A new year is upon us, so here are some thoughts on what was learned in 2011 and what 2012 might hold for the media world from contributors, staff and participants from our ever-lively LinkedIn group.
And of course, we want to hear your thoughts too – what was the most important thing you learned in 2011? Please leave us a comment below…
-- Rory Brown, co-founder of Briefing Media (TheMediaBriefing’s parent company)
Nothing radical but I would say that the main thing I have learned in 2011 is to do less – but do the things you do do better.
In the past I have worked in environments where you were judged by the number of brand extensions you managed to come up with – often to the detriment of the core. I think media is beginning to realise that doing a few things really well is a much stronger poisition to be in.
-- Peter Hobday Loading...
Two things: (1) The focus in 2011 slipped away from revenue. Although many marketers are enthused and bewitched by great advances in communications technology, they are too easily diverted from what should be their core activity: Return On Investment. (2) Subscriber revenue should stay with the marketers and not disappear! Catching subscriber fish isn’t easy, and it isn’t helped if your company then takes your catch and refuses to fund any further fishing!
-- Bill Pollak
1. In the world of new product development, most people spend 95% of their time on strategy and technology. As important as those are, what really matters is your go-to-market implementation – whether you have priced and marketed the product properly, and whether you have a committed sales team who can sell it plus report useful feedback to the development team from customers and prospects. A new product can be outstanding both strategically and technologically, and still fail in the marketplace if the on-the-ground implementation is underfunded or off-base.
2. I think the biggest challenge for publishers of legacy print products will be how to move more aggressively to digital-first. Sounds easy, turns out to be hard to implement – involves major changes in strategy, culture, technology and marketing. But I think 2012 is looking to be the year when those on the sidelines of that transition are going to have to learn to play.
-- Nic Newman
I think there needs to be platform and channel experimentation to understand what is possible and what might work (eg Twitter Loading... has become a core tool for news journalism) … the key problem is when all that diverts you from thinking about what you are really about, who is really valuable to you – and why. I see things swinging back in that direction now. Less focus on acquisition, more focus on engagement as a trend for next year
-- Paul Squires
What was the biggest lesson you and/or business learned in 2011?
We’re a very young business so every experience has its impacts. Perhaps the biggest “lesson” is to be as flexible as possible – not just to the needs of clients, but also to the market. We’re now doing things that at the point of creating the business I never anticipated, from designing and managing exhibition stands to developing and hosting complex CRM systems. That’s not to say that we aim to be a jack of all trades and master of none, but we’re simply aiming to help clients with whatever their specific problems may be, and to put our collective minds to those problems, however diverse.
What will be the biggest challenge for you and/or the industry in 2012?
For the industry… I think that the mass migration to digital by the consumer is going to create more seismic shifts in publishing. The move by newspapers to digital-only or weekly will unrelentingly continue, and those traditional cost bases will continue to be under severe threats.
What we currently see is an iceberg effect: GNM and Associated are by far the most active and visible in terms of “getting” the way in which newspapers now need to be those flexible, more global brands, and everyone else is really under the surface, with things going on that I will hope to see in the new year. Clearly, Ashley Highfield Loading... at Johnston is symptomatic of publishing making that shift.
The same is true in other forms of publishing. Magazines need to address the multiplicities of digital content in a much deeper, more strategic way than just putting the magazine into Newsstand. Books are facing similar-but-different challenges; anyone can become an author and publisher through Kindle Direct Publishing, so publishers will have to act more like ad agencies, taking an idea and working a narrative across a series of nodal points which tells stories-about-stories to build advocacy.
Nothing is a panacea. Gus MacDonald once said that an ITV Loading... franchise (STV in his case) is a licence to print money. In this age, you no longer need such a “licence”, but “printing money”? That’s harder…
-- Peter Houston Loading... , FlippingPagesblog.com
I would echo what you have said with specific reference to content channels. The last couple of years there seems to have been a mad rush to establish a meaningful presence on every digital content platform possible – web, blog, enewsletter, Twitter, Facebook Loading... , Google Loading... , LinkedIn Loading... , Tumblr, iOS phone and tablet, Android phone and tablet, blah, blah, blah…
This year I have come to see this attempt at universality as a bit of a mug’s game and have subsequently developed Houston’s law of Channel Dynamics to regulate multi-channel activity. It says: The value of any content channel increases proportionately according to the size of the engaged audience divided by the resource required for publication multiplied by (actual) revenue booked.
Of course, this is unlikely to win me the Nobel Prize for Publishing as it is ablsolutely bloody obvious to anyone who stops to think about it for more than 10 seconds. The problem is I don’t think many of us have taken the time to stop and think – all too busy trying to make our content omnipresent.
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