Embracing digital – New moves for old companies

Are incumbent companies starting to see the light when it comes to embracing digital? Evidence is slowly starting to point in that direction.

Artists are known for embracing change and innovation, but the art market itself has been slow to adapt to changing consumer behaviour. Now mega e-tailer Amazon is selling art on its site, and venerable auction house Christie’s is pushing headlong into online-only sales, as Mashable recently reported. And while fashion designers know how to use digital to push the envelope, the fashion industry as a business has been notorious for their skittishness at investing in efficient, immersive digital experiences for their customers, so worried are they about detracting from the brand. So it was reassuring to see during Paris Fashion Week recently that French marque Chloé had gotten the message. As Zeitgeist’s dear friend and fashion aficionado Rachel Arthur details on her blog, the brand launched a dedicated microsite for their runway show. Brands like Burberry and Louis Vuitton have been doing this for at least three years, so in of itself it’s nothing new. What made the experience different were two things. Firstly, the site created a journey that started before the show, and continued after it, rather than merely offering a stream of live video and little else. More importantly, it tried to make the experience one that reflected the influence of those watching. As Rachel points out,

“As the event unfolded, so too did different albums under a moodboard header, including one for the collection looks, one for accessories, another for the guests, and one from backstage. Users could click on individual images and share them via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or Weibo, or heart them to add them to their own personal moodboard page.

‘[We] are excited to see how you direct your own Chloé show,’ read the invite.”

The recognition of platforms like Weibo should be seen as another coup for Chloé. Too often, companies send out communications to global audiences with perfunctory links to Facebook and Twitter. Not only is there no call to action for these links (why is it that the user should go there?), but there is no recognition that one of the world’s most populous and prosperous markets are more into their Renren and Weibo.

Elsewhere, despite what seems like some niggling problems, Zeitgeist was excited and intrigued to read about Disney‘s latest foray into embracing how consumers use digital devices, this time creating a second-screen experience in movie theaters. Second Screen Live, as Disney have branded it, doesn’t immediately sound particularly logical, as GigaOm point out,

“Of all the places I’d thought would be forbidden to the second screen experience, movie theaters were near the top of my list. After all, you’re paying a premium ticket price for the opportunity to sit in a dark theater and immerse yourself in a narrative — second screen devices operate in direct opposition to that.”

And yet the Little Mermaid experience that the writer goes on to describe cannot be faulted for its attempt at innovation, at reaching beyond current thinking (not to mention revenue streams), in order to forge a new relationship between the viewer and the product. Kudos.

Lastly, Zeitgeist wanted to mention the US television network Fox as a classic example of a company that has slowly come to realise the power of working with digital, rather than against it. In years passed, companies like Fox were indisputably heavily involved in digital, but only from a punitive standpoint. Fox and others were ruthless in their distribution of takedown notices to sites hosting content they deemed to infringe on their product. Fan sites that exploded in support and admiration for shows like The X-Files were summarily threatened with legal action and closed. There was little thought given to the positive sentiment sites were creating around the product, and little thought given to the destruction of brand equity that such takedown notices brought about. Not to mention the dessication of communities that had come together from different parts of the world, their single shared attribute being that they were evangelists of what you were selling. Clips of shows, such as The Simpsons, appearing on YouTube would be treated with similar disdain. So it shows how far we’ve come in a few years that this morning when Zeitgeist went onto YouTube he was greeted on the homepage with a sponsored link from Fox pointing him to the opening scenes of the latest Simpsons episode, before it aired. Definitely a move in the right direction.

Once notorious for their stringent outlook on content dissemination online, Fox now pushes free content across multiple digital channels

Intellectual Property ReBoot

The British Library corrals some bright sparks and lights some fires over copyright protection.

At the Emmy Awards recently in Los Angeles, emcee Conan O’Brien bemoaned (or rather, celebrated, see above) the demise of old media, in particular his erstwhile host, NBC. While media fragmentation has played a significant role in this, many in the industry also complain of piracy. Intellectual Property Rights [IPR] are not sufficient they say. At the end of last month, the British Library published a paper under the Creative Commons license entitled “Driving UK Research. Is copyright a help or hindrance?”, in which 13 scholars, journalists and artists, all intimately familiar with IPR, advocate for a more relaxed approach to incentivising and regulating.

“There is a growing tension between laws designed to protect the intellectual property of writers and performers and their desire to capitalise on their own copyrighted material.”

The above quotation is from author and journalist Richard Donkin, featured in this report. The original purpose of copyright as set out in the United States is to incentivise people and to encourage innovation. Zeitgeist would argue that these original aims have been lost in a orgy of corporate overindulgence. As discussions continue on lengthening Europe’s current 50-year copyright term to equal the 95-year length in the US, one issue that many of those writing have difficulty with is the issues of ‘fair dealing’, more commonly known by it’s US term, ‘fair use’. According to this paper, it currently allows little scope for sampling for educational or critical purposes. As Professor Lionel Bently comments, “the publisher insists that I and my co-author have the consent of the copyright owner. But identifying and locating the copyright owner is not at all straightforward.” It is often very hard to track down the rights to a work as attributed to a particular person – especially if this person is no longer among the living. One of the contributors to this paper argues that people should be actively encouraged to register their copyright, rather than just assuming it as the work is created. This would not only give some authors the option of immediately making their work rights-free, but would also make the identification process that much simpler. The labyrinthine complications are echoed by Dr. Estelle Derclaye, who calls issues of IP law a “daily dilemma to some researchers”, constantly worried that photocopying this extract or inserting a video into a presentation would bring them (or the institution they work for) a step closer to a lawsuit.

‘Fair dealing’ also states that “[t]he copying of an image to make a presentation [on PowerPoint] is an infringement, as there is no statutory exemptions”. This is quite remarkable, and indicative of an anachronistic copyright structure. The notion is also hampered by issues of semantics. Professor Nick Cook writes that there are “specific problems” with ‘fair dealing’, one of which being that they “do not fully cover sound and film”, allowing only small excerpts to be reproduced. There is, however, no clear definition of ‘small’. This is stunningly inadequate. Until matters like this are cleared up, those creating, using and critiquing content will face confusion as to their rights. Cook continues,

“[P]erhaps the greatest problem… is ignorance of the law on the part of researchers (who frequently ask for permission they don’t need), publishers (whose copyright guidelines are often needlessly restrictive, and rights holders (a number of music publishers, for example, claim that fair dealing does not cover printed music – a claim for which there is no legal foundation.”

The danger of this last example of overprotective rights holders is that content does not find its way into the public domain and hence does not become used. Everyone from Picasso to Dizzee Rascal has used previous works to create their own content. Works “that people cannot access create no revenue for anyone”, comments Cook. This is no mere hypothetical abstraction. There are currently many, many films literally rotting away in the basements of various film studios in Los Angeles, waiting for their copyright limits to expire. Inaccessible, and not making any revenue for anyone. Journalist Mike Holderness argues that an alternative revenue stream could be set up to compensate creators of works for making their works available online and to anyone

The irrelevance or mere disdain people have for IP laws today is abundantly clear. Marshall Mateer, Education Consultant for the National Education Network, writes simply, “[t]oday copyright often becomes a barrier standing in the way of what it should be enabling”. Dr Gabriel Egan points out that the effort to get people to stop pirating content purely by enforcing Digital Rights Management software has failed spectacularly (not least because there are always loopholes in software). Taking an educative stance by trying to convince people of piracy’s moral corruptibility rather over-stated the case, and rather too late as well. Egan points out,

“Trailers in cinemas warning that copying a film is theft, akin to purse-snatching, strike most spectators as manifestly untrue. Stealing deprives someone of the use of their property, while copying something only adds to the number of copies in existence. The supposed loss to a rights holder is notional and dependent upon the untestable hypothesis that a consumer prevented from copying something will buy it instead.”

Richard Donkin, perhaps optimistically, writes that “[w]idespread disregard is often a prelude to legal reform”, arguing among other things that the copyright term needs to be shortened to around 20 years. It would be nice to see Mr. Donkin’s dreams come true.

Of Pirates and Market Correction

From the October Zeitgeist…

The term “Intellectual Property Rights” [IPR] is one of the most bandied‐about and misunderstood terms in the world of technology and media today. Its lack of concrete perception coincides neatly with the lack of knowledge of what piracy really means and what its roots are. Both terms are fundamentally important to those who create, produce and distribute content, which WPP companies do a fair bit of. Check out Lawrence Lessig’s “Free Culture” for more.

As The Economist notes, “Some agencies have tired of coming up with clever ideas for clients without winning a share of the resulting revenues.” Consequently, agencies have begun developing their own IP, whereby they create brands for a client and then own part or all of the idea, benefitting from any future profits that brand may reap. What insights though can we gain from those who infringe IPR?

The FT writes, “In removing the cost of distribution, the internet has proved itself a perfect piracy incubator and has made it harder for those involved to be prosecuted successfully.” The New York Times review of “Ripped” castigates indolent music industry execs who presided over their own downfall. Figures on piracy are questionable. The MPA believes piracy costs film studios around $6b p.a. No consideration is given to sampling or network effects. Its attempts to put wayward teens and twenty‐somethings off with a number of campaigns, ranging from anachronistic to awful, spawn creative parodies aplenty.

Some sort of market correction was indeed necessary in the film and music retail market. Charging £16 per CD and £20 per DVD was unsustainable, especially in a recession. Rampant downloading by millions has served to correct this inequality, as noted in an Ogilvy blog. Secondly, p2p networks – versus visiting Blockbuster to rent a movie that turns out to be sold out – brought convenience. Downloading a song in a minute and a film in an hour is a very attractive proposition; years passed before the arrival of legal alternatives – Hulu, iTunes, et al. – that are now taking off, and slowing the rate of illegal downloads.

What marketing insight does the act of piracy offer us? BBC News reported that within hours of the new Harry Potter film’s release, pirated copies were selling for £3 in car boot sales. If the insight for Napster was not just music for free but music obtained easily, might this indicate a growing desire for product availability across multiple platforms simultaneously? Disney CEO Bob Iger mooted such a move back in 2005.

Even before a spell of fining and imprisoning filesharers, it should have been obvious that punishing consumers does not work, nor heel‐dragging. Neither will endear people to a brand.