Table of contents
Michael Rosenblum
Digital thoughts, ideas and context for DNA2008 from keynote presenter
Michael Rosenblum
VJ and the election
http://rosenblumtv.wordpress.com/2008/02/12/vj-and-the-election/
From Pigeons to Online Profits
In 1815, Napoleon had just escaped from Elba.
(Trust me, this is worth sticking with)
After decades of warfare, Europe thought they had banished the French corporal forever, only to discover that he had escaped back to France, raised an army and was marching toward Paris.
In London, the financial markets were teetering. If Napoleon succeeded in returning to power, share prices would collapse. Wellington had been dispatched to stop Napoleon and would soon meet the foe face to face in Waterloo. How the battle went would dictate how the world would be shaped. All of Europe waited nervously.
In London, an inventor with an idea came to see Lord Rothschild, one of the richest and most powerful men of his age. The inventor had brought with him the cutting edge technology of the early 19th Century - a pigeon.
The pigeon, the inventor explained, would have a message banded to his leg. He would be taken to Waterloo and released, and would come right back to London. Whoever owned the pigeon would know the results of the battle 3 days ahead of everyone else. (In those days, the word would have had to travel by ship from Belgium to London). Was Rothschild interested?
The armies of Wellington met the armies of Napoleon on the battlefield at Waterloo and the whole world held its breath. The vast stock market in London watched nervously. When the battle ended, the pigeon was released.
Baron Rothschild strode out onto the floor of the London Stock Exchange and raised his hands.
Silence.
“We have lost”, he said. “Napoleon has triumphed”.
Shares instantly collapsed. It was a disaster.
Rothschild made busy buying up all the shares he could at the collapsed prices.
Three days later, ships arrived from Belgium announcing the defeat of Napoleon and the English victory. Shares rebounded to new highs. Rothschild made a fortune.
Because of the man with the pigeons.
Pigeons. Cutting edge technology delivering the news faster and better than anyone else. Pmail.
News has a value to those who understand the impact of the information. Getting it first has real value - to some people.
When we commoditized news in the 1940s, when we started to produce television news broadcasts for everyone, we diluted the value of the news. When we started to monetize news by selling advertising against those broadcasts, we diluted the value even further.
What value is there in news of Anna Nicole Smith? What value is there in news about OJ?
The answer, of course, is that there is none. There is no value in that news to anyone, except in the rather limited value that it brings viewers to the screen. There is a titilation value, but not much more.
That perhaps was the only model for monetizing news when we were in a world of broadcasting - one and the same signal to as many people as possible at the same time. But we are now entering the world of the Internet - and that is a very very different architecture from broadcasting.
The most successful Internet sites are those that match up buyers and sellers in any given marketplace. eBay matches up thousands of people who have junk in their attics to sell with specific people who want a specific piece of junk. Amazon.com matches up thousands of book sellers around the world with people who want a specific book. Jdate.com matches up thousands of people with something to sell (themselves in this case) with the specific person who is looking for a specific trait.
When news, and particularly when video news goes to the web, maybe our broadcasting model is all wrong.
Maybe we should start thinking about a different kind of model for gathering and delivering the news.
There are, after all, thousands of people around the world who can ‘offer’ news stories. There are many people who are interested in specific news stories, because those news stories have value to those people. The Internet is very very good at matching these kinds of people up - and monetizing that connection.
People on eBay don’t want to plow through a catalogue of every piece of junk in every attic in the world, nor do they want an ‘executive producer for eBay’ deciding what most of them probably want to buy. They don’t want nor do they need Katie Couric hosting eBay to tell them what is for sale.
A specific news story - like the victory of Napoleon at Waterloo, or fire in a coal mine in China, can have a massive financial impact for some people who understand the value of that piece of news when they hear it. They would most likely be willing to pay something for it. It has value. (Unlike the adventures of Anna Nicole Smith). Maybe news is really a marketplace for information. And maybe the web is the place that that marketplace for information and news can be properly exploited.
Maybe.
Oh… and the name of the pigeon guy? Julius Reuter.
If PBS ran the art world
Television, despite all the billions of human labor hours that have been spent making stuff (and that is what TV is all about, making stuff..just like painting or sculpture), has produced for the most part nothing but garbage. Endless millions of hours of garbage. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. People eating bugs. People selecting which briefcase has the money. Guess who’s coming to decorate.
It is beyond depressing. It is an embarrassment to our culture and to our civilization.
The question, of course, is why? Why do we, despite the billions of dollars spent on TV and the billions of hours devoted to it, continue to produce garbage?
Because creativity requires a personal vision.
When Picasso wakes up and gets the vision for Guernica, he simply goes up to the atelier and starts to paint. This is how great paintings are made. This is where genius comes from. If we ran the world of painting the way we currently run the world of TV, Picasso would get the vision for Guernica, and then he would write a proposal to PPS (The Public Painting System). The tile of the proposal would be “The Guernica Painting: A Proposal”.
THE GUERNICA PAINTING:
A Proposal for a Major Artwork
By Pablo Picasso
The Spanish Civil War is an event that has capture both the headlines of every major newspaper as well as the popular imagination of the nation. Yet what is the Spanish Civil War, what does it mean the average person. I hope to capture this feeling through an intensive, yet highly personal presentation of the impact of the fascist government’s bombing of one small village: Guernica.
The work will be largely two dimensional, painted on a canvass, with images of people, cows, and a lamp………
You get the idea.
Well, Picasso writes the proposal, (along PPS published guidelines), and, in time, (like about 6 months or so), the Guernica Project makes its way through the PPS review system. It is looked at, in committee, by a number of very well known PPS painters, as well as administrators for the PPS system. They generally like the proposal, and they may even fund it, but they have some suggestions to make.
PPS
The Public Painting System
Dear Mr. Picasso, Many thanks for your recent submission “The Guernica Painting Project”. We at PPS read it with great interests and I am delighted to tell you that you are on the ‘fast track’ for approval for commencement of the painting.
We do, however, have a few small problems with the proposal, but we are sure that you will be amenable to making some changes to make the painting more ‘audience friendly’.
1. This is a War painting. As you know, it is not our practice to fund War Paintings, as they do not fall within the PPS guidelines for ‘good paintings’. However, when we do fund war paintings, we have found that museum audiences generally respond best to something heroic, and a victory. (Washington Crossing the Delaware - both very heroic and uplifting - generated our greatest audience response during the museum fundraising drive three years ago). Your Guernica project, while dealing with a war, has neither a hero, nor (how shall we put this?) a happy ending. Please re-think the focus of the painting. While the Spanish Civil War is a very noble and worthwhile subject with which to deal, we would rather see you focus one or two ‘heroic’ personalities in the war (perhaps one Republican and one Fascist - to give an all important sense of balance…something we really like around here).
2. On another subject, we have spent a great deal of time (and money) focus grouping your most recent work. I have to tell you that audiences in our test markets of Cleveland and Parsipany, New Jersey, did not react particularly well to your work. This can, of course, be disappointing for an artist, but we have found that by paying attention to the results of focus grouping can greatly increase audience response numbers. When you come down to our offices in Washington, we will be happy to go over the specifics, but one point was driven home again and again. You must put the eyes back into the faces. People find this particularly distressing…..
This, in fact, is how TV is made. That, and once Picasso does get his funding for The Guernica Painting Project, he has to go out and ‘book’ a union paintbrush holder, a union paint holder, a union canvass mover. And, of course, all of them work only from 9-5, with an hour for lunch, and a five-minute break every hour. They will, of course, work overtime, but that is at their discretion, and only for time and a half, which will drive up the budget for Guernica.
Well, of course, this is going to produce garbage. And that is what you see on TV. Garbage. And that is the reason that what you see on TV is garbage. Not because the people who work in it are dumb, but because the way we have ‘architected’ the system is antithetical to creativity.
It is as though, with the invention of TV, we consciously set out to crush any way for the medium to foster creative vision.
If television were a marginal activity, like video art, we could afford to ignore it. To let it continue in its own, meandering and painfully mediocre way. But television is not that. For better or for worst, it is the single most powerful medium of communication in the world today. And it would seem that it is only going to continue to grow in power and influence. And that is why it is critically important that we stop, at this juncture, and say, OK. We have been doing this all wrong up until now. But it is not too late. We must rethink how TV works, what it is, and how we use it.
Edward III, Crecy & The Digital Revolution
There is an old expression that says ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is not necessities that precipitate invention; rather inventions come along unbidden and most people run away from them as fast as they can. Barring that, they accept them grudgingly, trying to shoehorn them into ways of working that were designed around earlier technologies.
This is surely the case in trying to ‘re-engineer’ some existing local tv newsrooms in the US into a faster, more online oriented, digital newsroom for the 21st Century. One might as well try to make the Motor Vehicles Bureau into Dreamworks. It is not that they don’t recognize that they have to change, or even that they don’t want to change, it is just that they can’t. They cannot bring themselves to do what is necessary to reinvent themselves. They prefer a more ‘incremental’ approach. This does not work.
I was reminded of this last night when I was reading The History Of The English Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill. Churchill is a great writer, and in four volumes he pretty well lays out the breadth and scope of English history. Last night’s chapter was on Edward III and the Battle of Crecy. But in reading it, it reminded me nothing so much as conventional media companies trying to come to grips with the Digital Revolution.
Edward was a real revolutionary and a seminal figure in British history. Crecy, as Churchill says, was among the four great moments that shaped both British and Western history. Until I read about Crecy, I did not imagine that it would have any relationship to contemporary media 600 years later… but it does.
Before Crecy, medieval battles were fought by heavily armored knights. Dressed in their suits of armor, they were expensive to field, expensive to maintain and they weighed a ton. Their skills were learned in long and hard lifetimes of training and practice. They were the ultimate killing machines, and invincible.
Edward landed in France with a mere 12,000 soldiers to face Philip’s army of 30,000 to 40,000 knights. But Edward didn’t bring English knights. He brought long bowmen. The long bow was an entirely new piece of military technology. Lightweight, cheap and easy to use. It was also deadly efficient. Edward’s long bowmen were not knights, they did not wear suits of armor, they didn’t even have horses. This was all unthinkable in 1346. Who would field an army like this? And it was not even an army! These were not the highly trained knights of nobility! These were commoners! The rabble! It was an outrage.
The French, in vastly superior numbers marched north to Crecy filled with over confidence. They looked out on the English forces and laughed. They would cut them to ribbons by lunchtime.
So the French army marched into battle with the English bowmen, on foot. The bowmen let loose their arrows - like rain.. and the French knights began to go down. The English were shooting the horses out from under the knights. This was against the rules! On the muddy ground, immobilized in their suits of armor, the knights were helpless as the English bowman set upon them and killed them on the spot. This was also considered unsporting behaviour. One was supposed, at worst, to ransom the nobleman.
The French army was decimated at Crecy, and later Edward repeated the trick at Poitiers. It was, in a moment, the end of knights, armor, chivalry and medieval warfare. A thousand years of history vanished in an afternoon.
What brought down the French army was first and foremost the new technology of the long bow. But more than that, it was the pure foresight and courage of Edward to completely embrace the new technology and understand how to implement it. He could have just added a few bowmen to his army of knights (just as newsrooms could add a few VJs to their conventional reporters and cameramen). Neither does the trick. Edward reinvented warfare from the ground up based on the light, simple and portable technology of the long bow. It was an incredibly brave thing to do.
One can imagine the feeling amongst the English Yeoman as they stood in the field at Crecy, facing the vastly superior, clanking and mounted armies of France. Standing on their own, horseless, armorless, they must have wondered, ‘what the hell have I gotten myself into’. But Edward saw the future and embraced it.
Sending out an army of VJs, equipped with small, lightweight cameras, without cameramen, soundmen, livetrucks can also be scary. But it is the same. You cannot embrace this revolution in a halfhearted manner. You have to completely rethink how a newsroom is made based on what the new technology can do; just as Edward completely rethought how a battle should be fought… and won.
We can all agree that new technologies have the potential to change the world, but only if they are recognized and implemented by someone who has the courage to make the changes. All too often, new technologies come along and people are fearful of them.
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In 1998, I ran a VJ training course for journalists in Chiang Mai, Thailand. They were taught to use small hand-held cameras and laptop edit systems to make TV.
Among my students was a freelance radio reporter name Scott Anger. He was working out of Kabul for the Voice of America, and like the others he picked up the new skill.
In 1998, the notion of a journalist carrying their own small camera and reporting on their own for TV was relatively new and certainly untested.
Last month, Scott Anger was hired by the Los Angeles Times to start up and run an entire VJ unit. While the print part of the paper is suffering budget cuts, the Times is throwing money and resources into online video. They understand, as do so many other papers and magazines, that their future is online. And if they are going to be online, in a world in which video can be transmitted online as easily as text and stills, that they must also deliver online.
In the 19th century, railroads revolutionized transportation. Rail systems exploded across the US and Western Europe, and vast fortunes were made for those who were first and who owned the railroads. The Vanderbilts, the Morgans, Leland Stanford, The Goulds, the Harrimans. These were all railroad fortunes. Railroads were the Internet of the 19th century. It was a fortune based on a technological revoution – steam engines.
But slowly, over time, the barons lost their vision. Instead of being on the technological cutting edge, they became defensive. And they forgot what business they were in. They were in the business of moving material from point A to point B.
When the US government began to build the interstate highway system, and Ford and Walter Chrysler began to build inexpensive diesel trucks to move things, the railway barons should have been at the cutting edge of the shift. They weren’t.
Instead of engaging and investing in and believing in the new technology, they fought it tooth and nail to defend their beloved rails. It was a losing proposition.
Anyone want to buy Amtrak Stock?
Didn’t think so.
Now, the distributors of information – the Sulzbergers and the McClatchys are faced with a new technology – the web. And they have a choice. They can either embrace and invest in the new technology, or like the railroads they can try and cling to the past.
If history is any measure, it would seem that at least the LA Times is headed for the future.
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The theme song in the Allstate Insurance Company commercial
Kodak once dominated the world of photography. In most of the world, the two terms were synonymous. By the late 60s, Kodak cameras and film owned the world of photography. Then, disaster. Today, Kodak is a company on the ropes. The reason is that they did not adapt fast enough to technological change. |
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Just because a company is in a dominant position, there is no guarantee that they are going to stay there – at least not without a lot of work. (See if you can go find the British Empire anywhere. It is almost impossible to believe that only a generation or two ago they had the most powerful economy, the biggest navy, the greatest trade reserves on the planet).
What does all this have to do with the ‘digital revolution?’
Plenty.
According to an IBM study Internet usage is now approaching TV usage — in the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Japan. But, online advertising is nowhere near parity with TV advertising... yet.
Why should that be?
My friend Jeff Jarvis (www.buzzmachine.com), notes that personal Internet time rivals TV time. “Among consumer respondents, 19 percent stated spending six hours or more per day on personal Internet usage, versus nine percent of respondents who reported the same levels of TV viewing. 66 percent reported viewing between one to four hours of TV per day, versus 60 percent who reported the same levels of personal Internet usage...
Despite natural lags among marketers, advertising revenues will follow consumers’ habits...”
Saul Berman, IBM Media & Entertainment Strategy and Change practice leader, said, “The Internet is becoming consumers’ primary entertainment source. The TV is increasingly taking a back seat to the cell phone and the personal computer among consumers age 18 to 34... ”
The next decade is going to bring a time of massive disruption to conventional markets and conventional beliefs about how the media business works. Like Kodak, companies are going to be faced with the difficult option of ‘adapt or die’. It will be astonishing how many opt for the latter because the former is simply too difficult to deal with.
Some more findings from the U.S. IBM survey:
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22206.wss
- “Content” is now, at last defined as conversation as well. Use of content services: 45% social networks; 29% user-generated sites; 24% music services; 24% premium video content for TV (not sure what that means); 18% online newspaper. Ouch.
- 58% have already watched online video and 20% more are interested.
- DVRs are good for TV: 33% watch more TV as a result (58% the same)
- 74% contributed to a social network; 93% contributed to a user content site. Who says that forums are only for nuts, blogs for early adopters, and photo services for geeks? Everybody’s making content. Why do they do it? Feel part of a community, 31%; recognition from peers, 28%. Conversation.
- How is content marketed today? Peers. Primary reason for viewing content on a user site: 46% said the recommendation of a friend.
But here’s the fly in my future-of-advertising ointment. Asked which ads “most affect your impression of a product or company,” TV commercials on major networks got the lion’s share.
This last is perhaps the most interesting. This week, “From Where You Are”, a song by Jason Wade a singer in the band Lifehouse, cracked the Billboard 100.
This would normally not be news except that “From Where You Are” is not on any album. Nor has it played on the radio. Nor, for that matter, was it uploaded to the web as a kind of indy garage band hit.
No.
“From Where You Are” is the theme song to an Allstate Insurance Company commercial.
But last week it hit number 40 on the Billboard charts, right after it was made commercially available on iTunes.
“We’re in a different age” said Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard’s associate director of charts.
We sure are.
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