sharing a parent. Their proximity can even hinder performance by distracting management… they have become more assertive and less likely to believe the moguls’ flannel about ‘synergies’.”

So in some ways it was of little surprise that Sony came under the microscope recently as well, part of this larger trend of scrutiny. The company has experienced dark times of late, with shares having plunged 85% over the past 13 years. The departure of Howard Stringer in 2012 coincided with an annual loss of some $6.4bn. Now headed up by Kazuo Hirai, the company has undoubtedly become more focused, with much more being made of their mobile division. Losses have been stemmed, but the company is still floundering, with an annual loss reported in May of $4.6bn. It was only a couple of weeks later that hedge-fun billionaire Dan Loeb – instrumental in getting Marissa Meyer to lead Yahoo – upped his ownership stake in Sony, calling on it to divest its entertainment division in a letter to CEO Hirai. Part of the issue with Sony is a cultural one, where Japan’s ways of working differ strongly from the West’s. This is covered in some detail in a profile with Stringer featured in The New Yorker. In a speech he gave last year, Stringer said, “Japan is a harmonious society which cherishes its social values, including full employment. That leads to conflicts in a world where shareholder value calls for ever greater efficiency”. But Sony’s film division – which includes the James Bond franchise – is performing well; in the year to March 2013 Sony’s film and music businesses produced $905m of operating income, compared with combined losses of $1.9 billion in mobile phones, according to The Economist. It ended 2012 first place among the other film studios in market share. Sony is the last studio to consistently deliver hits across genres, reports The New York Times in an excellent article. The article quotes an anonymous Sony exeuctive, “We may not look like the rest of Hollywood, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a painstakingly thought-through strategy and a profitable one”. Sadly the strategy behind films like ‘After Earth’ begin to look flimsy when one glances at the box office results. While Hirai and the Sony board concede that have met to discuss the possibility of honouring Mr. Loeb’s suggestion – offering 15-20% of it as an IPO rather than selling it off in full – Mr. Hirai also commented in an interview with CNBC, “We definitely want to make sure we can continue a successful business in the entertainment space. That is for me, first and foremost, the top priority”. In mid-June Loeb sent a second letter, advocating the IPO proposal and saying “Our research has confirmed media reports depicting Entertainment as lacking the discipline an accountability that exist at many of its competitors”. The question is whether selling off its entertainment assets would remove any synergies with other divisions, thus making the divisions left over less profitable, or whether such synergies even existed in the first place. For Loeb, the “most valuable untapped synergies” are still in the studio and music divisions yet after decades as one company they still remain untapped. That point won’t make for pleasant reading at Sony HQ.

Another problem is the changing nature of media consumption habits. Not only are we watching films in different ways over different platforms, we are also doing much else besides, from playing video games, which have successfully transitioned beyond the nerdy clique of yesteryear, to general mobile use and second screening. This transition – and with it a realisation that competition is not likely to come from across regional boarders but from startup platforms – is largely being ignored by the French as they insist on trade talks with the US that centre on the preservation of l’exception culturelle. Such trends are evident in business dealings. The Financial Times this weekend detailed Google’s significant foray into developing content, setting up YouTube Space LA. The project gives free soundstage space to artists who are likely to guarantee eyeballs on YouTube, and lead to advertising revenue for the platform. From the stellar success of the first season of “House of Cards”, to DreamWorks Animation’s original content partnership announced last month, Netflix has become the bête noire for traditional content producers as it shakes up traditional models. We have written before about the IHS Screen Digest data from earlier this year, showing worrying trends for the industry; as predicted, audiences are beginning to favour access over ownership, preferring to rent rather than own, which means less profit for the studio. As much due to a decline in revenue from other platforms as growth in of itself, cinemas are expected to be the major area of profit going forward to 2016 (see above chart). We’ve written before about the power cinema still has. Spielberg and Lucas pick up on this;

“You’re going to end up with fewer theaters, bigger theaters with a lot of nice things. Going to the movies will cost 50 bucks or 100 or 150 bucks, like what Broadway costs today, or a football game. It’ll be an expensive thing… [Films] will sit in the theaters for a year, like a Broadway show does. That will be called the ‘movie’ business.”

In a conversation over Twitter, (excerpts of which are featured above), Cameron Saunders, MD of 20th Century Fox UK told Zeitgeist that “major changes were afoot”. Such potential disruption is by no means unique to the film industry, and should come as a surprise to one. Zeitgeist recently went to see Columbia faculty member Rita McGrath speak at a Harvard Business Review event. In her latest book, “The End of Competitive Advantage”, McGrath discounts the old management consultant attempts at providing sustainable competitive advantages to business. Her assertion is that any advantage is transient, that incumbency and success often lead to entropy, unless there is constant innovation to build on that success. Such a verdict of entropy could well be applied to the film industry. The model has worked well for decades, despite predictions of doom at the advent of television, the VCR, the DVD, et cetera ad nauseum. But fundamental behavioural shifts are now at play, and the way we devise strategies for what content people want to see and how they wish to see it need to be readdressed, quickly. Otherwise all this deliberation will eventually become much ado about nothing.

UPDATE (15/4/13): Of course, context is everything. The New York Times published an interesting article today saying investing in Hollywood is less risky than investing in Silicon Valley, though the returns in the latter are likely to be greater. Neither are seen as reliable.

This issue isn’t going away. We write again about it, here.

Before and after Prism – On liberty in a digital age

First aired on PBS in 1985, filmmaker Ken Burns’ documentary on the Statue of Liberty was on Zeitgeist’s TiVo watch list this weekend. It’s really quite staggering to note how issues being discussed then are even more relevant three decades on.

It goes back to an article we wrote recently on the US government’s more legitimate efforts to collect data. These myriad agencies are working so fast to see whether it’s possible to collect this or that piece of data on someone, they are not stopping to think whether they should, and what the long-term implications are. By long-term, we mean what such a “Faustian bargain” means for the civil rights of citizens – particularly of course in the relation of the right to privacy – and what such machinations do to the long-term standing of the country as a whole – particularly from the outside looking in.

How certain is our moral footing on criticising Chinese cyber-attacks when we are hacking ourselves?

“Spying in a democracy depends for its legitimacy on informed consent, not blind trust”, wrote The Economist in this week’s lead article. Not so anymore, seemingly. The recent revelations that the NSA have been collecting masses of data from Facebook, Twitter, Google et al., with little thought for due process and with a focus on communications outside the US, and that at least one telco, Verizon, was ordered to provide significant amounts of user data to the government, is disconcerting to say the least. Zeitgeist wrote a letter, recently published in the Financial Times, before this story broke, that attempted to convey that the true worry for those opposed to such overreach is the high possibility of neglect or abuse, rather than intentional Machiavellian manipulation. Government ineptitude is more likely, and far more dangerous. Clarity and transparency are the enemies of such ineptitude.

As former New York governor Mario Cuomo admits in the clip at the beginning of this post, it can be very tempting to squash a little liberty here and there in return for added security. The situation, which arises at a time when the US is supposed to be taking China to task over its own extensive cyber-espionage (see above graphic), where we are, as one CNBC commentator described recently “hacking ourselves”, must give us pause, and begs us to re-examine what our notions of liberty are in an age of digital disruption.

The New News – Monetising journalism today

“What the Internet has done is made a million sources of information available. It’s only a click away… The Internet has disrupted many industries. The newspaper business has been destroyed. It’s beginning to happen, arguably, to television. Consumer behaviour is changing!”

– Henry Blodget, editor-in-chief, Business Insider

Great minds may think alike, but they’re now consuming media on a plethora of different devices. Legacy media companies have been struggling in recent years to protect old revenue streams as the onslaught of digital disruption has rendered previous business models less than adequate. Recently, though, there have been signs of hope.

In television, Hulu and Netflix are increasingly showing themselves to be lifesavers of the long-format viewing, in an era where we are being increasingly distracted with short-term fixes, evinced by the success of social gaming product from companies like King. Hulu added 1 million paying subscribers in Q1 of this year and streamed over a billion videos. Netflix, after bravely investing in producing its own content with House of Cards, recently reported it has already recouped the sizeable $100m investment it made in the first season. It’s interesting, reassuring and quite logical to note the news that when Netflix enters a new market, piracy in the region drops. Let’s hope that legacy media companies are finally recognising the oblique connection here (and ponder less the millions of dollars lost over the years to pirated content at the expense of no legitimate alternatives). Though Borders has disappeared and Barnes & Noble may be in trouble, the book business is doing well, with 2012 being a “record year” for the industry. Digital downloads were up 66%, with physical purchases down only 1%. In music, the industry is slowly embracing a future (now very much a present) that has been staring them in the face since the start of the century with Napster and its myrmidons; digital sales rose 9% last year, helping overall sales to rise for the first time in a decade (see The Economist’s chart below). In South Korea, a region traditionally awash with pirated content, startup KKBox has come up with innovative ways to get people to pay for music again. They emphasise a sense of community – much like the one users felt they belonged to on Napster – bringing subscribers “closer to the regional music scene… Users can listen in real time as music celebrities make playlists of their favourite songs. There is also a KKBox print magazine and an annual awards show and concert, and it sponsors regional music festivals”. In other words, the offering goes beyond simply providing product to be streamed; it creates a cohesive world around the product.

In 2012, music industry sales held steady for the first time in years. Digital sales continued to grow.

This cohesive world is in vogue at the moment; it represents most business justifications for investment in social media, and on a granular level again for investing in multiple networks, be they Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. This cohesiveness also allows for the exploitation of new revenue streams, something we’ve written about before. It’s a point that’s recognised by those in the newspaper industry. David Carey, head of the Hearst Magazines empire, has stated unequivocally that today “you need five or six revenue streams to make the business really successful”. It’s why companies like Monocle, which produces a high-end cultural magazine, has started a radio service that has been “profitable from the start, since normal commercial radio stations never deliver the kinds of listeners its high-end advertisers want”. And as advertising revenue dips below subscriber revenue, as it did recently at The New York Times and will do if it has not done so already at the Financial Times (FT), these new business models need to be set up and utilised, fast.

These discussions and others were up for debate at an event two weeks ago, hosted by the Media Society at the offices of the FT, examining the effects and implications of digital disruption. On a macro level, the problem has been with trying to get people to value content that is no longer physical. From the looks of it – not least from the evidence above -this is broadly starting to be achieved in the music, book and television industries. The problem, according to Laurie Benson, formerly of Bloomberg, was that the newspaper and magazine publishers took the genie out of the bottle, and “panicked”. For, unlike television content producers that seemingly buried their hand in the sand, those in the newspaper business immediately shoved all their content online, for free, in an effort / vain hope that advertising would continue to provide. Nic Newman, who spearheaded the BBC iPlayer initiative, said companies were still fundamentally struggling with mobile, which is especially important now it is considered “the first screen”. Moreover, social media, as well as providing an opportunity to construct a cohesive environment for the product being sold, has also, said Nic, hugely changed the way we find and discover news. The irony of his statement, given at the headquarters of the Financial Times, a paper with arguably the most opaque paywall in the industry – and with a zero-sum Facebook strategy – was not lost on Zeitgeist. On that note, Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, spoke up, saying he was “very comfortable” with the paywall as it currently was. He admitted he was “worried” about what Twitter would do to their model (the tense should perhaps be what it is doing). Rob mentioned Forbes, which is now allowing direct outside contribution. This obviously makes the platform somewhat more exciting, and certainly more accessible. But what does Forbes mean now as a publication; what is their editorial position, asked Rob. Though many interesting questions were posed, answers were few and far between at the conference, and few initiatives were proposed.

On a more granular level, what are businesses doing now to try and maximise revenue in print? We’ve discussed recommendations for print media before. Unsurprisingly, some of the more innovative – and perhaps controversial – models are coming from those publications outside the mainstream. Business Insider, and Vice, are two such examples. Insights into both publications (although defining these companies as only publications perhaps limits the perception of their offering) were covered in the same issue of The New Yorker last month.

Ken Auletta’s article about Business Insider, and its “disgraced Wall Street analyst”-turned editor, Henry Blodget, states that the blog “draws twenty-four million unique monthly users, more than CNBC”. Overhead is one clearly one of the main areas that such companies have over their legacy rivals, whose roots are in ink and paper; Business Insider could never hope to, nor would they wish to have 1,700 full-time staff, as the WSJ does. One of the innovative, intriguing and controversial things about the editorial of BI is it’s blending of hard news – “7 signs household finances are getting stronger” – with more off-the-wall, attention-grabbing, low-brow content – “3 teeth-whitening products that actually work”, “Here’s what NBA players looked like before they had stylists” and “The porn industry has already dreamed up some awesome ideas for Google Glass“. Blodget, who continues to write many stories himself, is seemingly as comfortable writing about budget-cliff negotiations with an accompanying eighteen charts, as he is writing about the experience of flying home economy class from Davos. Andrew Leonard, on Salon, called the latter “the stupidest article to be posted to the Internet in the year 2013 – and possibly the entire century”. The content may have indeed been questionable, but it’s part of an interesting strategy to cater to multiple mindsets of the same audience; Blodget says he wants to “put the fun back into business“. The New Yorker article describes how BI produces original content through research, including how Goldman Sachs lost the chance to be the lead under-writer in Facebook’s IPO, and questioning whether previously undisclosed emails showed that Zuckerberg really had stolen the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins. A lot of the time though, BI links to reported news “and then adds its own commentary, as well as reactions from others”, what Blodget calls “halfways between broadcast and print… it’s conversational”. It’s also unquestionably lazy, but provocative, which is what – along with many slideshows, with each slide on a different page – earn the blog so many clicks. 85% of BI revenue comes from advertising, a dangerous ploy in a time when rates and interest in online platforms are either slipping or more generally failing to account for costs. Most of the rest of the pie comes from paid conferences, something that other publications – incumbent or otherwise – should take note of. People pay with their time, and sometimes money, for your expertise and opinion, so expanding this engagement into other adjacent opportunities is a wise move. To this point, the company has also hired analysts to create research reports on telco trends. The New Yorker comments, “The result is something like a private magazine that several thousand individuals and businesses receive, for $299 a year”. Other companies are experimenting with various monetisation methods. Andrew Sullivan’s publication The Dish is soon to be made subscriber-only, with no ads, as $20 a year. The good news is that people are starting to willingly pay for other digital content, such as books, music and film. But aside from BI’s small subscriber-based research section of the site – an exception on blogs – the greater worry is what the type of engagement we have with content online means for the type of content that is produced in order to cater for those tastes. Are we reaching the end of an era of nuance? The New Yorker again,

“Lengthy investigative pieces are rare on all-digital platforms. They are expensive to produce and, given a readership that has an average of four minutes to spare, not likely to attract a large audience. As economically beleaguered newspapers invest less in long-form reporting, digital publications are unlikely to invest more.”

Journalism for Vice means creating content to be reported on, rather than simply reacting to developing news

Lizzie Widdicombe’s article on Vice magazine shows there is far more innovation to be developed in the publishing industry, as long as one is willing to stop thinking of oneself as publisher. Vice is by no-means an upstart, at least in the magazine world, but recently found itself on the global stage after having the sheer tenacity to organise Dennis Rodman to go to North Korea for an exhibition basketball game, sitting alongside the Dear Leader himself Kim Jong Un. The story ran with the headline, “North Korea has a friend in Dennis Rodman and Vice”. Immediately we see the lines between reportage and editorial, between analysing events and creating them, begin to blur considerably. The headline looked particularly careless when shortly after the ‘basketball diplomacy’, North Korea “scrapped its 1953 armistice with South Korea and threatened preemptive nuclear attack on the United States”. The Vice article detailed the “epic feast” they were treated to, which again seemed callous given the generational malnutrition that has led to stunted growth in the North Korean population. Journalism stalwart Dan Rather called the whole episode “more Jackass than journalism”. This is a very different type of journalism indeed. The company has 35 offices in 18 countries, with websites, book and film divisions as well as an in-house ad agency. Since 2002 it has operated a record label with albums from the likes of Bloc Party. The New Yorker article says “these ventures are united by Vice’s ambitions to becomes a kind of global MTV on steroids, [but] unlike MTV – which broadcasts a monolithic American vision of youth culture – [the international aim is] to ‘localise’ their sensibility”. According to Shane Smith, Vice’s CEO, ‘The overall aim, the overall goal is to be the largest network for young people in the world… to make content that young people actually give a shit about'”. Vice employees sometimes refer to the brand as “the Time Warner of the streets”.

It has made significant forays into video, with a channel on YouTube that attracts more than a million subscribers. Like Business Insider, Vice also blends the highbrow with the lowbrow in terms of content. On YouTube, the New Yorker reports, videos range from ‘In Saddam’s Shadow: 10 Years After the Invasion’, to ‘Donkey Sex: The Most Bizarre Tradition’. The company’s revenues are estimated at $175m for 2012. In 2011, Vice was valued at $200m, “and last year Forbes speculated that the company might someday be worth as much as a billion dollars“. Its newest venture is a show on HBO (owned by Time Warner), with the tagline ‘News from the edge’. The show “takes on subjects from political assassinations in the Philippines to India’s nuclear standoff with Pakistan”. It engages in what it calls ‘immersionism’, where Vice employees are sent out to these locations and more or less told to engage in practices of varying degrees of danger. The New Yorker says this type of reporting harkens back to that of Hunter S. Thompson, who pioneered “participatory journalism… Vice claims to have a similar objective. Introductions to the HBO series announce that it’s out to examine ‘the absurdity of the human condition'”. One of the reasons companies like Time Warner, News Corp (see image below) and Conde Nast have all made the pilgrimage to Vice’s offices in Brooklyn is that they are all terribly envious of the way the company has managed to engage and monetise their audience. As well as the HBO show, Vice also create supplementary material fro HBO.com that shows how the show was made. Its Internet presence is diverse, and this is where the multiple revenue streams and advertising opportunities come in, as The New Yorker elaborates,

“Web sites, including Vice.com; an ad network; and its YouTube channel… Vice makes more than 85% of its revenue online, much of it through sponsored content… Besides selling banner displays and short ads that play before its videos, Vice offers it advertisers the option of funding an entire project in exchange for being listed as co-creator and having editorial input. Advertisers can pay for a single video, or, for a higher price – $1-5m for twelve episodes… – they can pay for an entire series, on a topic that dovetails with the company’s image… At the highest end of the sponsorship spectrum are [content] verticals, in which companies can sponsor entire websites.”

North Face, for example, partnered with Vice to sponsor ‘Far Out’, where Vice employees visited “the most remote places on Earth”. CNN is attempting similar feats, in an effort to legitimise the partnership – for example with Jaeger Le Coultre – by producing content that has a connection with company’s brand values. Some of Vice’s content verticals are softer than others, so that they can be more advertiser-friendly. It is seen by some at Vice of returning to the original soap opera days, when P&G would sponsor a serial show. This has led to some longtime fans declaring the publication has become too safe – gone are the early magazine covers featuring lines of cocaine, for example. The New Yorker comments the result “can feel like a strange beast, neither advertising nor regular content but something in between”. Vice also have a Creators Project, “devoted to the intersection of art and technology”. They partnered with Intel, and content has included an article on a cinema hackathon, as well as an event where a non-profit and VFX company partnered with techies to develop new forms of “interactive storytelling”. Intel sponsored the event, the video of the event, the blog post and the entire Creators Project website. Over three years, the company has paid Vice “tens of millions of dollars annually… to fund and publicise similar projects”. It is part of Intel’s attempt to have itself perceived as more of an experience brand, a la Disney and Apple. Said the CMO, “We want to see Intel coverage in Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone“. The video of the event is also put in YouTube, a company that is “crucial to Vice’s ability to expand” and which two years ago began paying Vice to make shows as part of a broader strategy to upend traditional TV – seen elsewhere in their recent Comedy Week. Such efforts from Vice form a feedback loop of good news that encourages investment from other individuals (such as former media mogul Tom Freston) and companies (such as Raine Group and advertising conglomerate WPP, a former employer of Zeitgeist). Vice is also planning a global, 24-hour news channel. Smith told The New Yorker, “Let’s say, hypothetically, you become the default source for news on YouTube. You get billions of video views, WPP monetises it. Then you are the next CNN“. This would be a dramatic shift in the way it makes its money now, from those sponsorships mentioned earlier. Quixotic efforts such as the North Korea trip, as well a recent bungling of a story on John McAfee, on the run from police, where Vice inadvertently gave his location away, would have to be curtailed. “If Vice does become a global news network, it might have to rethink some aspects of its prankster approach to reporting”.

Murdoch and other CEOs have much to learn from Vice’s business model

It’s becoming abundantly clear then that what news publishers need to do to survive is embrace a diversity of platforms. This will be a long road for legacy incumbents. The FT now produces a great deal of video content, but it is still largely lost on the app and on the website. There is no hub where videos are categorised in any way. Few if any publications allow someone, upon purchasing a hard copy of the newspaper / magazine, to have access to that same content online, if only temporarily. These are simple but fundamental things that companies like this must do if they want to present their audience with a cohesive experience. That’s about operations and user experience. From a content perspective, journalism also faces new challenges. Fareed Zakaria, who Zeitgeist has been an avid reader of since the reporter’s days writing for Newsweek International, says Vice’s TV show for HBO has “loosened the format” of television reporting, as it tries “to get a news audience interested in the world”.

What are the implications of such a loosening? Vice CEO Shane Smith defended the company’s North Korea trip to The New Yorker, going on to say, “Is it journalism? It depends on what the definition of journalism is”. Um, well, yes, quite. If we’re to maintain any distinction between content that is supported and promoted by advertising, editorial that has a particular bent, and unbiased news rather than sensationalist reportage, we need to start having a serious conversation about what journalism is. In particular we need to discuss what the balance is between the desire to entertain and the task of informing the populace. If the onus is truly on the latter, then it becomes a genuine public good that must, at worst, be subsidised by public money. The issue The New Yorker raises in its article on Business Insider crystallises the dilemma; the medium in which people consume news has changed, thus so have their habits. They are now less likely to dedicate time to reading long articles; so writing these kind of articles is increasingly an unprofitable exercise. An end to thorough investigative journalism would surely have dire consequences. While fears over the death of journalism have been greatly exaggerated, a dramatic shift is underway, and perhaps for the worse. And that’s true no matter what your definition of journalism is.

Fit to Print – Recommendations and lessons for print media

“Breaking an old business model is always going to require leaders to follow their instinct. There will always be persuasive reasons not to take a risk. But if you only do what worked in the past, you will wake up one day and find that you’ve been passed by.”

– Clayton Christensen

What do Dell, The New Yorker and the music industry have in common? All three are currently grappling fundamentally with their business models in the face of creative destruction at the hands of digital disruption. The CEO of Dell is struggling to take it private at the moment – in a proposed $24.4bn buyout – in an effort to ensure its strategy looks away from the short-term needs of investors while it restructures with a new, long-term strategy that will shift focus away from its core PC business. An issue of The New Yorker hardly makes for a quick read, but has been one of the more innovative companies among its peers to embrace and experiment with digital. We wrote about their initiatives last summer. Recently, for their anniversary issue, the publisher offered digital issues for 99c, an offer that Zeitgeist took them up on, and it was pleasing to see how well the digital edition mirrored with print one, while at the same time adding some features that took advantage of being on a digital product. Last week, The Economist published an article on the music industry, which is beginning to see glimmers of hope in its revenues from digital sales. “Sales of recorded music grew in 2012 for the first time since 1999“, although only by an anemic 0.3%. This is still better than Hollywood, which had to settle for celebrating a flattening of home entertainment revenues, after years of decline. After almost being destroyed by it, a third of the music industry’s revenues now come from digital, but they are barely keeping up with the decline in physical sales, which makes up the bulk of other revenues. Lucian Grainge, chairman and chief executive of Universal Music Group, spoke to the Financial Times at the weekend,

“The industry needs transforming. It’s for others to decide whether they want to get stuck in the past or whether they want to come on the journey… We’ve learnt an awful lot, but it’s like being in a commercial earthquake and the reality is it takes time to get out from beneath the desk where you’re protecting yourself and move forward.”

Indeed, one of the biggest issues industries must address is when is the right moment to risk their current business model in order to address change and adapt. Grainge talks about the industry need for a “constructive collision” between musicians, content owners, distributors, entrepreneurs and investors. To what extent this is happening is unclear, but it is certainly thinking outside the box, and could well be applied to other areas similarly suffering at the hands of such change. As goes the music and film industries, so goes the print industry too? How do print titles develop profitable models for generating profits in the face of such volatility in changing consumption habits and digital disruption?

New methods of media consumption have driven consumers to distraction

In December 2012, consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG) published a report entitled ‘Transforming Print Media’. The report begins on a sour note, admitting that the conventional wisdom is that newspaper and magazine publishing is “a dying business”. This is a hard assertion to counter though, and the consultancy’s own graphics show a rather alarming lack of growth in developed countries. Emerging markets, conversely, are seeing growth in both print advertising and circulation, for both newspapers and magazines. For instance, while between 2006 and 2011, the US has seen a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) decline of 12% in print advertising, China has seen an 8.5% uptick, and India a 13.9% growth. One of the immediate problems the report addresses, and one which Michael Dell is looking to neutralise is that of concentrating on short-term gain at the expense of long-term restructuring with a rigorous focus on which adjacencies work well and which do not. This can be immensely hard to justify in an environment of quarterly earnings reports and instant CNBC updates. BCG suggests implementing a strategy that will instill long-term change while also providing medium-term gains to keep investors happy. The report proposes a 3-5 year plan, and, interestingly, notes that success will rely “more on execution than insight”. Zeitgeist would counter that without both being optimal, the strategy is bound to fail. Moreover, knowing exactly who you want to target and how their methods of media consumption and interaction have altered / are altering is a critical tool for success. It also points out that new business models should not be about “trading print dollars for digital pennies”, something that the music and to some extent the film industry are both grappling with currently.

David Carey, head of Hearst Magazines, commented last year that, in publishing, “you need five or six revenue streams to make the business really successful”. One of the key points that recurs throughout the BCG report, which Zeitgeist, while working on developing strategic recommendations for the Financial Times last year, was also in favour of, was in extending the reach of the business in new directions. These directions leverage the brand equity of the company and extend into areas adjacent to the company’s expertise. For the FT, opportunities exist to extend the brand name into complementary areas of luxury with which the paper is already associated. Monocle has made in-roads into diversification by starting a radio station, which it says is very attractive to advertisers because they have a clear idea of their audience; the type of high-earning consumers who never normally listen to radio. As well as new revenue streams, Zeitgeist also focused on customer retention. One important consideration was that of both vertical and horizontal cohesion. The business as a brand must speak in a relevant, cohesive way across channels, and, in the case of the FT, speak in the appropriate way to its many different readers around the world. BCG advocates “reassessing vendor relationships; stream- lining editorial, content sharing, ad pricing, and production processes; and pooling advertising sales across titles or clusters… the right changes to financial policies— particularly to debt levels and ratios, dividends, and buybacks —can create a clear and compelling case for long-term health, can lift stock prices, and can attract more patient investors.”

Research has shown that price elasticity does not play a part for newspaper buying. Higher pricing, conversely, improves revenue

Price is a fundamental consideration too. For the FT, Zeitgeist extemporised on the importance of price. Referencing behavioural economics, price for the FT acted as an anchor. It framed the paper more by juxtaposing it with its cheaper peers than by giving it any inherent value. In reports from the last few years taken both in Europe and the US, several major broadsheet newspapers were studied. They had all raised their prices. Some of them had seen their circulation decrease. But all of them had seen increases in revenue, even the ones that had lost circulation. Zeitgeist presented the FT with an analogy; the champagne label Krug, some years ago, hiked up its price, with little notice and for no perceived reason. Production, pricing and taste had not changed. The company lost some suppliers because of this change. But overall, their revenues increased. Krug was now in the upper echelons of the luxurious world of champagne, done to coincide with a global rebrand that appeared in all the right places. BCG alludes to the price increases in its report, saying consumers will “perceive greater value in the product than the amount it is costing them… there is the ability to increase these prices by as much as 70 to 100 percent…”. The report addresses paywalls, which Zeitgeist have written about several times in the past. The key it seems is in making these paywalls permeable, not inflexible. This is one issue the FT will need to address, one its peers, like the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), The New York Times and The New Yorker, have taken steps in the direction of already. The WSJ has frequently taken down its paywall during times of emergency (such as Hurricane Sandy), or for sponsored promotions. Advertisers still play a significant role in US print advertising – a $34bn role – but it is diminishing. The New York Times reported last year that advertising revenue had dropped below subscription revenue. As worrying as this is, it should provide an opportunity for companies to focus more on producing content that the actual readers want, rather than what the advertisers want to see. Broadly, the difficulty lies in getting consumers to see the worth of a digital product versus a hard copy. Obviously this issue is not restricted to the publishing industry.

Krug champagne used behavioural economics to alter its place in the market

The importance of the transition to digital is hard to overstate. As well as issues of pricing and paywall strategy, there is also social media to consider. Here, the FT is a good example of a brand that is playing it safe, operating for the most part with a very top-down messaging strategy that leaves little room for collaborative communication. But digital production and the expectation of instant news also means that companies are having to change the way they produce content. Speaking at the Future of Media summit at the Broadcast and Video Expo recently, Editor in Chief of Time Out London Tim Arthur said their changes were “led partly by necessity and partly by desire”. BCG outlines three models that are emerging: “dedicated print and digital editorial teams, integrated teams that operate throughout the print and digital platforms, and full editorial integration”. There are several advantages to be leveraged through digital as well. Research is a big one. Time Out’s Tim Arthur admitted they never used to carry out research until their recent transformation, which included an overhaul of their digital strategy, as well as making their hard copy paper free. It was great then to hear how the company was now using multiple channels to collate data and engage audiences at the same time. Unlike the FT, Time Out was no longer engaging in a one-way conversation, and they were operating with “less arrogance”. The company changed from a content-stacked, “trickle down” approach to one that recognised different audience needs over different platforms, which is a key insight. Furthermore, the opportunities to make advertising more engaging are also quite evident. iAds for example, allow more interaction. A recent ad in The New Yorker promoted a new book with a ‘tap to read a chapter’ function.

“These considerations inevitably lead to a series of hard choices about the degree of diversification that publishers can realistically undertake”, so summarises the BCG report, which suggests controlled experimentation to work out the best model. On an internal level, the company must convince employees that this change will be for the better and for the long-term. It must also convince shareholders of the benefits, while showing real value as early as possible. Such a transformation provides opportunities for streamlining technologies and future-proofing ways of working. It should make the brand think about what its equity is, and where else it can push out to in order to drive new revenue streams. Digital is not something to be feared, it should be embraced. The opportunities for more targeted, engaging advertising, not least through the use of consumer data, which also can help provide more tailored and attractive content – content that is “useful to others” as Arthur says – will be fundamental steps to take. The music industry, which was ravaged by Napster and its myrmidons at the end of the 20th century, took an age to wake up to realisation that money could be made from the millions of people who were already downloading songs online. The film and television industries have reacted slightly faster, and initiatives like Hulu, Ultraviolet and Tesco’s Clubcard TV will help stem the tide. Print on the whole is more on top of the game. Companies like the Financial Times and Time Out are driving innovation in the sector, but must still more readily embrace change if they are to really connect with future readers. Time will tell.

Making Retail Truly Emotional

A great ad featured during a commercial break in the Academy Awards broadcast tonight on ABC. There’s no shortage of data out there pointing to the decimation of the retail sector, and we have written on the subject before. Stores cannot be promoted from a practical viewpoint any more; the internet has put paid to that. The irrational, emotional connection is what companies like JCP – after enduring troubles with another rebrand – are counting will bring customers into store. It’s a nice ad that feels genuine.

UPDATE (28/2): Great advertising sadly can’t always save a company from poor financial performance. The stock dipped today by over 20% as the company backtracked on a previous strategy, deciding to hold daily sales after completely swearing them off a year ago. Walter Loeb, a retail consultant and former senior retail analyst at Morgan Stanley, proclaims the company “lost its core customer during the transformation”. Oops.

UPDATE (25/3): James Surowiecki, writing in The New Yorker, has a good piece on jcp’s trials and tribulations, here.