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
20
Learning, management and leadership
Filed Under Blog, Cengage, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
There is nothing more certain in the information industry than that, once past a certain point, the big only get bigger. Thus I see no logical end to the steady growth of Pearson, over the past decade, as the leading force in education systems and services. Indeed. I predict another decade of such growth, driving national education champions to despair and frustrating would-be competitors who lack the global outreach. They now have the size to balance slower running developed world markets against fast-flowing BRICs educational economies. While their competitors want to play them on a pitch named Textbooks or Blended Learning, they have the scope to introduce just the right amount of technology, curriculum control and assessment into the mix to satisfy a Brazilian state, an American city school board or a consortium of vocational training panels. Their custom business will build over time. And so will their approach to individualized learning.
In short, over the next decade they will become recognized for what they now are: the behemoth of education with every growth option at their disposal. As a company that early recognized that the enterprise systems of schools were one of the keys to digital education they can be systems and solution suppliers of turnkey environments with the content in place. They can get to grips with the assessment engines of the world, using their experience of owning the major US solution supplier as well as a major UK examination board to drive national systems globally. While we have been saying for 20 years that education is different because of national and cultural distinctions, they have got on with identifying the things that education has in common – from sorting out timetabling, communicating with parents, marking exams and providing administrators with performance reporting – and have made a business of this alongside schoolbook supply. Does any other player in their competitive sector have a strategic alliance with Oracle?
Pearson has always been able to change. A nineteenth century builders merchant from Yorkshire, UK, became, in the hands of Weedon Pearson, a successful oil wildcatter in Venezuela and finally the collector of great tradeable brands in mid-twentieth century Britain. Some of those brands remain in terms of Penguin and the Financial Times, but as we saw with IDC, having a few brands around to toss into the investment fire is a great way of fueling the next stages of growth, just as the last realization from the last sale is now lighting acquisition fires in China, Brazil and India. So we should be asking what next at this point. And we should be interested in the parts of the education scene where Pearson currently has little scale or penetration.
I once had the enjoyable consultancy task of introducing a major hardware player to “the largest educational publisher in the world”. Dreams of strategic alliance were in the air. My hardware client was frankly disappointed: “we get more revenue from printer cartridges sold to education than they do from textbooks”. Now the roles are reversed. My hardware friends are buying search software to stay alive and Pearson are powering on, following a strategy which will undoubtedly see them emerge as a major owner of schools and universities in a number of countries, the owner of distance learning institutions with global outreach (including degree awarding and exam setting bodies in countries like the UK), a partner of governments in delivering national solutions and a leadership role in the flight from content into an individualized learning environment. And they are the only player in the sector big enough to do the whole education value chain.
They have invested and played around experimentally in some sectors for years, however, without coming up with a real strategy. Learning management is one. Working with Blackboard was one phase, buying Fronter was another. Yet their latest announcement, last week, that they will now enter a partnership with Google to develop OpenClass as a free generic LMS available globally on the Web is something else again. Here is a well-tenanted marketplace, with Blackboard and open source Moodle occupying some 80 per cent between them. Pearson seemingly have no real axe to grind here – except pure disruption (and they have teamed up with the arch-disruptor to do that). At the moment huge amounts of Pearson content must sit on Moodle or Blackboard installations. But I suspect that Pearson think this is a temporary world, that the future of learning management may have mobile and Cloud attached to them, and that they need to be somewhere fairly unique, where even larger competitors like Cengage could not follow. OpenClass could be a place like that.
Finally, as Pearson puts further distance between itself and its rivals, it is interesting to see how it now feels that it is important to build viewpoints and concensus in education as well as develop systems and solutions. The work of the Pearson Foundation was highlighted recently in Media Taylor (www.mediataylor.com) I am not sure that I take such a sinister view as this blogger, but, especially in countries like India, it will be important to prepare the ground and widen the options. Major players like Pearson have an interest in this – but also a duty of care. Since there are such plentiful national educational interests that Pearson will not face competition issues in most of its markets for some years. In the meanwhile informing and educating educational buyers could be a critical part of that.
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