The opening pages of AIMIA’s The Business of Digital Content conference booklet contains a mindmap of the Digital Content value chain – it makes Barry Jones’s Knowledge Nation (aka Noodle Nation) look like a street sign.
Everyone was hoping that by the end of this one-day conference it would all be clearer, as 20-odd presenters tried hard to nail down their little corner of the web – branded content, social media, DRM, monetisation models, advertising strategies. Truth is it’s a fast moving target. I like the way that Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur categorizes digital media as a series of waves in an ocean – you paddle like crazy to catch one, ride it for a while and then you look around for the next one.
Pippa Leary, General manager, Media (Fairfax Digital) gave a spirited account of her division’s rise and rise within an established old-media company. Most interesting was her account of Fairfax Digital’s response to the twin news tsunamis of Steve Irwin and Peter Brock ‘moving on’ in the same week. The lessons about server demand - which resulted in the Fairfax News site crashing for an hour - were later applied to the Heath Ledger story with great success.
They now have a system which can shed server load to Akamai (at great expense) when they see a news spike approaching and a CMS (Content Management System) that can take a story live in 15 seconds.
Seems that the race between news organisations to get breaking stories to the top of the search engines is measured in seconds. They buy search terms such as ‘Heath Ledger’ as soon as they see the story coming. Success is measured as much by the ranking their story achieves in the search engines (compared to their competitors) as it is by the content itself.
Interesting insights:
- if they make a judgement that the story won’t work for advertisers on the site, they will turn the problem ad in that story off. Plane crash story? Dump those Qantas banners!
- lunch is the new prime time, when ofiice workers chained to their cubicle by workloads take a peek at the news while choking down a sandwich.
Branded content
I think I finally got it – thanks to the description of a couple of branded content campaigns by Alastair Henderson (OMD Fuse) and Ben Liebmann (FremantleMedia Enterprises). They talked about the Omo and V-Raw campaigns.
Here’s my take on the Omo campaign (Dirt is Good):
Consumers are over washing powders being sold on the basis of little blue bits in the powder promising whiter undies. So branded content brokers look for a real issue that intersects with life and washing powder. For instance - kids don’t play outside enough any more, they don’t get dirty. Build a campaign that parents will respond to by getting their kids outside (and dirty). The parents are happy, the kids are happy and Omo is happy. So the site contains activities that kids can do outside (and get dirty) the TV spots show kids getting dirty … you get the rest.
In the V-Raw campaign, (V-Raw is an energy drink – don’t worry, I hadn’t heard of it either) the idea was to associate the ‘mental energy’ that V-Raw engenders in the drinker with creative occupations. V-Raw undertook to place the most creative entrants to an online competition into internships (aka work experience) in creative companies.
So, I asked myself – ’self – how could you apply this to long-form content?’ and almost immediately I heard a rumour that the first branded documentary is about to screen on Australian FTA.
Traps for young branded content players – don’t put your product itself to UGC (User-Generated Content) – asking for trouble. Rather put a piece of content up as a conversation starter around your product.
Mobile content
David Gurney (Blue Rocket Productions) gave his trademark grimly ironic tales from mobile content world – Welcome to Hell.
His humorous analysis of the revenue possibilities based on a piece of mobile content sold into the UK market was sobering to say the least.
Traps for young mobile content players – there are Aggregators and Alligators – the latter can lock you into deals that then have to be re-negotiated with the real aggregators – your share getting shaved all along the way.
Hyperlocal content
Tony Surtees (CEO iPrime) talked about the addition of ‘hyperlocal’ content to traditional broadcasters’ content, using iPrime in the ACT as an example. He predicted that we will see hyperlocal services delivered in all major centres – like melbourne.tv. (Don’t bother – I’ve checked – the domain name’s taken. So is hobart.tv. dubbo.tv was available – I’ve got it now). He also gave us a glimpse of iPrime Sportsplay – a social network for grassroots (aka amateur) sports teams, based on Rob Antulov’s 3eep platform. Just ready to be branded.
Global content
Bill Burton (Bigpond Media) hinted that solid revenue from their model of the movie download business was some way off. No surprises there.
BBC Worldwide – when they say worldwide they are one of the few who aren’t kidding – has designated Australia as a prime territory in their strategy for global content domination. They have acquired a share of Freehand TV and Lonely Planet and of course localised Top Gear.
BBC.Com is their commercial child of BBC.co.uk and one to watch for emerging business models. You tend to think of the Brits as hoping this digital thing will all go away and then BBC.com comes along.
Future visions
Everyone leaned forward noticeably as the panel on financing startups took the stage – I am sure I wasn’t the only one thinking ‘rainbow/pot of gold’…
By the end of the session full of talk of valuations, earnings multiples, exit strategies, margin calls and so on (no wait, that’s ABC Learning, isn’t it?) it was back to that old sinking feeling – risk-averse investors and the three Fs of early stage investment (Friends, Fools and Family). Alex Hartman took the scary-wunderkind-of-the-Conference- award. He’s the 25-year-old Director of Corporate Development, Destra.
The delightfully buoyant Jennifer Wilson wrapped the day up with a gallop through the latest in social media trends – a few nuggets:
- Hire your users
- Let go of content
- Stories are conversations
- YouTube plus ad revenues split with the content creator changes the picture for the creator (in a good way)
- USA Today putting UGC on its homepage
- Most people will lend you their car/home/partner for the day, but not their mobile
- Look for mobile native social networking apps if you want the next big thing
- ‘Find the blue ocean in the sea of social media’ (umm, yeah, thanks Jennifer)
While consoling myself with a drink after a two-hour delay out of Sydney (is it just me or is this happening more often?) I struck up a culture-of-complaint conversation with a fellow traveller who turned out to be the online manager for one of the FTA commercials. She had sent some of her staff to the Conference but hadn’t been herself. As I ran through the ‘this raised more questions than it answered’ line, she nodded knowingly. And she has a team of forty in her online division all doing ….something.
