TMT Trends 2017 – Oscars Oversight, MWC Mediocrity, Publishing Problems, M&A Mistakes Avoided

Nostalgia as the name of the game

Nostalgia has been the name of the game for many in the world of TMT [technology, media, telecommunications] for a couple of years now, as TV series are rebooted and eras brought back to life (think Fox’s The X-Files and Netflix’s Stranger Things, FX’s The Americans respectively), movie franchises are retooled (think Kong: Skull Island, Beauty and the Beast) and books also drag people back to the 80s (think Entertainment Weekly’s number 1 book of 2016, The Nix).

Nostalgia is almost certainly an appealing emotion for many media executives today too. In entertainment, they may look back to fond days before PwC screwed up who won an Oscar and who hadn’t; in technology, vendors are leveraging “digital detox” trends as an excuse to remake old products and in publishing many are surely screaming for the days before digital, when staff at the likes of Conde Nast were still allowed to throw “hissy fits” (to quote British Vogue’s Lucinda Chambers from the recent BBC documentary on the magazine). The empire is having to fast come to grips with a world of declining print revenue shared by all in the industry, as comprehensively covered in a recent piece by the Financial Times.

The one outlier to this trend, fortunately for them, is Viacom, which recently decided that instead of seeking refuge in the past (and in sheer scale) by re-teaming with CBS after splitting over ten years ago, it would instead streamline its operations down to six “flagship brands”. Undoubtedly the wiser move (if only based on the above cheat sheet from The Hollywood Reporter).

This article will focus on those first two issues, last weekend’s Academy Awards and last week’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.

Oscars oversight

Talk about your burning platform. Last night Zeitgeist sat down to watch Deepwater Horizon, last year’s film an avoidable disaster in an event involving a lot of due diligence, seemingly little of which was executed properly.

So it was – far less catastrophically – with the 89th Academy Awards last weekend. PwC were caught out for the first time, having overseen the awards ceremony’s handing out of winning envelopes, among other things, for 83 years. In their apology, the firm explicitly made reference to the fact that a) such an incident had been foreseen b) protocols had been prepared, in case of such a rare eventuality c) these were not followed through quickly enough on the night. As with many cases of significant error, the fault appears to be with an excess of comfort.

• Firstly, PwC as a firm, it could be argued, had become too comfortable in the role of auditor. In an interview before the ceremony with one of the two partners involved, it was revealed the opportunity to be auditor for the awards had never gone out to tender. This is poor due diligence on the part of the Academy.
• Secondly, Brian Cullinan, one of the PwC partners, seemed himself to have acquired too much comfort with his role. Whether this was tweeting (hastily deleted) pictures of Emma Stone at the moment he should have been concentrating on his work (see picture above), as Variety revealed, or – as the same publication also uncovered the other day – that he wanted to have an on-stage presence, involving a skit with the host, Jimmy Kimmel.
• Thirdly, we would also add that – having worked for Deloitte in a strategy role in days gone by – PwC should never have let these two individuals stand in the limelight. Any project, however glamorous (or not), should always have only one face, that of the company as a whole, not an individual.

The eventual winner, Moonlight, was praised by The Economist (among many others) for being a wonderful film, and one that deserved to win the coveted Best Picture award. Interestingly, it noted how it had been made for “a tenth” of the budget of films that had won in the past several years. This is a worrying trend, as these prior winners were already considered to be of a small budget; minnows that did not attract the attention of the studios, who increasingly find themselves in the comic-book franchise game, rather than the Oscar race. It bodes poorly in the medium-term for the release and backing of films that try to tell human stories about real life; art that may actually have an impact on others. It is these types of films that, with current political turmoil, are needed right now.

MWC mediocrity

Innovation in mobile is becoming harder and harder to come by. If, as Forrester reported recently, smartphones are in the hands of 40% of the global population (even including those people hanging out with penguins in icy tundras and running away from lions on barren plains) then such a product is in need of something new to differentiate the market for consumers. At the annual Mobile World Congress, such things were in short supply. This week’s Economist quoted Ben Wood of CCS Insight summarising the event as a “sea of sameness”.

Indeed, ZTE (as above), had a gloriously twee “fairy garden” on display, which seemed very very similar to the one we saw at MWC in 2016. From a product point of view, Nokia (yes, Nokia) seemed to generate the most buzz for its revamped 3310, a resurrected product from a bygone mobile age. A feeling of sameness hung in the air from those reporting from the ground too; cynicism was prevailing.

Last year, Zeitgeist found that if you didn’t have Oculus at your stand (for any reason, no matter how inconsequential), you were a nobody. You also needed to be talking about 5G (no matter how vaguely). The same seemed to be the case this year, except more so. This, despite the fact that Oculus has squandered an eighteen-month lead in the market, now with a position of third in the VR marketplace by revenue. VR in general has yet to transfer to a mainstream pursuit, to the surprise of analysts. 5G, on the other hand, saw some glacial movement. While operators in Japan and South Korea had already begun investment and deployment of the networks before standardisation, the UN’s ITU body has now set those standards, laying the way for other markets to begin upgrading their networks. Their challenge is a formidable one, and to be honest they should not expect it to be anything other than a thankless task. Their main approach to this eventuality at the moment seems to be bigging the technology up beyond all recognition, which has started a backlash of sorts among the more experienced in the sector.

Game Change – How TV stole Film’s Spotlight

In a belated – and very un-zeitgeisty – move, Zeitgeist only got around to seeing HBO’s Game Change this past weekend. The film, which first aired in the US in March, is based on the book by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. While the film has attracted its fair share of controversy, it has been deemed “very accurate” by those on the campaign trail at the time. Zeitgeist thoroughly enjoyed it; HBO had done it again.

HBO have had a remarkable run of success, producing some of the most daring, innovative and enjoyable TV shows of the past 20 years, from Curb Your Enthusiasm and Dexter to Sex and the City, The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire. HBO has created a brand halo effect for television, a medium once dismissed by serious actors and directors whose natural home was in movies. Now those professionals, such as Dustin Hoffman, flock to television. Speaking recently with the FT, he commented,

‘The big studios were making films that are only being done outside the studio system today. It used to be you would never do TV.’ That stigma has gone, he says; these days the only creative risks being taken are in low-budget independent films and on well-financed pay TV networks… ‘HBO leave you alone and there’s no censorship. You do the work you want to do.’

The real game change then is in the drift in creativity from the big screen to the small. The world of film is increasingly deemed to be suffering, bombarded as we have been for several years now with iteration after iteration of superhero from DC and Marvel. To rub salt into the wound, The Avengers yesterday passed the $1bn box office threshold after just 19 days, joining Avatar in its speed at reaching said gross. Last month’s Vanity Fair editorial elaborated on the malaise that is slowly descending on film. Graydon Carter notes,

Television offers a range and scope, and a degree of creativity and daring, that the bottom-line, global-audience-obsessed, brand-driven movie industry just can’t compete with… the superiority of television goes beyond drama. Comedy on TV is undergoing a renaissance, far outpacing the bromances that the film business falls back on so much.

Within this shift in TV’s prominence, a microcosm of change is also taking place. Ten or fifteen years ago, all the best US programming was being produced by the major networks – NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC – and garnering many a golden statuette at award ceremonies, with cable left to function as auxillary provider of repeats of said programming. This situation has now changed, as cable networks like HBO, FX, Showtime and AMC debut their own quality shows. The New York Times reported on this ‘cable envy’, and how the majors are trying to fight back. It seems a seachange has occurred as the glut of ‘reality’ shows has made way for higher quality programming.

Of course, the other massive shift occurring in the TV landscape at the moment is the way in which we consume television. This has to influence both the quantity and type of media that we consume. Social TV and the ‘second screen’ trend are making the TV-watching experience even more engaging. VentureBeat feature a great infographic of how said landscape has changed.