A Look at the Future of Media Summit

Posted July 16th, 2008 by Brian Cavoli

The Future of Media Summit is being held this week in Sydney Australia with a live video link to Silicon Valley. Now in its third year, this ambitious event addresses the rapidly changing media landscape and offers a vision for the future of media strategies, journalism, privacy, TV and video.

The event is accompanied by a detailed report which is available for free on their site, but I’ll summarize it for you here.

The big idea is that we are now entering a new “media economy” where there are no walls between media and entertainment. More of our social interactions are occurring across multiple media channels and every organization is a media participant creating, aggregating and disseminating content for a business objective. In this environment people have an almost “insatiable desire for content and connection” creating a significant growth opportunity for media, entertainment and companies in related industries.

The report identifies seven forces shaping media:

1. Increased media consumption – The more media we can get, the more we want. As consumption continues to increase, so will clutter and noise causing ad effectiveness to decline

2. Fragmentation – More channels and media options will continue to fragment audiences dividing audiences into smaller and smaller segments.

3. Participation – We are in a content creation explosion. More non-professionals are creating content and more attention will be paid to participatory channels like social networks.

4. Personalization – Users will expect to have more control over how, when and where they consume content causing an increase in behavioral targeted advertising

5. New revenue models – Micropayment for content will remerge and media companies will unbundle ad sales and content creation

6 Generational change- Younger generations are far more internet focused so the average age of TV and radio audience will increase. Ad dollars will continue to shift towards new media outlets.

7. Increasing bandwidth – As broadband reaches more of the world and mobile broadband accelerates, content will be available on demand to anyone anywhere.

This is an interesting take on the future of media. There is nothing particularly new here, but this presents a very compelling story about the increasing power of the individual. All of these forces are evolving at the same time. Even if you don’t agree with how they will evolve, it is easy to see that there are substantial shifts occurring that will change the way companies approach marketing in the future. This vision is an exciting opportunity for marketer to improve their effectiveness by adopting the principles of social media marketing today.

There is a quote I love in this report from the author, he said “In uncertain times, don’t try to predict the future. Systematically explore possible futures.”

Several bloggers are providing summaries of the sessions in Sydney and the event host is microblogging the event with this CoverItLive stream.

Entry Filed under: Digital Content, Advertising, User-Generated Content