Jul
11
Viewing the Ruins of Policy…
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Do you have a moment? Let me take you to a site I know, where you can see a government caught in a quandary. Its at https://www.schoolsrecruitment. dcsf.gov.uk/ and it represents the entanglement of media, a networked society, and the controlling urges of government in a fairly graphic way. The dilemma for the UK’s brand new Con-Lib coalition is as follows:
* the previous lot, outed on May 11, were moving in education towards the idea that teacher and school staff recruitment was best controlled by government on its own website. This is it, launched only 3 months before the UK election.
* one of the big bills for local government in the UK is teacher advertising. If this were to be done by government itself on the web, serious savings could be made, and these could be channelled back into the education system.
* futhermore, government doing the advertising enables better quality control to take place, offers ways of monitoring local government practises and ensuring compliance. And online application using government approved forms would create productivity gains and entrench better human resources practises. And government need not expand to contain the new service – it has been outsourced to Tribal Education, a supplier whose service fees would be less than the annual cost of advertising every vacancy in the commercial education press.
* and, what is more, the previous government can be blamed for the scheme! Surely a winner, then?
Hold on a minute. I did type “commercial education press”, didn’t I? Well, yes, there is one, led by the venerable Times Education Supplement (TES). Does it do teaching jobs online? Yes, it has an excellent service, developed since Mr Murdoch’s News International sold this unit away from Times Newspapers, fearing as he did that government may pull this trick. Now its owned by private equity investors who have courageously re-invested in it to modernize it, enable it to beat off web competition from eTeach and, to my great delight, have re-created it as a portal for communications amongst teachers. It has a great role yet to play in the exchange of resources in the UK teaching marketplace.
But will it be able to play that role if government policy cuts off its lifeline advertising revenues? Hard to say, but surely a Conservative government, devoted to the interests of private enterprize, will discontinue such a media abusive policy and ensure that this saving is not made. Even harder to say, in my view: government now has a bigger reason for not doing anything about putting this into reverse – cost reduction beats out ideology in most instances.
Of course, that begs the question of whether costs really will be reduced this way. Last time round this track in the UK, it was National Health Service jobs. Britain’s NHS, with 1.6 million employees (third in the world behind the Red Army and the Indian Railways), was and is a huge recruitment advertising engine. Creating NHS Jobs permanently blighted the prospects of the nursing press and health management publishing in the UK, but there was a private sector winner, in the form of DMGT’s Jobsite, who leased the systems it used to the NHS in return for being able to mirror the NHS site, getting traffic though no revenues. The NHS system is now embedded in NHS personnel practise and there can be no going back.
So government has the capacity to blight whole sectors of publishing activity through re-inventing publisher services on the web? You betcha, and if you doubt, look at the UK’s regional press, once deeply dependent on local government advertising. The huge decline in local press interests, despite all the bleatings of politicians who professed their devotion to the local rag, was as much about the loss of government advertising as anything. And is this inevitable and should it be reversed? Given that government uses the network less effectively and in a more costly way than most users, there is a good case for advising them to stay clear. But that will not happen.
In a society where publishing is increasingly democratized, government will see its chance. And the ability to control and direct is irresistable. If the instrument of control is a job ad, then so be it. The advice to a Young Publisher may well be “Join the civil service” in due course, but for society at large this process may create a democratic deficit.
Come to think of it, did I describe that website as a policy ruin? I was wrong. It is a foundation for the next incumbent to build a more ideologically correct version. But how I wish that I was wrong about that too.
Jun
23
Meditation on a Dry Gulch
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, online advertising, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Wounded.Or at least hors de combat for a week . A swollen and poisoned leg has reduced the international traveller of recent weeks to an impotent and gouty Englishman on his back like some stranded turtle , leg in the air and , by default , an enforced spectator of World Cup football which threatens to give boredom a bad name . And not only that , but I failed to miss the British Budget speech. So the world I have come to occupy seems to be one wholly lacking in vivacity and imagination , where the responses of politicians and footballers alike seems to be concentrated on booting the ball hopefully upfield , with the objective that space or time or another dimension will solve all of our problems . And then , like the man from Porlock ,a client came knocking and broke into my medically-induced nightmare . And his question led me once more to ponder what happens to advertising models online when current observable changes have worked through their ever-shortening life-cycles .
Lets start just there . Suppose for a moment that you agree with me that life cycles on the web are still speeding up . In other words , it took a decade for Google to build its brand , but five years for Facebook , and perhaps three years for their successors . This is a direct response to the rapid increase in the speed of ntework communication and not just the size of user populations . We now expect that friends and collagues will respond to a network relationship which demands attention.My daughter reported to her family this morning that she had been quoted in a Bloomberg article in the San Francisco Chronicle : within 30 minutes she had email responses from her husband , her father and her step-mother . We talk the language of these changes in pace but we do not really understand what their impact will be .
Yet in one sense we do . Notice how the network never throws anything away . Business model development is circular , as with much else in a world where there is no maturity , just renewal . So when I get a question about lead generation as an advertising business model on the web , I am bound to go back five years to a time when , in the US , lead gen was being seen as the saviour of the online advertising world . And why does online advertising need a saviour ? Because although it has grown persistently through the decline of print advertising , it is still a small , low margin sector of the economic activity of the web , once you have factored Google out of the equation . And , if you believe what I have written about speed of change , then you must factor in the decline of Google , and its replacement by a semantic-based atlternative brewing even now in a garage near Bangalore .
Lead generation came about because its progenitors sought better than CPM returns , less dependence on search engines and more value-add to procure loyalty – stickiness . But just as the print yellow page players have never made an online impact commensurate with their offline power , so the lead gen players have never made an impact that measured up to the role that we designed for them five years ago . And part of the reason for this is another marked web behaviour model – the limitations the network seems to place on competitive replacement of aligned business models .
I need to unwrap that .I can do so by saying that in the mid-’90s I was one who proclaimed that a thousand business models would now flower on the web , and that users would pick the best , and then the better as it appeared , and so on in a frenzy of service choice activity . Well , I was wrong . What appears to have happened is that users chose , in every class of service , the best of its class , and then another , and while many more then appeared with enhancements , they stayed very loyal to those first choices , and many networked marketplaces became duopolistic as a result . And then , when a definite break with the old and still satisfactory services took place , it occurred because of market disruption from a new ( and usually technological ) market activity . These duopolies , while they should have been a market stabilizing activity , now show signs of breaking down more speedily .Bear in mind too that technologies are getting cheaper , and technology spend has rarely , if ever , been a barrier to entry .
Which is a dispiriting picture if you are a duopolist in an online advertising market sector . Is this a determinist model : you must go down when the technology silver bullet hits you ? Not at all . Just review your entire business model annually , and let users drive your service enhancements and technology picks .If you are a sector leader , the real barrier is brand – something it takes newcomers more time to climb over than technology , though the breathing space it provides is very short . In online advertising , any sector duopolist must surely be looking at video for value enhancement , at developing web presence for advertisers ( the leading growth field in this year’s Outsell survey ), and above all at social media/buying clubs online . And this investigation of the direction of flow and the speed of change begins on Day 2 , after initial service change . Looking back , the most common characteristic of change-agents has been their propensity to believe that once changed , markets would stay that way long enough for everyone to make money . It ain’t necessarily so .
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