Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

On the surface, Malcolm gladwell is a great public speaker. Engaging, humorous and clearly adept at handling an audience. I caught Gladwell speaking at the Rotman school of business the other day.

Gladwell spoke about ideas that bloom late. He related the world of art and media to the world of business by talking about creativity and great ideas that sometimes come slowly or only through “happy accident” or serendipity.

he spoke of how venture capitalists and big media these days have often a too-short or too-well-defined expectations such that they risk missing many great ideas that would not have been obvious at the onset of a project. He provided some entertaining and spectacular (anecdotal) examples like Fleetwood Mac or Six Feet Under. both of these franchises were enormously successful in the long run however took considerable time to find their voice and their audience.

Fleetwood Mac’s tipping point came with its 11th album. Had six feet been a regular cable show its initially abysmal audience share would (presumably) had it cancelled in its first season. This is an important idea. A lot of people have been speaking lately about what’s “broken” with venture capital or with Hollywood for that matter these days. Gladwell argues that myopic investment parameters are causing us to miss out on whole fields of creative opportunity.

The trouble I have with Gladwell on Monday, are the same troubles ahead with The Tipping Point, his insights are mostly applicable post-facto.

It’s well and good to say that “sometimes long shots pay off over time” or “sometimes the darnndest little things will make a huge difference” but it’s not very helpful. These same factors which make for the best storytelling , are the least helpful at actually developing testable or predictive models of the creative process.

By marketing his ideas to a business audience it’s like Gladwell is dangling this carrot of huge opportunities in front of us without really providing us any proscriptive advice on how to capture it. It’s a good way to sell books though. As the saying goes, the market for something to believe in is infinite…

“People don’t buy a product for its features they buy it for the behaviors that those features allow them.” – (best as I remember it ) from Alex Manu
I am no expert on television or broadcasting (and it may show) but here are my thoughts on the subject from the recent iSummit in Toronto.

This conference was a clash of two worlds. Panelists delegates from traditional broadcasting and the web 2.0 geeks. And neither faction was even speaking the same language. At issue:  Old value chains in music and television are breaking down as the channel universe expands inexorably and ip-delivered content begins to cannibalize the old comfy monopolies the big networks and labels once held over the public’s attention space. People are spending less time watching TV. Television advertising is losing its effectiveness. Consumers are skipping ads, consumers want their entertainment on demand. If the broadcasters ( or, for that matter, the CRTC) aren’t offering them the product they want, those consumers will just route around the damage.

What comes down to is this.

The broadcast industry is going through the same squeeze that the music business has been through these past few years. They’re feeling their market power eroding relative to their suppliers (independent producers, consumers) and their customers (advertisers).

The web 2.0 crowd meanwhile oh chuckles over big media’s nervous crisis. There were any number of celebratory stories shared at the conference from the growing rise of independent music ( finally) to the remarkable and “disruptive” influence of low/no budget success stories like rocketboom.

Is this the end then for big media?

I don’t think so. For the following reasons:

1. “Massive passives” the bulk of consumers won’t change behaviors quickly, they like their media to be easy to use and many many people are still on analog cable. This means there’s still lots of time to figure out the new models.

2. There will always be a demand for long-format, high production value, quality programming. Rocketboom and ask-a-ninja are, I concede, a great way to waste three minutes. But people will still demand well produced programming, that programming will never be free, and so someone will have to be in the business of financing and producing this content ( but like with free-trade debate, the open question being, in a more open market, whether Canadian[or insert nation here] firms can effectively compete against American the manufacturers of content… and whether they can/or can’t or not, and in turn whether that’s a good/or bad thing ( exercise for the reader))

3. There will be too much content. In a world with infinite selection, it’s the filter (aka the editor) adds all of the value. There’s also a value in shared experiences, it’s no fun factor body of the water cooler all watched completely different shows last night. So someone needs to be an aggregator and help users choose their content. This is a role that traditional broadcasters could fill that local, national or worldwide level.

And the future, the same “TV” shows will still be out there, there will be little more selection down the tail of the curve, the way that content is monetized and delivered will shift slowly over time. But it will be monetized and it will be delivered. The question is just whether those currently stuck in the middle of the value chain will have the foresight to set up their business models to seize the value or whether it will all go to the likes of itunes, google/yahoo, or to those that own your set-top-box.

Thoughroughly enjoying the copyright debate at iSummit today, In the interest of engaging that conversation, here’s my position on the debate.

I’ve linked up a draft of a policy paper I put together for the McLuhan Institute at UofT a year ago.

Abstract
This paper assesses the Canadian government’s March 2005 proposal for copyright reform specifically focusing on Anticircumvention and Make Available provisions as they relate to sound recordings (phonograms). At the present time, Canadian policymakers are under pressure both from abroad and from interest groups domestically to adopt more a more stringent copyright framework in alignment with standards set by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It can be argued however that Canada’s continued forbearance on copyright issues related to Internet Downloading and its cautious approach to adopting WIPO WPT and WPPT signifies a laudable leadership in developing a balanced and socially efficient copyright policy in the best interest of both producers and consumers of digital media.

This is a late draft of that paper, I’m still trying to track down the final so please forgive a few likely tyops.

link (ms word format)