Nov

4

Rush to Judgement

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Everyone has a sticking point when it comes to the impact of technology. My hard-headed friend who cannot imagine that virtual exhibitions will ever get off the ground positively salivates when we talk about personalized learning in a mobile context. And he was close to my thoughts last week when I attended the Dublin Web Summit. In fact, it might have been his bulky frame that kept on standing up and cutting off my field of vision from the fixed camera position. Because, you see, I wasn’t actually there. Twelve international airports in the previous 28 days had quite cured me of the urge to travel. But I did not miss anything that I had wanted to see in Dublin, and much that I was able to hear was excellent. Other parts less so: web summits are rather macho for my taste, and  entrepreneurial boasts about their social outreach and their unique viewer growth have more resonance in body building than in business. But the Summit itself, in conjunction with Livestream, performed its function, and started me thinking again about the role of virtual events.

And from a couple of answers to my enquiries there does seem to be a change from when I last looked at this a year ago. One obvious point of enquiry was Comdex, famously bought by UBM for a dollar, and revived as a virtual event. The news is that in its second year this show increased its exhibitors significantly, and now seems to be attracting well over 5000 paying customers, making it an exhibition worth attending. Elsewhere, it would be my surmise that Globalspec, having launched a great number of events last year, are now doing a sort of culling operation, retaining and building what works and scrapping the rest.

If virtual eventing is to emerge as an art form, then it is important that shows should be cheap to initiate and that there should be a sort of rough hewn hierarchy of development values in play. This seems to be happening, as shows get upgraded from virtual conferencing to “catalogue exhibitions” and then on to virtual reality full-on, with a genuine effort being made to replicate the communications of the exhibition hall. Conferences superficially seem easier, but simply watching a live videocast and tweeting may not be the most interesting interaction we have ever had. Few have moved to live broadcast full interactivity, yet it is surely only a turn of the network wheel away. Wait for colleagues to say “I was in a really interesting conference in Tokyo on the train coming into Waterloo this morning..”

So lets look around and see the variety of models now at work. All of these happen to be in UBM (a lesson in the results of listening closely to David Levin!) but they are not untypical of the range of activities happening elsewhere. Of course, you would expect the technology events to be on the move here, but they are certainly not the vanguard. Black Hat is interesting: this security technology meeting has opted for variable packages for online users depending on whether they attend on the day, or look at it retrospectively. So if you go to Uplink, in this case, for live streaming video, you get 2 tracks of 20 supplier briefings, two keynotes and the interactive service which allows you to ask questions and enter into dialogue. If you use the on demand service you get two keynotes and the best two presentations from each track. And if you visit Interop online, you simply get a video library to search and download.

But I found two areas where different models and pace of development were in play. Airline maintenance costs and technology is clearly one. I surmize that you may have to sleep a long time between sessions, so visiting this in bed may be essential. However, I was really taken with www.retailinvestorsconference.com. This is a neat partnership between Betterinvesting (National Association of Investors Corp, www.betterinvesting.org) with  MUNCmedia and UBM’s PR Newswire. The target is private investors, and particularly those who do not use advisors or stockbrokers. They do a one day virtual meeting a month. On 3 November you could have heard a presentation by the Nasdaq – quoted China Precision Steel Corp. As part of the deal, the video and presentation collateral get distributed by PR Newswire. However, attendees on the day (I wonder if they give their avatars blue rinses!) have a terrific range of interactive choices. They can go to the auditorium and hear the session (EST timings get Florida as well as the North East). Or they can go to the Exhibit Hall and visit the presenter’s booth, make contact with staff and ask further questions. Finally, there is the Lounge, with the opportunity to talk to other investors and see what experiences they have had. The organizers appear to be doing one day a month, and up to 8 sessions per day. This is like having a trade show with 96 exhibitors and speakers – and a huge growth opportunity within the other 353 days of the year.

So a wide range of business and presentation models, but now I feel that this movement is rumbling towards real marketplaces. The App and tablet combination will be important in making theses shows work, and making their interfaces seamless. Ambitious management in tough times are trying to make a little technology go a long way, and charge for the virtual as if it were real, Some of the pricing packages will slow market development, and some of the attempted bundles are too ambitious as well. My feeling is that this opportunity is larger – and cheaper – than many believe.

And, finally, there is one opportunity here which is being seriously neglected. Virtual events throw off data like dandruff. Skilled developers will know everything about user profiles – who is interested in what, what key questions were asked, what ongoing interest survived the meeting etc. This can be anonymized and re-used, subjected to analysis on behalf of individual clients, and served up to help newcomers to profile themselves  when they first use the service. It adds value and serves to offset the effect on pricing of relatively lower cost bases. But above all, it  brings the  events companies to the important threshold of becoming B2B data companies, and if they fail that challenge then they will fail the full opportunity that becomes available when these new businesses mature. Lets postpone the rush to judgement. The jury is still out and the odds must be stacked in favour of a huge advancement in the age-old business of introducing buyers to sellers happening here.

Oct

25

Under the Volcano

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

As the 1990s turned into the dotcom boom, we used to play a game which we named for Malcolm Lowry’s classic novel. Since we were a bit sniffy about the term “disintermediation”, the game was played by each contestant naming an industry which we thought was about to be edited out of the value chain by the reality of virtual communications. We then argued the case for its eventual extinction, and took a secret ballot on the arguments. I can recall the music industry, real world betting shops, cinema, and much retail banking disappearing that way. Now I look round and see that businesses still exist in these spaces. We were smart, but not smart enough. We reckoned without the powerful drive to “re-intermediation” – players moving to a spot where they could add value of a different type more appreciated by a networked marketplace – and we certainly did not see that most of the blighted industry activity would drift on for another few decades, ever more marginal, but representing value to diminishing populations of addicts who are willing to pay more and more to sustain their “fix”. When I went to the US last week my daily newspapers in the village shop cost me £3.00; on my return they cost £3.40. I have both these papers as Apps, and this has become my preferred way of reading them, but do I really want to attack the economic basis of the village shop? Disintermediation is much more complex than I thought in 1999.

And I never won the competition. My candidate for volcanic disruption and extinction was always advertising and PR agencies. According to Sir Martin Sorrell, who should know, these have now disappeared entirely, but I suspect that this is because he has renamed his world-leading enterprizes “data and marketing agencies”. But two events brought all of this to mind. In the first place I saw a headline which said, on October 6, “PR Newswire and Ektron Strike Up One-of-a-kind Strategic Alliance”, and then I had the pleasure of listening to and questioning David Levin, CEO of UBM, at the Outsell Signature Event in Phoenix last week. (Pause for Plug and statement of interest: I work part-time for Outsell, I moderated parts of this meeting, I know of nowhere else in the industry where you can speak with CEOs in depth under Chatham House rules – I cannot tell you what they said – but for sheer depth and understanding talking to Scott Key (IHS), Y S Chi (Elsevier) and David Levin is a bargain at any price, though here it was surrounded by case studies in change from another 13 CEOs and senior executives. Miss it at your Peril – it will be in Europe next year! Obviously I am not going to quote the views of David Levin, and no information market disruptor is ever wise to predict the demise of a part of his customer base while they are still buying services, but I left the room more and more convinced that the “strategy and monitoring” role of these agencies is beginning to shift, even if the creative role stays in place.

So what is this interesting strategic alliance at PRN all about? For me, it is simply another stage in the coupling of PR releases with media response measurement with market response measurement. The Press Release of yesteryear, that single page of grey, effusive but cautious text with the typical note for editors on the participants has given way to documents built around demos and video presentations, with multiple media input, intended to ring bells not only amongst media commentators, but to awaken financial analysts and gain general- to-specialist network user reaction. The destination of much of this stuff is social networks and You Tube. The idea is to launch the communication and then track it, and then track the ripples of activity that circle out from it, in blogs and tweets, and then to be able to take part in, redirect, respond, learn from the feedback loop. Increasingly this seems to be what marketing departments do, and increasingly they can do it for themselves (countless book publishers – yes, even them! – use a simple  package to launch a seperate web presence for every book published, using as tools the Superdu components, which any marketing assistant can handle). So, PR Newswire, as the largest distributor of “press releases” (www.prnewswire.com), now moves into media monitoring by plugging its PR Newswire Sync application into Ektron’s widely used corporate marketing web management platform (www.ektron.com). The vital part of all of this is the PR Newswire Listening Dashboard, which enables a primary analysis and social media monitoring tool. This reminds me of something I have been watching for a long time – the evolution of the old Durrants media monitoring outfit into Gorkana (http://www.gorkana.com/group/#index), where the emphasis is on the analysis. Whether we are talking CRM (corporate relationship management) or product launch, it seems to me that more of the game is now managed inside the corporate marketing function, more analysis can be done there with these tools, and more strategy can be created there than ever before. No wonder Sir Martin and his merry men are building the world’s largest data dump of consumer buying decisions, to get “predictive insight” into likely purchasing outcomes: they must add value now by the shovel load, since a whole sector of their traditional skills has been peeled off and re-installed as workflow on the desktop of the most lowly (and low paid) marketing department operative. One of Ektron’s largest customers is the UK National Health Service!

Some people will say that this is reskilling an industry that had very few skills to start with. Other, kinder, souls will point to the continuing need for creativity, and I can see re-intermediation happening already. Typical would be Jeremy Swinfen Green’s Amberlight Agency (www.amber-light.co.uk). Meeting Jeremy recently for the first time in 15 years (as a young digital ad-man he helped me carry the argument for AdHunter (later launched as Fish4) in a Cotswold country house hotel before a very dubious Northcliffe board) I began to see, through his practise as a very busy Human-Computer Interface (HCI) advisor where this fragmentation of skills was taking us. Anyone for a game of Under the Volcano? I am still gong to choose advertising and PR for the lava and hot ash…!

« go back — keep looking »