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…!
Oct
13
I can see so clearly now…
Filed Under Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
In case anyone has doubts, this is a continuing stream of (un)consciousness arising from my earlier Dogpatch thoughts about innovation and STM. And, of course, in my enthusiasm for the new, I neglected some of the “slightly older but just as valid” new. Thanks everyone for reminding me of this. We shall go there anon, but I wanted to start at the STM Association dinner the night before the events described in my last blog. There I had the pleasure of sitting next to Rhonda Oliver, now running publishing at the Royal College of Nursing, but doing so after leaving Portland Press, where she was CEO. And it was Portland Press, a distinguished but not yet world dominant player in biochemistry publishing, that I first learnt of really interesting forays ito the world of semantic-based publishing. Here is what I wrote about them in this blog last year:
“Particularly noteworthy was a talk by Professor Terri Attwood and Dr Steve Pettifer from the University of Manchester (how good to see a biochemistry informatician and a computer scientist sharing the same platform!). They spoke about Utopia Documents, a next generation document reader developed for the Biochemical Journal which identifies features in PDFs and semantically annotates them, seamlessly connecting documents to online data. All of a sudden we are emerging onto the semantic web stage with very practical and pragmatic demonstrations of the virtues of Linked Data. The message was very clear: go home and mark-up everything you have, for no one now knows what content will need to link to what in a web of increasing linkage universality and complexity. At the very least every one who considers themselves a publisher, and especially a science publisher, should read the review article by Attwood, Pettifer and their colleagues in Biochemical Journal (Calling International Rescue: Knowledge Lost in the Literature and information Landslide http://www.biochemj.org/bj/424/0317/bj4240317.htm). Incidentally, they cite Amos Bairoch and his reflections on Annotation in Nature Precedings (http://precedings.nature.com/documents/3092/version/1) and this is hugely useful if you can generalize from the problems of biocuration to the chaos that each of us faces in our own domains.”
And the reference to Steve Pettifer recalled to mind my old friend Jan Velterop, once agent-provocateur in Springer’s thrust into OA (how grateful they should be to him now, given that his work drew them alongside BMC, and thus to real growth in this year of OA and eBooks compensating for negative trends elsewhere). Dr Pettifer advises Utopia Documents (http://getutopia.com), who have been developing in parallel to Labiva and Mendeley in the workflow space for PDFs. Each is different, though they have common attributes. The fact that there are now three environments in this space is a strength for all of them. Isolated good ideas rarely work out. Constantly re-iterated solutions “invented” separately in several places shows a sector responding to the same calls from many customers – “Help me out of here – I am losing control!”.
Utopia Documents is also running a public trial on Elsevier’s SciVerse environment. This is critical, and prompts a question: if Nature and Elsevier see this, why doesn’t everyone else? And I think this may be in part because we have been confusing the workflow utility of PDF handling with the strange world of scientific networking. In one of the many frank and helpful comments made by Annette Thomas in the interview I referred to earlier this week, she remarked that much of what Nature had done to “create” networking between scientists had shown very modest results. She said that while scientists showed a modest appetite for networking via news and blog comments, she thought that Nature Networks did not succeed because they lacked the immediacy and involvement of workflow tools, and it was more likely that in this context real contact between self-formed interest groups would take place. Here she seems to be moving closer to the Mendeley (www.mendeley.com) position, but with a qualification. She clearly feels that you build the utilities first, and then see how interest groups develop their own dynamic using the shared information created by the toolset. Crowd-sourcing a la Mendeley is good, but self determination may be better.
Thinking about Portland Press and Jan Velterop also took me back to Jan’s company, Academic Concept Knowledge Ltd (AQnowledge – http://aqnowledge.tumblr.com). The semantic search environment created here is now embedded in Utopia Documents. But this is not what strikes me most emphatically about Jan’s work in recent years. Here is a hugely experienced academic research publisher who is not format bound and can think beyond the book, the journal, and even the article. Integrating antibodies-online.com, with its 300,000 antibodies and related products for concept matching shows that he and his team are creating a small player with an eye for data and for what research workflow really entails. By putting together all of the laboratory supply sources and the raft of descriptive material that they generate AQnowledge may be doing more for using article stores as a live element in workflow than any of their peers. Yet it has taken a company like BioRAFT (www.bioraft.com) to push this home with compliance information, demonstrating once again that we are in the sectoral tools age of workflow, unable as yet to envisage the full desktop of tools and utilities, or the way they link together, or indeed the Electronic Lab Manual to which they in all probability lead.
Finally, STM now has major players – think of MarkLogic, TEMIS and SilverChair to name but three – quite capable of deploying the technology to drive towards the Big Data vision which I referenced in my previous piece. So, with all of this in the wings, why do the publishers still want to pursue the parochial and eschew the visionary?
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