Disrupting the Future

By Dr. Joe Webb and Richard Romano

“Digital printers are killing our business.” “The Internet is killing our business.” “Staples and other superstores are killing our business.” “The recession is killing our business.” “No one understands the value of print anymore.”

While lamentations like these are often spoken, Dr. Joe Webb and Richard Romano, examine the real reasons behind the changes in the printing industry today in their new book entitled “Disrupting the Future.”

“They talk about how we got here, where here is and what tomorrow is going to look like. Most importantly, though, they also provide strategic and tactical recommendations that can help you identify where you could go with your business,” writes Peter Muir, president of Bizucate Inc.

This excerpt from the book touches on the important ways people’s relationships with media are changing, and how that affects the value proposition of print media.

People’s Relationships with Media—Then and Now

	Then	Now
Permanence	physical and stored	always accessible
Portability	take it with you	connect on multiple devices
ROI	design + content + budget	deployment-related
Intent	nudge	lure
Cross Media	serial	parallel
Reference Point	authoritative single source	gateway to context
Media Selection	controlled	saturation
Personalization	pre-selected	recipient-selected
Direct Response	targeted from above	groundswell

Let’s look at each of these factors one by one, and compare “then” with now.”

Permanence
Then: Content, whether it was printed, filmed, recorded or videotaped, was physically stored someplace. A book, a magazine, an audio tape, a videotape, etc. It had to be physically acquired.

Now: Content is always accessible. Text, video, audio and other media are available 24/7 online. Although the physical file is stored on a particular computer, it can be streamed, read and/or downloaded whenever and wherever the user happens to be.

Does this make content more or less permanent? The common argument is that today’s file formats won’t be readable on tomorrow’s computers. But books and other offline media degrade over time, and are also subject to backward-incompatible formats, as anyone with a large collection of VHS tapes can tell you. Having content always available online precludes its relegation to an incompatible format.

However, another issue with permanence and “always accessible” is, what if the publisher goes out of business? You could say, Gutenberg is long dead but the Bible is still here. But then if Gutenberg had been a Webmaster, and had first put the Bible online and then died, GoDaddy would rescind his domain unless someone renewed it. The ultimate point is that something is permanent and accessible—be it in print or online— as long as someone maintains it. So while the Bible may endure (largely because it’s a perennial bestseller and in the public domain), less popular and obscure titles are not so lucky, and one needs to scour antiquarian bookstores for rare titles. (This is the rationale behind Google Books: to make sure all books are permanent and accessible.)

Portability
Then: Content, as a physical medium like a book or magazine, could be picked up and taken with the user.

Now: Content is accessed on multiple devices. Smartphones—and the new Apple iPad—now make even a website “portable” as it can be accessed wherever the user happens to be and, in a way, picked up and taken with the user.

The untethering of Internet users from a limited physical location has been a key driver of mobile media. The combination of a smartphone like an iPhone and an online library like Project Gutenberg means that someone can be standing at a bus stop, suddenly have the urge to read Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, go to a website, and do so—in literally seconds. Think about where this will all go in 10 years.

Return on Investment (ROI)
Then: ROI was a function of what it cost to design, produce and disseminate the content.

Now: ROI is difficult to gauge as customers are wrangled by a combination of media and channel deployment that is difficult to gauge quantitatively.

ROI is a nebulous concept that, as we have said, varies from company to company, and even executive to executive. Except for direct marketers, its calculation also has an emotional ingredient. Even in the days of monomedia, it wasn’t always entirely clear what the return was. It is a function of what the objective of a given project or campaign is. Or, perhaps, “the boss liked it.”

Intent
Then: The goal of “then” marketing was to nudge (or perhaps noodge) a user or customer to do something, such as respond to an offer or other outbound message.

Now: The intent is to lure or attract customers via inbound marketing efforts.

Instead of trying to create demand that may never materialize, you assume that there are people out there who already want what you offer, and you thus make it easy for them to find you.

Cross Media
Then: Content for different channels was produced and deployed serially; that is, first the print material was created, then those assets were reused for the website, then a TV spot was created, etc.

Now: Content needs to be deployed to a variety of media channels more or less simultaneously, or in parallel.

Strategy and planning become more important than carrying out physical production tasks.

Reference Point
Then: There was a single, authoritative voice that delivered content as a monologue to users.

Now: Media serve as a gateway to content (and context) that fosters a dialogue with and among users.

One clear example of this has been the gradual decline in importance of the professional movie critic, as word of mouth from general moviegoers trumps what the film critic for the New York Times or even Roger Ebert says. (See, for example, the 2009 documentary For the Love of Film Criticism.)

So, too, have professional book reviews been disappearing. Online media have made it easier for the “man on the street” to opine on a product, company or any other topic.

Media Selection
Then: The creator has full control over a limited number of media that could be used to reach users.

Now: We are saturated with media channels, and the content creator has no control over which a given user will prefer at any given time.

By focusing on a limited few media and excluding others, the creator risks alienating or never making contact with a pool of potential readers/viewers/customers.

Personalization
Then: Content could be personalized by linking it to a preselected database of recipients.

Now: The recipient opts in to receive targeted and personalized content.

How many times have you received a variably printed piece that had outdated information on it? If there is an advantage to online personalization, it’s that its databases tend to be more up-to-date. Still, we do get personalized messages from the likes of Amazon that have a “When Databases Attack” kind of feel to them: “You bought War and Peace; we thought you’d like Thin Thighs in 30 Days.” (That’s really not much of an exaggeration!) The reason this happens is that not all of a person’s purchases reflect a common interest, and people buy gifts for others. The database doesn’t realize this and assumes that everyone who likes Tolstoy has chubby thighs.

Direct Response
Then: Users/customers were targeted from above; users were herded to specific locations or actions.

Now: Response to content is user generated and swells from the ground up.

People choose what to view, be interested in and act on. It can be frustrating when people don’t catch on to something the way the user intended, but that’s the way it is.

All of these factors describe the ways that users interact with content then and now. Print had a handle on coping with the “then”— but what about the “now”?

——

The excerpt from “Disrupting the Future” is reprinted here with permission.

Copyright 2010 Joseph W. Webb, Ph.D., Strategies for Management. All Rights Reserved. No portion of this excerpt may be reprinted by any means for any purpose without express written permission of the copyright holder.

Dr. Joe Webb is director of the WhatTheyThink Economics & Research Center Richard Romano is contributing writer and analyst for WhatTheyThink.

You may download a free PDF of the book at http://whattheythink.com/disrupting-the-future/.

If you wish to purchase a printed copy, please go to http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/disrupting-the-future-v1/10275827.

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