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Leaving Retrograde: The Vision
Manifest at The SIIA Information Industry Summit |
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7 February 2005 |
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The SIIA Content Division has been working on a vision of
what the content industry was about in a Web era for
several years, now. Sometimes skeptical publishers seemed
to doubt that vision, but there was little in this year's
SIIA Information Industry Summit that left room for doubt.
The combination of content, technology and people that has
promised a new era of profitability and challenges for
publishers and aggregators is clearly upon us, with few in
attendance at this event wondering about the whether and
most intent on learning best practices for the "hows."
Branding, online ads and multimedia are three key factors
that drew focus at the conference that point to important
new best practices emerging. |
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Sometimes
when I've rushed to catch a train home and I've settled into a
window seat there's an uneasy moment when it appears as if my
train is moving well ahead of when I thought that it was
leaving. After a moment of confusion I realize that it's not my
train that's moving but the one next to me. It's an optical
illusion known as retrograde motion: for a short time things
that are standing still seem to be moving forward and vice
versa. You can observe this phenomenon at times when you look
at the orbits of the planets in our Solar System from the
perspective our our own planet's orbit. Centuries ago
astronomers reckoned that these jigs backwards were the planets
doing little circular dances along perfectly circular orbits
around the earth. Copernicus saw that the sun was the center of
this dance, but it was Johannes Kepler who figured out that
elliptical solar orbits for every planet, including our own,
would account for retrograde very simply and logically. Our way
of thinking about our place in the universe has never been the
same since.
At this year's excellent
SIIA Information Industry Summit at Gotham Hall in New York
City you could observe people coming to realize similar
fundamental shifts. For many at last year's event the industry
was still comfortably in retrograde, settled around familiar
patterns still rationalized with easy, circular explanations as
to why Web-oriented content didn't matter for "real" content.
This seems to be the year in which the content industry as a
whole has accepted the new center of the content universe. The
individuals and institutions once thought of as the lucky
planets orbiting around the terra firma of traditional
publishing are now recognized clearly, if begrudgingly, as both
the centers of the publishing universe and publishing planets
in their own right bound together by the irresistible gravity
of Internet-enabled content delivery.
But significantly most major publishers
are no longer fazed by this transition and are settling in for
a long and hopefully profitable trip. While some of those at
the conference who are growing grey and girthed on the profits
of a previous era continue to resist, the vast majority of
those still needing to make their bacon are concentrated
heavily on adapting to this new order and making good money in
it. Our
entries in our Industry Events Weblog provide
session-by-session accounts and analysis of the conference, but
for now here are some high level themes that seem to have
emerged from this leading industry event:
- Many content brands are searching
for their identities. One of the dominant themes in the
panels and offline discussions seemed to be what it meant to
be a content brand in a user-centric publishing universe.
Whether on the Web itself or on the intranets of major
institutions, the content coming from publishers has to prove
its mettle beside sources that may not fit the traditional
publishing mould but that are highly respected by their
audiences. For content appearing on search engines this means
a brand must have article-level relevance via search results
and contextual ads: if search results tuned by the
preferences of users don't say that your content brand is
relevant, who's going to tell someone that it is? For those
in charge of editorial operations rethinking branding may
mean re-shaping the role of editorial functions. Editorial
managers need to become product managers, developing
not only words and story lines but a wide array of content
sources from inside and outside a publishing organization to
provide a constant marketing awareness of the immediate needs
of users.
- Ad-supported online content is
moving the center of gravity in publishing rapidly.
There's nothing like success to change reluctant minds. The
enormous transfer of advertising dollars to online outlets -
roughly one fifth of all U.S. ad dollars will be spent online
this year, says the consensus - is creating far more converts
in traditional publishing circles to online publishing than
all of the pony-tailed elevator speeches of the past decade
combined. It's not just the sheer volume of spending, though,
that's getting the attention of core publishers: it's the
measurable quality of success that Web publishing offers.
We're moving past the cost-per-click era of bulk lead
generation into highly qualified leads from contextual
content and online communities, with professionally-oriented
learning to play the online search placement and ad game with
results at least as successful as their consumer media
counterparts. There are no real walls anymore in online
content: there is one market, one user, with a myriad of
methods to reach the user in personal and professional ways.
Advertising has made this happen for premium publishers more
than any other factor this year.
- Multimedia is replacing weblogs as
the buzz factor. Weblogs are certainly not disappearing
or declining in importance, but they've become so central to
the story of online content these days that other factors are
beginning to fill the hype cycle. The key buzz factor
floating around was multimedia, especially the widening
availability of high-quality video content on both Internet
and mobile channels. For many institutional purchasers
building out bandwidth for multimedia is still not a
priority, so this is emerging primarily as a consumer trend
for now. But then again, so did just about everything else
that's shaping publishing today. From humble "podcasts" of
downloadable audio segments to nearly broadcast-quality video
clips to streaming video, being able to make content sing and
dance with the lyrics of text is key to reaching a generation
raised on video and music as the core of their content
experience. As if publishers didn't have enough to think
about.
I encourage you to hunt through the
details of the conference in our
Industry Events Weblog, but in a nutshell it was a
conference to remember for a long time to come. Profitable
publishers and aggregators with a clue to the future have
jumped on the right train en masse and are off on a journey to
an exciting journey through user-centric publishing. To those
who wonder whether they've missed the train, never fear: we'll
give you a lift.
-
John Blossom
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