Posts Tagged: disintermediation

Worky — No Comments
4
Jan 10

A dash of Balsamiq broke my resolve

Bal­samiq: Even though it appears to use Comic Sans, I reckon it’s still a ground-breaking innovation

Until now, I’ve res­isted the urge to make any pre­dic­tions for the new decade, but a link posted on Twit­ter yes­ter­day by 37Signals’ Jason Fried just about broke my resolve. (Besides, I’d already made my pre­dic­tions in a post at MRM’s site in Novem­ber last year…)

It’s for a really smart app called Bal­samiq, which allows teams to rap­idly trans­late ideas for soft­ware, web­sites or apps into live mock-ups.

So what’s this got to do with brand building?

Well forget what Bal­samiq does for a moment and think, instead, of the effect of its applic­a­tion: It com­pletely messes up the for­mu­laic, tried and tested, chartered-institute-of-chartered-charterers dogma that has the tend­ency to squeeze the life out of great ideas before they’ve seen the light of day.

An applic­a­tion like this offers a tool for genu­inely agile design of web-based ser­vices; it allows people — espe­cially inten­ded users — to road-test ideas without those count­less meet­ings and doc­u­ments that are inten­ded to fine-tune a spe­cific­a­tion (which prob­ably only works in theory anyway).

Bal­samiq is fur­ther evid­ence of a shift away from the packaged-up-to-perfection pre­scrip­tion of the mass media model.

Why? Because it enables teams to col­lab­or­at­ively har­ness the poten­tial of the social web in order to design, build, test and launch an idea more swiftly than would have been pos­sible only a matter of months ago. It cuts out layer upon layer of unne­ces­sary bur­eau­cracy in order to let people use it and — so — improve it.

Just con­sider how counter-intuitive a tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing approach would seem stacked up against the idea driv­ing Balsamiq.

Last Novem­ber, I pre­dicted that three vital dis­cip­lines would sur­vive the col­lapse of the tra­di­tional mass media model: live events, inter­ac­tion design and con­ver­sa­tion. (I explained why in my ‘How to build a brand…’ presentation).

Like Jason Fried’s own Base­camp, Bal­samiq offers real evid­ence of the emer­ging sig­ni­fic­ance of these dis­cip­lines and the col­lapse of the mass media model (that’s the model that spawned news­pa­pers, radio sta­tions, tele­vi­sion chan­nels, call centres, web­sites, market research­ers, media plan­ners, advert­ising agen­cies, event and hos­pit­al­ity agen­cies, spon­sor­ship agen­cies and public rela­tions consultants).

In the past 12 months signs of the dis­tint­er­me­di­ation of the tra­di­tional mass media model have been remark­able: Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to a mil­lion fol­low­ers on Twit­ter, Carter Ruck dropped an injunc­tion in the face of pop­u­lar dis­sent over its Trafigura gag­ging order and Rage Against The Machine beat the X-Factor’s Joe McEld­erry to the Christ­mas Number 1 in the UK.

Des­pite the effects of the shift — which will only accel­er­ate in 2010 — I’m still left won­der­ing how many people in the mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion have recog­nised the redund­ancy of the tra­di­tional mass media model and, so tra­di­tional pro­mo­tional approaches?

Worky — 2 Comments
17
Jun 09

Man bites dogma — Round Two

The com­ment added by BSkyB’s David Wheel­don to the ‘Man bites dogma’ Pay Per View (PPV) post sparked some­thing of a surge to the blog yesterday.

David’s com­ments draw atten­tion to the dilemma facing pub­lish­ing and con­tent pro­du­cers: How an earth do we mon­et­ize and pro­tect the dis­tri­bu­tion of con­tent when free access has become ubi­quit­ous with the advance of the web?

In many respects the debate isn’t about mon­et­iz­a­tion of con­tent but of its dis­tri­bu­tion. That’s because tech­no­logy has turned tra­di­tional dis­tri­bu­tion models inside out and, iron­ic­ally, media brands have been an active par­ti­cipant in this revolu­tion. The net effect (no pun inten­ded) is the dis­tinct pro­spect that it is the owners of dis­tri­bu­tion tech­no­logy, and not the pro­viders of the con­tent, that will seize the lions share of the ‘value chain’.

Today’s media owners will become dis­in­ter­me­di­ated them­selves; they will lose the power to mon­et­ize con­tent dis­tri­bu­tion and be sub­ject to dis­tri­bu­tion by new par­ti­cipants with new models of dis­tri­bu­tion — like Google.

The Guardian’s Media Talk pod­casts in both the UK and US have served up some inter­est­ing debates in recent weeks.This link to Media Talk UK dis­cusses the poten­tial intro­duc­tion of a ‘pay­wall’ at Sunday Times, while its US cousin Media Talk US digs into the issue of a poten­tial con­tent cartel in the US.

Today, you can link and listen free of charge. In future, you may not. And that’s why this debate is going to roll and roll…

Worky — 1 Comment
13
Jun 09

Man bites dogma

This was writ­ten a few weeks ago for the blog-in-development at MRM

Inter­est­ing opin­ion piece in the Guard­ian about Rupert Murdoch’s pro­nounce­ment last week that he expects News Inter­na­tional titles to be char­ging for access to online con­tent; effect­ively pay per view (PPV) for news content.

There are two sides to this: On the one hand, Mr Mur­doch has always called trends in mass com­mu­nic­a­tion cor­rectly; even spark­ing the trend. On the other hand, I sus­pect he’s got this one wrong because com­mer­cial imper­at­ive is over­power­ing judgment.

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