James Murdoch, son of Rupert, aims and fires at the BBC

According to a report in London’s Guardian newspaper picked-up by MediaBistro’s  daily news feed, James Murdoch, 36 year-old son of Rupert Murdoch and Chairman and Non- Executive Director of the U.K. cable concern, Sky, used his invitation to give the MacTaggert Lecture at the 2009 Edinburgh International Television Festival to blast away at the state-controlled (and subsidized) BBC.

Here is a link to the speech. There’s not a lot of news in  it. The sorts of arguments one would make about the virtues of free-market information vs. state-controlled information are predictable, and we already know the two points of view are never going to get along.

On the other hand, The Guardian Newspaper’s editorial regarding Mr. Murdoch’s speech does make some news, of a sort. It says this:

“He [James Murdoch] would like British TV to be more like the press – opinionated, lightly regulated (if at all) and totally independent. In other words, he would like Britain to be more like America. The problem is that the American newspaper sector – untroubled by either the BBC or very much regulation – is on its knees. The free market can no longer support the work of keeping communities informed. (Emphasis added.)” 

That last sentence is news to me. What it could and should say, perhaps, is that the free market can no longer support the work of newspapers and other traditional media companies in the manner to which they became accustomed. But it should be obvious to anyone in today’s media society that communities are awash in information.

Perhaps not the sort of information for which The Guardian is willing to show much respect. It may be making a distinction between the “credible” analogue versions and what it considers the digital drivel served-up by blogs and news aggregators and out-of-work reporters still covering events from the world’s hot-spots on the laptops. 

But that seems unlike The Guardian, which has one of the finest news web sites in the world and is also deeply invested in reporting on the media business (it is the title sponsor of the Edinburgh Television Festival).

All the more reason, therefore, to call-out their comments.

In closing his speech Mr. Murdoch says, ”I have argued tonight that this success is based on a very simple principal: trust people.” And he says:

“People are very good at making choices: choices about what media to consume; whether to pay for it and how much; what they think is acceptable to watch, read and hear; and the result of their billions of choices is that good companies survive, prosper, and proliferate.”

And The Guardian acknowledges:

“He is right to talk about the need to trust consumers, even if the underlying purpose of his speech will be seen as  one of self-interest.”

The BBC has always struck me as credible and trustworthy. I am in the U.K. regularly and have winced more than once at the penetrating interview style of its reporters as they bore into public servants and officials. In respects, BBC-type journalism is insulated from the status culture of journalism in the U.S., where media watchdogs are prone to sail out of the same yacht clubs as their government and corporate charges.

You can trust the people to know the difference, however, and they do. James Murdoch may have his competitive issues with state-sponsored media and the arguments back and forth may hinge on whom you trust. In the end, people trust themselves, which is why the Internet has been such a resounding success with them.

New media, same as old, old media.

Nic Brisbourne, a partner at venture firm, DFJ Esprit, has an article in Paid Content talking about the future of news in a digital age. His view is that it will be, a) highly distributed, b) free, and c) forced into smaller packages. Says he:

“In the digital world, the news industry, like many others, will be radically smaller. This contraction is partly a consequence of much reduced distribution costs, but is also a reflection of the fact that the monopoly rents Fleet Street enjoyed in the last century are a thing of the past.”

A similar argument about the need for news (specifically, newspapers) to think small was made in this space earlier this spring.

In arguing that news will come (is coming) in well-distributed, niche packages Nic Brisbourne is setting-up his contention that a new sort of journalism will emerge to organize ongoing news and story-lines by curating the bits and pieces and providing insight and commentary on top. Huffington Post is mentioned as an example. So are TechCrunch and Perez Hilton.com.

Mark Cuban was recommending a similar deal to Rupert Murdoch recently, proposing that he aggregate News Corp content from around the world into custom packages if he really wants to try and charge for it. Nic Brisbourne isn’t persuaded that charging for content will work. But, still, there is a sort of consensus between them that aggregating and curating information unlocks value.

News has become abundant, Brisbourne says, at a cost of zero. Indeed, hasn’t all information? Music has become abundant. So has art, sports, travel, cooking (question: can there possibly be as many recipes in the world as appear available online? Answer: Of course.), pet care advice, child care advice, media and advertising advice, etc.

Information is abundant and free and Nic Brisbourne’s argument is that coallating the threads of its different parts becomes the scarce source of value.

Excellent. It may interest us all to know, now, that this was the premise of Time Magazine when it was founded. From the Time.com web site:

TIME, founded on the notion that a surplus of news existed which had to be licked into usable shape, felt no need to gather its own news until the 1930s.
From The Story Of An Experiment
Mar. 8, 1948

Aggregation was behind the great networks NBC and CBS when they got going thanks to the invention of radio. It is the premise of my favorite new magazine – one that actually seems to be working - The Week.

This means Nic Brisbourne is definitely on to something, which is that the future of news and information is largely the same as it has been. New media will evolve (is evolving) around the specialized aggregation of information and content (e.g. Huffington Post: breaking news and opinion; PerezHilton: celebrity gossip; TechCrunch: new Internet companies and technology).

This is different from the generalized aggregation of audience - as everyone with a portal model found out early into the Internet revolution. But don’t blame them for missing the point; they were mimicking what seemed like the successful model that main stream media had become. Wrong. Not successful. Almost impossible to sustain at super-size levels. Per Nic Brisbourne :

“The great tragedy of the newspaper industry in the late 20th Century was that, in the pursuit of profit, quality journalism became a dying art. Budgets were reduced, journalists were asked to write more stories per day and were given less time to check facts. At the same time, editors were instructed to avoid stories that might create controversy and the expense of lawsuits. The result was more and more bland articles recycled from paper to paper, more politically motivated editing and the collapse of public trust in the newspaper industry.”

When I think about media over the last 30 years I think about the gradual dumbing down of content in order to appeal to a lower and lower common denominator. Fundamentally, we may regard the Internet as a total re-boot to what it was when pamphleteers dotted the media landscape.

Will history repeat? One hopes that the vastness of the new media landscape and its minimum barriers to entry for would-be publishers will postpone that possiblity into the very, very distant future.

Even if OPA publishers won’t listen to Jim Spanfeller, there are many others online that will, if invited.

You can say this about Jim Spanfeller, the outgoing CEO of Forbes.com: he’s straight-forward. There’s very little ambiquity in his piece in Paid Content yesterday, titled “Publishers Are Killing Web Advertising’s Potential With Misguided Pricing,” which concludes by saying “When it’s all said and done, there really is no remnant inventory on the web, just as there is little to no real remnant inventory elsewhere.” Jim is exhorting web publishers not to give away value by entrusting it to the “invisible” hand of third-parties.

Jim is Chair Emeritus of IAB and Treasurer of OPA, and - knowing that -we’re conscious that his exhortations are largely directed at the branded media-types with whom he spends most of his time. But his message applies to all serious web publishers, not just OPA publishers, which is why the OPA could help itself and many others by acknowledging the content value that extends deep into the long tail of the Internet. It failed to do this with its recent study “Improving ad performance online” (about which there has been plenty to say in this space) and Jim slipped past the chance again in his Paid Content commentary yesterday when he said the OPA study ”shows the far greater value in buying ad programs directly from publishers” - a problematic, and somewhat suspicious claim to the vast majority of publishers online without salespeople of their own.  

Buying directly from publishers is not a media value proposition. Buying the value of content, and the audience it attracts, is a media proposition.

Jim Spanfeller is deeply committed to media value and were he invited to speak right at this point he (and possibly also the agents at OPA responsible for their recent study) might hasten to add to his comments that yes, yes, of course, it’s about content and the audience it attracts. But, he’d argue, ad networks and other third-parties aren’t capable of that for publishers. Indeed, in most cases, they are prevented from doing so because they are restricted from guaranteeing web sites and positions. Many of them are blind. So, selling the value of the web site is actually antithetical to their offering and they, along with participating publishers are “killing web advertising’s potential.”

Indeed, it’s a shame, but as it turns out the online system has evolved with a built-in value cap; a governor that keeps the Internet motor from racing.  And, it’s hard to rail against those market forces as Jim Spanfeller is conscientiously doing in order to remove the governor and change behaviors. 

To succeed, you need leverage which has been the point in taking aim at the OPA study released two weeks ago that failed to differentiate among ad networks, or other third-parties that sell value, or offer a nod to thousands of independent web publishers who don’t have their own salespeople, but surely have their own audiences! These publishers can provide leverage to the media value argument online with their passion - as partners, members of a branded content network, or simply (affordable) dues payers.

It’s been said here to anybody who will listen: imagine an OPA (or IAB, or party-to-be-named-later) Annual Meeting 10 years from now with 10,000 people attending, mostly publishers. Think MacWorld. Maybe the Javits Center in New York will hold them. All of them excited to be there to talk about publishing issues. All of them with stories to tell about how their web site is different  and makes a difference. All of them intimidated by the very big Time Warner booth with an invitation over top that reads “Be Part Of The Biggest Content Network in the World!”; all of them whispering as Tim Armstrong walks by; all of them standing in line at the Google booth (“Why Paid Search Still Works For You!”); all of them sitting with their arms folded across their chest listening critically to the panel of senior ad agency executives talking about partnership and performance. Maybe twenty-five hundred of them in the audience blogging and Tweeting and whatever-elsing as the Global Agency Director General of All Things Bright and Beautiful rumbles on about the importance of partnership and performance “with all of you of who are so closely connected to the audiences online that are our most important customers.” 

That’s leverage.

Even if OPA publishers won’t listen to Jim Spanfeller there are many, many others that will. And they can help, if invited.

“What-avision?” Don Hewitt’s life in television speaks to a new media generation

 

According to the New York Times obituary this week, Don Hewitt, the legendary television news producer who died on Wednesday, reportedly asked, “What-avision?”, when CBS first approached him in 1948 to produce television content. 

In 1948 there were no television households in America – and/or, what televisions there were you could practically count using two hands. In interviews before his death, Mr. Hewitt recalled the freedom to make up the business of TV news as he went, rationalizing that no one was watching, anyway.

It was 20 years after his arrival at CBS to produce the news that Don Hewitt created “60 Minutes,” which we must regard as one of television’s crowning achievements. Popular and critically acclaimed, “60 Minutes” would go on to represent the best of what television had to offer, and that fact remains today.

We’ve been at the Internet thing for about 15 years, which means as an industry our “60 Minutes” may still be out there somewhere ahead of us. Don Hewitt’s journey of nearly six decades in the television business reminds us, again, that new media takes years – generations – to reach its fulfillment.

That’s cold comfort to an industry that insists on being in a hurry. Moving in “Internet time” is a sort of Super Hero cape people in the business like to tie around their neck when they work. But, looking at the archive footage of Mr Hewitt (see video, below) barking into two telephones at the same time, one on each shoulder, and then banging his fist on the desk, I see the same cape around him. He could be anyone I know online. I wonder what he’d have to say (and may have said) to all the young Internet Marvels swooping to and fro today, “faster than a speeding bullet.”

Probably, “Trust me, you have a long way to go.”

Don Hewitt described himself as lucky in an interview shortly before his death. He said it as someone with nothing left to prove and with the advantage of 80+ years of hindsight. He said it such that it imparted wisdom, not modesty.

Of all the things he may have been speaking, no doubt one of them will have been his good fortunate to arrive at the same time as television. It’s another message to a striving Internet generation: how lucky are we to have been here for this. 

The Online Publishers Association vs. the Internet: next steps.

Over at the Big Picture blog, Daniel Taylor comments on the inquiry into the indifference of the OPA to the rest of the Internet world. Basically, he asks, what’s the rest of the Internet planning to do about it?

Good question.

It may interest him to know that a few years ago a group of us did, in fact, think about founding a separate trade association to represent the interests of, as he says, “the little guys.” (I used to hate that term because it’s not accurate in regards to many, many web sites out there; but now I’ve grown to like it. There’s something appealing about being on the side of the little guys, even when they might be big.) We were drivers of that initiative at Burst, but then we moved on to other things, and it lost its energy.

Daniel is right, however, it was bound to happen and we did see it coming when we tried to organize. Large publishers would have found a third-party to substantiate their “superior” claims vs. the rest of the marketplace. As I said in the Ad Age piece, these sorts of studies are instruments of state propaganda. We get it. So, logically, next we’re going to rally to produce a study that challenges the OPA claims, and we can have a fair fight back and forth.

Some of the first people we may call to work with us on that study are OPA dues-paying supporters ($5,250 annually), many of which – interestingly – are ad networks: 24/7 Real Media, Collective Media and Tremor Media, for example, along with other ad network enablers such as Ad Meld, PubMatic and Rubicon. Many of those, and many others, celebrate the fact that their networks are rich in OPA member inventory, which explains why they are OPA supporters. We work with Rubicon. We also work with Short Tail Media, another OPA supporter, which is a customer of Burst’s adConductor platform and launched with the intention to help OPA members kick the ad network habit by being the partner of choice for the OPA. We’re rooting for them, naturally.

For starters, as we design our study, we’ll want to understand the implications of the OPA study as it pertains to the value of the inventory they re-purpose through their ad network supporters. Most of those networks bill it as “premium” inventory, but it is probably regarded as scrap, or remnant, by the members themselves. Keeping things apples to apples, our study will want to strictly compare the value of the proprietary inventory of vertical niche web sites to the proprietary inventory of the OPA’s members and not – thank you very much - to the remnant stuff they send to ad networks and which they’ve just shot to hell with their study.

I am confident of the results of our study. It won’t be a hatchet job on branded web sites, however. We expect to be able to show that the abiding relationship audiences have with online media, that is of premium value to advertisers, is derived substantially from relevant and timely content. We expect to show, further, that it does not grow on trees; rather, it comes from publishers that know and care. In the end, we will show that there are many, many, many who know and care online, even some of those at OPA web sites for whom it’s just a job.

London Heathrow’s Airport hosts a writer in residence.

According to a report in the New York Times today, London’s Heathrow airport is hosting a writer-in-residence (Alain de Botton) as a way to capture and promote the Heathrow experience through “branded conversations” with travelers. Results get turned into a book, 10,000 of which will be distributed for free at  Heathrow.

Brilliant. Give the PR firm, Mischief, a medal.

“Branded conversations.” Great term. Very Internet.

More on the Online Publishers Association’s recent “Content” study

Advertising Age featured more of my comments about the recent OPA study that sought to invalidate the broader Internet for brand advertising.

Additional coverage on the OPA report (“OPA Trashes Ad Networks…badly”) at Chief Marketer.com

The Online Publishers Association: still driving with its foot on the brake.

The Online Publishers Association(OPA), the trade association representing the digital interests of mostly offline media companies, opted to set fire to the forest floor yesterday with the release of a study on brand advertising metrics that, by the time they finished, scorched the effectiveness of the entire Internet as a brand medium save for its 50, or so, members who served as the “proxy for content sites” in the study. That means all the other non-proxy content sites served by ad networks or sales representatives, plus portals – or, basically, the remainder of the Internet - were voted off the island by the report.

There are 400,000 words in the English language and there are seven you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is, the great George Carlin once observed. Add to it, now, that there are 10 billion web sites on the Internet and only 50 on which you can advertise your brand successfully.

They must be reeeally goood.

Unfortunately, this is a problem for anyone rooting for the Internet to get to $50 billion, which many people seem to be doing. If  brand advertisers can only hope to be successful on OPA web sites, the $50 billion means that, a) they will pay through the nose for advertising on the reeeally goood sites, and b) the rest of the Internet will be awash in so much fakevertising it will be like spilled oil on the beach. (Which Yahoo! already thinks is like spilled oil on the beach and is trying to clean up on its sites. Which is not what needs to happen if CPMS go to $250 on OPA sites and you need enough room for an environmental disaster to support the rest of the economy.)

This is what lashing out looks like. The OPA didn’t release a study yesterday; the OPA lashed out at the industry, which it feels conspires every day to wreck the value propositions of its members who are important, dedicated, hard-working, First Amendment freedom fighters that are sick and tired of being trampled by midgets. Honestly, I think they are just that frustrated. Every day it’s attack of the killer ants. Every day it’s a nightmare of compromises and conditions and unwelcome intrusions:

“Another Ad Network to see you, Sir.”

“The local residents have asked if they may hunt on the grounds tomorrow, Sir.”

“The gentleman in the portal next door has asked if he might borrow some Grey Poupon.”

No one is confused about the OPA’s mission: countless years and considerable wealth and innovation went into building the global media franchises that the OPA mostly represents, and keeping them secure amidst the torrent of new media brought on by the Internet is an important and worthwhile assignment. They should be beacons. But we must live in the real world and the real world online isn’t confined to a city block. It isn’t a gated community. It just isn’t. Look up.

The OPA should be the representative for all quality content online including content touched by ad networks and rep firms. It needs to get over the “branded” content thing and identify with millions of consumers online that have abiding relationships (some might call these brand relationships) with plenty of sites the OPA has never heard of. The IAB is wisely reaching-out at a critical time to long tail, independent publishers. The OPA should be ahead of it. The OPA, informed by the centuries-old mission of its founders - themselves small, independent media pioneers – should be the principal steward of online content and quality and a fierce advocate for publishers, big and small, that work hard to create meaningful destinations for consumers. The OPA should be filled with empathy, not petty rivalry.

If so, the OPA’s study yesterday might have offered cover to brand advertisers desiring to allocate more money online in response to all the signs that proclaim that’s where the people are! Instead, the OPA said “No. Mine,” and helped keep the brand advertising promise of the Internet down. In the process, for the day at least, the shift of brand dollars regarded as essential to the future of the industry was postponed. Again.

Aggregation aggravation

MediaPost’s ”Around the Net in online media” picked-up Mark Cuban’s open letter (blog?) to Rupert Murdoch with advice on how to sell content online. His advice has two parts: 1) create editorial scarcity by blocking the aggregators that point to News Corp content and, then, 2) reassemble and repackage News Corp content from around the world into useful bundles that might appeal to news junkies or sports freaks, etc. Essentially, Cuban says to Murdoch, aggregate your own content on your own terms; put the fact that you own a media empire to work for you and make the people pay for that value.

Mark Cuban’s unsolicited advice was presumably inspired by Murdoch’s assertion to the markets last week that News Corp will start charging for content in July 2010. He has that long to figure out how. If he heeds Cuban’s advice the time between now and then will go to weaning his media empire off its addiction to the aggregators in order to create the scarcity value for News Corp content. I’ve relied on a few aggregators just to get this far in this blog post – “Around the Net”, of course, plus Media Bistro (which led me to Time.com). As a drug, they are wonderful alternative to the real thing. The danger to News Corp and others, of course, is that without them reality may bite.

But there is something fundamentally positive in the talk about value and value creation online. The whole third-party aggregation thing is being scrutinized not just on the content side, but on the advertising sales side with the thought that it’s time to start kicking some of these habits. I don’t think many companies are going to be successful charging for content. Cuban talks about the Wall Street Journal as an exception and that may be true. But if companies can’t charge for their content they may want at least to ensure their exclusive rights to sell advertising against it.  

In that regard, we live in the ad network space here at Burst Media where there has been much gnashing of teeth over the last year among web publishers – principally branded publishers such as any of those in the News Corp stable – who are trying to cut down their reliance on third-party ad networks. We have mostly stayed out of the fray by avoiding relationships with publishers that aren’t willing to work with us transparently - meaning, fundamentally, all the brand publishers with their own sales forces. If today those publishers are plotting their escape from unwanted third-parties, we won’t have a dog in the fight and we can choose to root for the value the publishers may win back as result. (And why not root for value?)

Advertisers – mostly ad agencies – are also strung-out on the whole third-party aggregation thing and are devising 12 step programs of their own to get back in charge. At a glance, their goals appear different than the publishers that are engaged in cleansing their systems, but who should be surprised? It has always been thus. The torment affecting everyone online has been a lack of differentiation, and it is that demon causing all the aggravation over aggregation.