Media

What We Have Houston is a Focus Crisis

By Mark Evans in Media, Social Media 2 Comments Tags: , , ,

The ability to multi-task is an urban myth.

You may try to do multiple things at the same time but it is difficult, if not impossible, to focus on the task at hand if there several tasks battling for attention.

Nevertheless, there’s a widely-accepted belief that talking on the phone, writing an e-mail, and checking your Twitter status at the same time is an efficient way to operate.

Frankly, we’re kidding ourselves. It may be physically possible to multi-task but it’s totally inefficient to be bouncing around from task to task like a Mexican jumping bean, rather than focusing on one thing at a time, before moving on to the next task. (aka single-tasking).

Focus is a subject I have battled to embrace over the past couple of years as the demands of handling multiple consulting clients makes it more important to manage my time and focus my efforts. In our multi-tasking world, it takes tremendous discipline to bear down on what needs to be done when there are a variety of tempting distractions.

Among my peers, it seemed like I was the only one struggling to figure out if there was a different way to operate – a way that let us focus in a multi-tasking world.

It is encouraging to see other people start to address what I see as the “Focus Crisis”.

In a blog post recently, Jason Falls asked “What would happened if you took a break from social media? Falls, a social media consultant, addressed the issue of being engaged professionally and personally when social media can be seductive mistress demanding your attention 24/7.

Mark MacLeod (aka StartupCFO) had a post about turning off his wireless device so he could focus on talking to new companies about a possible investment, or watching his son swim. Again, we’re talking about someone struggling to focus. To an effort to get back on the right track, MacLeod made this commitment:

“So, I am vowing now to my family, my partners and the entrepreneurs we meet that I will be present. Work will continue to come in probably faster and faster as our portfolio grows over time. So, I will need to be very good at carving out blocks for work and blocks for meetings. And at home, I will need to create distinct times for work vs. continually floating in and out of work and family stuff.”

Finally, the New York Times has a front-page story today about the struggles teachers are having getting students to focus. In class, students are sending dozens of text messages using wireless devices rather than focusing on the teacher.

Maybe I’m taking 1 + 1 + 1 to equal four but what we’re increasingly having is a failure to focus on anything. We’re multi-tasking, distracted and inefficient. Our personal lives are less rich and engaged because we need to check our wireless devices for e-mail or update our Twitter status. Our professional lives are becoming less productive even at a time when it’s more important to focus because many companies continue to operate lean and mean.

As the ability to focus becomes more difficult, we’re losing something along the way. In our personal lives, it’s respect and true engagement – something that can not be achieved when a conversation with someone could be abandoned at any time to take a phone call. In our professional lives, we’re less efficient, which means more stress because the work isn’t getting done. As a result, work is spilling into our personal lives so we can catch up.

Not a lot of people may be talking about it but we’re in the midst of a focus crisis. And it’s not going to any easier as more devices, technologies and online services battle for attention. But if we don’t get a handle on being focused soon, we’re in trouble.

Is It Really Time for Personalized TV?

By Mark Evans in Media 2 Comments Tags: , , ,

I don’t watch a lot of television – not even those HBO shows that everyone raves about.

That said, I still have cable television because it’s really the only way to watch live sports. If there was a service that let you buy live sports on a pay-as-you-go basis, I probably wouldn’t need cable service.

For all the talk about TV’s new future and the rise of services such as Hulu and Apple TV, the world is still dominated by cable and satellite service providers. As much as people talk about being able to just buy the shows they want by downloading them or streaming them off the Web, there doesn’t appear to be a stampede of consumers yet.

But there are indications that the marketplace is changing. A recent survey Webbush Securities analyst James Dix discovered 7% of 2,500 respondents had stopped using basic cable and 12% had cut their premium or satellite services.

“There is evidence of cord cutting,” Dix told the New York Post

Perhaps the biggest hurdle facing the growth of the pay-as-you-go TV market is live sports. While there is some pay-per-view and sports packages, sports remains the reason why many people still have cable or satellite service. As much as television shows have migrated to the New TV, sports is still pretty much rooted in the Old TV.

It may have to do with the fact the networks are willing to pay billions of dollars in broadcasting rights, or maybe it simply has to do with a new model not being ready for prime time yet. For example, a Hulu for live sports in which you could watch any professionals game for $2.99 or $4.99/shot could be very interesting.

My take is we’re just moving into the New TV era. Hulu is an indication of what may be over the horizon, although it is a hybrid given it’s controlled by traditional broadcasters. Apple TV could be interesting but it’s strong ties to iTunes will be a strength and a weakness, while Google TV is still finding its feet.

For couch potatoes, it could be an interesting landscape with far more choices.

For more, check out David Pogue’s recent column in the New York Times.

The Growing Importance of Messaging

By Mark Evans in Media, Social Media No Comments Tags: , , ,

Over the past few months, my consulting business has started to move in a new and interesting direction.

Many of the start-ups that approach me are looking for help with messaging to better articulate who they are and why potential customers would be interested in their products or services. It may seem like a straightforward proposition but, in reality, being able to clearly tell the world why they should care is a major challenge.

The biggest issue is a growing number of consumers are time-strapped and, at the same time, multi-tasking. And their attention spans are, at best, minimal. It means that if a company fails to capture their attention right away, you can kiss that potential customer goodbye. It’s not that your product or service isn’t interesting or worth a look; it’s more that we live in a world of instant-gratification and give it to me now.

This means that messaging quickly needs to resonate, captivate and engage. The mission statement, value proposition and feature benefits need to be crystal clear and basically grab people by their collars. There’s no time to be cute, subtle or a tease. Your messaging must make people immediately say “Yes, I get it.” It can’t make consumers do any work to figure things out because it will only encourage them to quickly move on.

The question is: if messaging is so important, why do so many companies struggle with it?

The answers are various and far from simple. In some cases, bad messaging has a lot to do with the skill-sets of people developing a product or service. They’re really good at building things but not good at telling other people what these things do and their benefits. It’s not a bad thing but the reality some people don’t have good marketing and communication skills, particularly when they have to do it in such a short period of time.

Another pitfall for many companies is they’re so close to the action, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get a fresh perspective on what they do and why anyone would care. When you spend so much time focused on a particular product or service, it’s hard not to get locked in about what it does. This is where a third-party perspective can be invaluable to shed new light or ideas that may be entirely different than what a company has been thinking.

A big part of this problem is companies are focused on talking about what their products or service do, the features and the benefits. Instead, they should be focused on how their products or services meet the needs of existing and potential customers. There may be a subtle difference in these two approaches but they can make make or break a company.

The first approach is “me, me, me”, while the second approach is “you, you, you”. Look at how many companies talk about how “We make this product…” or “Our technology is best of class…”, rather than “You can use our products to be more efficient” or “You need to be reduce costs…..”.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for companies is acknowledging they need help to improve or change their messaging. It can be difficult to admit that what they’ve been telling the world may be working or, for that matter, an accurate depiction of who they are and what they do.

Any company willing to take the next step by seeking outside help needs to be flexible and open to change. They need to embrace the possibility that their messaging may be completely overhauled or taken in a different direction. It’s the only way that messaging can improve or evolve, which, at the end of the day, can make a big difference.

Who Controls the Pipes, Wins

By Mark Evans in ILEC News, Analysis, Media 2 Comments Tags: , , ,

Given some of the recent transactions, convergence has come roaring back after being considered dead in the wake of some disastrous deals earlier this decade. Can anyone say AOL/Time-Warner?

Despite the renewed belief that content and connectivity are a magical pairing, my take is it’s much ado about nothing all over again. At the end of the day, the pipes are much more valuable than content. Why? It’s simple: There are only a limited number of pipes but lots of content. This may live in a 500-channel universe but there’s limited way to access all of this content.

If consumers want content, they need a way to get it, and they are willing to pay higher prices for better, faster, more convenient connections. Look at how broadband prices continue to be increased with nary a whimper from consumers, who are loathe to pay anything for online services, even those they find valuable and useful.

No one talks about it much but he/she who controls the pipes, wins. It’s as simple as that.

There’s at least one person who seems to share my thesis: Rogers Communications CEO Nadir Mohammed, who provided this juicy quote to the Globe & Mail:

“We think there’s a lot of glory in dumb pipes,” he says. This is shortly before he also says, “There’s no such thing as dumb pipes.”

This quote come from the leader of a company which owns large broadband and wireless businesses, as well as radio stations and TV stations, magazines, Web sites and a baseball team.

The sudden need by pipe owners such as Bell Canada and Shaw to own content sounds like the same arguments pipe owners were making a decade ago, and we all know how well that turned out. The difference between then and now is there’s so much more content being created, which has made content is more of a commodity.

Meanwhile, the number of pipes has stayed relatively the same. Sure, there are a few more wireless carriers but it’s not like billions of dollars being poured into building new broadband networks being created. As long as pipes are in short supply, they will remain an extremely valuable asset – much more valuable than content.

BCE’s Puzzling Stab at Convergence

By Mark Evans in Media 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about BCE’s decision to acquire of all CTV – a decision apparently inspired when BCE CEO George Cope watched Canada’s women’s hockey team win Olympic gold on his wireless device – a moment he described as when the “penny dropped”.

It’s a move that obviously has convergence written all over it based on the idea that owning CTV will let BCE exclusively distribute content to its wireless, IP-TV, satellite and Sympatico.ca customers. This is yet another strategic makeover for BCE, and something that bleeds of competitive scrambling, if not desperation.

In theory, this will achieve three things:

1. It will make BCE’s distribution channels more valuable
2. It will give BCE a golden opportunity to squeeze more dollars from its customers
3. It will help BCE customers who want CTV content away from Rogers, Videotron and Shaw, as well as keep its own customers who have been fleeing to Rogers and Videotron in Eastern Canada.

On the surface, it may seem like a solid strategic approach but my take is the same flaws that doomed the original convergence movement will inevitably doom Convergence 2.0.

The biggest problem is consumers want content neutrality. Consumers want to get content when, where and how they want it. They don’t want to have to be a customer of a certain carrier or cableco to get content. Instead, they want to pick and chose their content – be it from Hulu, Netflix, CTV, CBC, NBC or Apple.

What consumers are willing to pay for – and even pay a premium to get – is a high-speed connection so they can access the content they want. It’s one of the reasons why high-speed ISPs have been able to raise prices and create different tiers of service with little resistance from consumers.

This is particularly true in Canada where high-speed competition doesn’t exist. In most markets, there’s friendly competition between the carriers and cablecos. While speed is often used as a competition differentiator, price is something that rarely, if ever, comes into play, probably because the margins on high-speed are so sweet that the carriers or cablecos don’t want to kill the golden goose.

Given this oligopolistic landscape, BCE didn’t need to purchase CTV. But George Cope probably believed he had no choice given his many of his major rivals own content: Shaw owns Globe TV, Rogers owns SportsNet, CityTV, Omni and a stable of radio stations and magazines, while Videotron has access to Quebecor’s media portfolio.

If anything, it speaks volumes about Canada’s media and telecom landscape in which cross-ownership has been allowed to thrive even at a time when the Internet has let more content than ever be available to any one with an Internet connection. At the same time, Canada’s digital border is alive and well, which explains why we still don’t have access to services such as Hulu and Pandora.

The only losers in this growing content contest between the cablecos and carriers are consumers, who may be forced to dance with specific partners as opposed to have a dance card that lets them choose whoever they want.

Media is Changing. But How?

By Mark Evans in Media 1 Comment Tags: , , , ,

I was fortunate to be invited by the Digital Journal to participate on a panel last night about the future of media – a subject that attracts a lot of attention as traditional media valiantly scrambles to stay vibrant and viable.

For the most part, the panelists were well behaved and provided some great insight into how the media world is changing. In particular, it was interesting to hear from Anjali Kapoor from the Globe & Mail and David Skok from Global News about how their organizations are evolving and embracing change. Polar Mobile’s Kunal Gupta provided some great insight into how mobile devices are changing content consumption, while Facebook’s Elmer Sotto talked about the role that Facebook is playing as a distribution platform.

The question everyone in the room wanted to know, of course, is what the future holds for media. Everyone involved in the media business or interested in the media is looking for insight about what’s over the horizon. What they got from the panel was that everyone recognizes that things are dramatically changing but no one knows what exactly is going to happen.

For example, there was an animated discussion about how mobile users are consuming lots of content. Kunal talked about how mobile users consumes 100 pages of content on Time.com’s wireless application, compared with 14 pages of content for Time.com’s Web site. There was also a healthy discussion about the iPad and whether it could be the saviour for the newspaper and magazine businesses. And we talked a little about how location-based services might be an interesting opportunity.

That said, you could sense the frustration in the audience. They’re not looking for glimpses of the future or tidbits about what’s currently happening; they’re looking for tangible information about what’s coming. They want insight about the bleeding-edge technologies or services that will impact media.

As much as no one wanted to disappoint the audience, the truth is no one really knows. If we did, one of us would probably be working for a red-hot start-up focused on revolutionizing the way media is created and consumed.

Instead, people have to live with the fact the media world continues to be a volatile and evolving environment. The good news is that a growing number of media companies have embraced the fact they need to change or die. It means there’s a lot of self-analysis happening, as well as a growing willingness to experiment.

To me, the future of media and who ends up surviving all this upheaval hinges on who creates the best content. As a former reporter, I truly believe that story telling is as important, if not more important, than ever. Whether it’s a video, newspaper or magazine article, Facebook update, blog post, photo or tweet, content is still King. How we economically create this content and how we consume content is still very much in the air, which leaves lot of room for more panels on the future of media.

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