Author Archives: Mads Kristensen

5 pillars of media innovation

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Yesterday I had the good fortune to be involved in a good workshop and discussion about innovation within media companies and what is needed to foster and nurture getting new ideas and seeing them successfully through. From the workshop a set of ideas emerged which I think is worthwhile to share here.

I call it the 5 pillars of media innovation. It’s a set of fundamental principles and decisions, everyone can make and which I actually think will make a positive difference towards a media companies potential to innovate and create really strong new products for its customers. So here goes:

  1. Always put the customer before the company. A lot of media companies still have a tendency towards thinking of new products more in the context of what they want to do rather than what the customers would actually be in the market for. Media companies do not exist for the sake of themselves but for the sake of the customers they serve, and of course the innovation approach should reflect this.
  2. Don’t just look at your peers. Media companies love looking at other media companies to benchmark themselves and to some extend it’s valid, since you always have a need to measure how you are doing compared to the ones who look like you. But if you have a hole in your business model, and the ones you look at have the same, chances are you won’t find a solution towards filling the hole. Instead you should be looking at the ones striking the holes in your hole. Not to copy or anything but to get inspired by little things that they do, which applied in a media context might make a ton of sense. That to me is how you increase the opportunity to make leaps forward and not just take (too) little steps.
  3. Make innovation key to your organizations DNA. If you don’t understand the need to innovate and really just want to be doing what you have always been doing, you should really think about, whether you’re in the right business. The media landscape is changing at a rapid pace, and if you don’t recognize the urgent need to see things in a new light, explore new opportunities and be better than the rest, you’re fundamentally lost.
  4. Award the champions. Recognize the talent that you have. Pull forward the people with the good ideas and let others know that they are examples to be emulated by others. Nothing work as well than showing people that it’s possible to do and provide them with someone to be inspired by. It gets the energy flowing. And energy is crucial in innovation.
  5. Report on your progress. Don’t be afraid to include reporting on your innovation progress to the markets. It both tells them that you’re taking the job of reinventing the media business (yes, that is what we’re all trying to do – or should be trying to do anyway), and it puts pressure on the entire organization to succeed. If the results or lack of same is out in the open there is no excuse anymore to not do anything. It becomes a daily priority – as it should be – as people know that they will both individual and collectively be held accountable.

That’s my 5 pillars of media innovation from a structural point of view. Do you have any to add?

Be famous for the right thing

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Yesterday I had the chance to hear Lovefilm COO, Jim Buckle, talk about how his company is dealing with change and threats to it’s original business model. Lovefilm started out as a DVD-per-post rental company and is now moving to streaming services, as broadband just eats the old way of doing things, and in many ways their situation is comparable to the challenges facing traditional media.

Jim said two things, which struck a note with me.

First he said they they are striving to do it right the first time. Yes, it goes counter to the widely accepted culture of rapid prototyping, the perpetual beta and all that, and there are drawbacks. But it does reduce the risk of wasting resources doing the wrong things and of delivering a product that is sub-par with what your customers would expect.

Second he mentioned that they have a goal of being famous for the right thing. I think that is brilliant. Because by framing and putting to words what the real end goal is it makes it so  much easier to focus and concentrate on really delivering on the promise. And even though it’s hard to disagree with the obvious in that, in reality it time and time again proves really hard.

What’s the real value of journalism?

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I fundamentally agree with Frédéric Filloux of Monday Note that media companies need to give up the single reliance on advertising online and get deeper into how to get customers to pay for content. And I think his simple calculations are an excellent starting point for the discussion and for breathing some new hope into the discussion.

There is one fundamental point, I think he misses, though; it’s about what the real value of journalism is? Frédéric Filloux quickly discount the bloggers (and perhaps rightly so?) claiming indirectly that only the work of professional journalists can hope to attract payment. But is that really true? And will it happen without some serious product development?

In my mind one of the bigger challenges is that a lot of media companies are still by and large insisting on producing horse-driven carriages in a world that has adopted to cars. There is such an insistence on the old production model and reason for being that it’s almost lethal at times.

The good thing about this is that perhaps really the biggest obstacle for media companies succeeding in charging for content is – themselves. It’s good because it’s something that’s somewhat under the control of the media companies themselves and not at the whim of the market. However, it doesn’t make changing the mindset any easier.

‘Free’ losing fans?

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It’s interesting to watch a lot of the public debate around what should be free (i.e. covered by taxes) in society and what should not. At least in Denmark, where taxes are sky-high but where there is also a very tight masked social security system, people are starting to discuss the appropriateness of a culture, where you demand, demand and demand again yet don’t want to give anything back.

What would happen if that same discussion applied to media?

If people are starting to question the cost of free in public life, will they start thinking of all the other things they are taking for granted but which really do come with a cost? I’m not so sure, but I think it would be healthy to at least have the debate.

Personally, I’m not in any doubt that the media models need changing and adapting to a modern digital lifestyle, where there is greater demand for a service-oriented way of thinking than an old industrial mindset. So no doubt that media as such will still be undergoing profound change. But there is a heck of a difference about working towards change with the idea that when you come up with something really valuable and meaningful there is an understood willingness to pay – or whether people still live under the delusion that great things come at no charge.

Adding gameplay to the mix

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I like games. I like playing games. I like the way that playing games gives me an opportunity to both immerse into a subject and have fun at the same time. I like the way it gives me a sense of learning even when pretty much every non-gamer would say that I’m pretty much wasting my time. How little they do know.

Games is a huge industry yet it’s application into various other industries is still very much in it’s infancy.

That includes the media industry, where games are an occasional byproduct of the general news production. Often that has to do with huge production costs per game and the time it takes to really make it work, so obviously those things need to be addressed in order to make games a more viable and interesting piece of the media puzzle.

To me it seems like there is a huge opportunity in taking a framework approach to gaming in the same way as you can do it towards developing apps, where you have an engine that is easily customizable, and it’s the last 5-10 percent of the product development – the graphics, the design, the individual parameters – that makes the game stand out and be unique. And add gameplay and thus an extra level of loyalty-creating experience to the mix.