Old Media Falling Into The "Digeration Gap"

If you've shown up here, why don't you mosey on over to my new blog? Yeah, I just soft launched The BrandForward Blog. It's at http://michelletripp.com. You can find all the same posts you can find here. But it's a bit more pretty.

Yeah, go on! Scoot! Nothing to see here!

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I'm a little confused here. Haven't magazines learned anything from the music industry?

Some questionable protests were recently made by Time Inc.'s CEO Ann Moore that are the epitome of what I'll call the "digeration gap." Apparently she preached at some college students that "good information costs money." By her own admission they started to throw shoes at her.

What should have been a newsflash for Moore turned out to be more of a bake sale challenge. Instead of walking away from that interaction with a renewed quest for finding a viable business model that works with emerging technologies and the evolving consumer climate, she gave lip service to the idea of a new model in one breath, while reinforcing her own perceptions in the next:

"I think it is time for Time Inc. to sit down and seriously think, what is the model? We are going to have to figure out a way to have paid content in the future."

Our little peek into Moore's business strategy speaks volumes. Time Inc. intends to look for answers by going back to the old business model: subscriptions. They're taking a move from the RIAA play book and repackaging it. They're not looking for a new way of doing things. They're looking for a new way to do it the old way.

What's happening at this critical juncture is that some really smart people are just not getting it. Yesterday's business model will not work now. And it really won't work tomorrow. But instead of being at the forefront of developing this new model, a lot of key executives are trying to bulldoze past it, hoping somehow it'll turn into fertilizer for their own crop.

So this is the digeration gap. The difference between people and companies who embrace the internet and the future of information, and the ones who are still in love with the way things were, and desperately hang onto the "tired and true" way of doing things.

There's one little piece of information that those on the wrong side of the digeration gap are failing to realize: Tomorrow's business model is about the individual, not the corporation. Executives like Moore are trying to come up with a model that supports the corporation, that reinforces widespread control, that focuses on selling a lot of things to a lot of people from a central point of vantage. And they honestly believe they're being strategic and logical about it. Sure. But it's as if they're trying to play major-league baseball on a croquet course. Things aren't fitting but they'd rather fumble around instead of just looking down.

Another comment made by Moore that's hurting my head like a blunt object:

"Who started this rumour that all information should be free and why didn't we challenge this when it first came out?"

Wasn't it some Chinese fellow that said "the answer is in the question?"

Moore wants to know why "we didn't challenge it." I think the real question should have been "why didn't we challenge ourselves?" Companies that fall into the digeration gap are the ones that aren't just asking the wrong questions, they're also looking for the wrong answers.

Let's take one more look at this doozy:

"Good information costs money."

Now that's the ultimate rub. Good information no longer costs money. As more people on the planet gain the ability to communicate to a mass audience, it's clear that quality reporting can be done by someone without an editor breathing down their neck, without the necessity of a "Baghdad Bureau," and without the corporate structure propping them up (and no doubt influencing them). Time Inc. is operating on the concept that information is expensive, and that to survive they need to keep it expensive.

Yeah, I realize they have this big huge multi-national corporation to run, but the consumer doesn't care. Ann Moore can do the lecture circuit at every high school and university on the planet trying to convince the next generation they should pay for information. Hell, she can turn it into LollaPAYlooza and bring the RIAA and MPAA with her. I hope she has a lot of room in her closet. The shoes will be forthcoming.

Job number one for corporations like Time Inc. should be one thing: "How do we maintain ownership of the space we've built in our consumer's mind over the last 50 years." Because right now the one thing they stand to walk away from the ashes with is their brands. Brand as in mindshare. When the magazines shut down and the newspapers fold and the television networks are lost in a sea of original non-network INDIVIDUAL content, the brands will be all that's left.

As aging corporations use their might and brawn to resist their forced approach to the ledge of the digeration gap, they have only two choices:

Corpse or phoenix.

Defending Twitter

Now here's the deal. This post is going to suck. No attention to grammar. No smooth segues. No cloying humor. And forget a tidy tie-in at the end. It seems I'm addicted to twitter and don't have time to be bothered by the particulars of a blog anymore. The world out there is spinning and churning and scrolling while I'm stuck in this little box. I feel... so... isolated.

Which is why it perplexes me that anyone (especially someone in the business of COMMUNICATING) could have two bad words to say about twitter. It's the greatest thing since sliced facebook.

But apparently Bob Hoffman (The Ad Contrarian), CEO of Hoffman/Lewis San Francisco isn't hitching a ride on this freedom train.

"How the narcissistic keep in touch with the feckless"

is his personal take on this whole newfangled toy the kids are playing with. http://tinyurl.com/cdhn8j. Hmmm. By his own admission his opinion is founded on... ahem... two bold encounters. But he claims psychologists support his observations, so it must be right.

Why yes, it's absolutely logical. That someone who isn't active on twitter would look from the outside and peep in like an octogenarian listening in on high school chatter. Tsk! Tsk!

Or that someone who's dedicated their career to the study and treatment of mental health disorders would dance in glee over the prospect of a new "ailment/addiction/syndrome" suffered by millions of people... who by happenstance love talking about themselves. Match made in heaven.

So yeah, a guy who doesn't get twitter (or get on it for that matter) and a group of PhDs whose whole existence (and Mercedes payments) hinge on VERBAL twitter are going to pound the gavel? I think not.

My two things about twitter:

1. I don't care if half the people on twitter are narcissistic and the other half are cross-dressers. THEY ARE THE CONSUMER AND THIS IS WHERE THEY LIVE. This is who they are, and the job of the marketer/brander/ad guy is to figure out what's valuable to them and what will motivate them to connect with a brand.

2. Twitter turns conventional media on its head. For that matter it's turning facebook (and google!) on its head. Think of the record companies and their reaction to new media: They're so attached to their 50 year-old business model they don't see opportunity when she comes knocking at the door in the middle of the night with a bottle of Jameson and a box of Trojans.

Okay, here's one more thing:

3. For every cool old ad guy that's drinking from the twitter cup, there's another old ad guy that's feeling a bit squirmy about a medium where a corporation doesn't control the content, a corporation can't use tired analytics to measure ROI, and a corporation doesn't write the monthly retainer check. Of course he's not going to like twitter! Or those pesky kids who use it.

Twitter haters, RIAA executives... what's the difference. The world is changing and they're about to become obsolete. The ones that will still be standing in 5/10 years are the ones that realize the consumer really, truly is RIGHT. And not in a lip service kind of way. The consumer is right because the consumer finally has control over the options. Twitter being one of them. A big one of them.

Methinks squirmy ad guys should embrace what the world embraces. Learn to love what you don't understand. Face down what scares you. (It's called GROWTH.)

And this is where I'd normally throw in some quippy little kicker of a wrap-up but that would take an extra five minutes. And a lot can happen on twitter in five minutes.

(Why are you still here??? Get back there!)