March 07, 2006

Content or Customer is King?

BBC NEWS | Technology | Digital media 'empowering users'

The BBC reports on the FT Digital Media Conference:

Consumers are exercising more control, said Microsoft's Neil Holloway, Already in the US, 70% of personal video recorder users are skipping adverts, he noted.

"People want to connect to information and connect to their friends," he said. "The focus will be on highly personalised experiences."

Suggesting that advertisers might be missing a trick, he added: ""Today only about 5% of global advertising is online, yet 20% of media is consumed online. This is an amazing opportunity for advertisers."

Advertisers are missing a trick? More like losing the plot. Its not advertising but community that will deliver the goods. Surprisingly the rest of the article does make that point (well the various speakers do). Its a shame they didn't ask people like Tomi Ahonen & Alan Moore to speak on Communities Dominate brands - might have been an interesting conversation. Alan certainly makes the point about newspapers recently

Posted by Paul Goodison at March 7, 2006 12:02 PM | TrackBack

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Comments

Hi Paul

Thanks for the plug, and we liked the story too, but yes, those same stats and cases were pretty well covered in our book already. Shame they didn't contact us, ha-ha.

But here is something really cool and new, about that clear shift in content/consumer role in mass media.

We all know the Pop Idol / American Idol etc format? Now this January the version in Finland - Finnish Idol - had a cool innovation. They introduced parallel to the TV show, a "common man's idol" contest. Networked karaoke on mobile. Here is how it worked:

The singer would call a premium number, sing the Karaoke song, and record it. Then invite friends to go listen to it and vote on it... In the end they of course found a winner. But look at the activity and bear in mind Finland is a small country of 5 million people:

1,862 average Finns called in to make an entry to the contest

150,000 separate people voted in the contest (voting many times obviously)

1.95 MILLION votes were cast. More votes in the Common Man's Idol than the simultaneously run Finnish Idol contest on TV.

This is first a very fascinating study in the evolution of produced content. It shows how highly people appreciate "real" content such as that on reality TV shows and like this kind of karaoke singing. It also shows how much average people want to participate, to create, and to share.

It is the future of TV. More about it at our blogsite www.communities-dominate.blogs.com and this is so much appreciated by both Alan and me, that we can promise we will make Citizen Idolism ha-ha one case study into the next book :-)

Thanks for your support, Paul, we really appreciate it. And keep up the great work at this blogsite

Tomi Ahonen :-)

Posted by: Tomi Ahonen at March 7, 2006 08:54 PM

Thanks for sharing this Tomi! The idea of citizen media and active interaction with brands is becoming more of a passion. I hope to be able to realise some of my thinking soon and put the ideas in Communities Dominate brands into some kind of practice.

Posted by: Paul Goodison at March 8, 2006 01:17 PM
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