Capably coping with consumer demand could be music to media executives' ears

WASHINGTON - "I want what I want, when I want it."

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Capably coping with consumer demand could be music to media executives' ears

Media execs learn to navigate the changing media landscape

Helpful resources from API's 2004 Publishers Forum

The quote was introduced to the gathering of media executives by IBM Business Consulting Services partner Saul Berman, who opened the forum with a presentation based on his report "Media and Entertainment 2010: Open on the inside, open on the outside: The open media company of the future."

The forum ? titled "Near and Far Horizons, the Road Ahead for Media Organizations " ? immersed media executives in discussions about what changes in broadband and mobile technology will mean for their digital operations, how changing ownership rules will affect their ability to operate in the television space and the role of the media during a time of war abroad and terrorism fears on U.S. soil.

Discussions were led by Jonathan Cody, legal advisor on media and broadband issues to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael K. Powell; Decker Anstrom, president and chief operating officer of Landmark Communications, Inc.; Andrew Nachison, director of The Media Center at The American Press Institute; Dale Peskin, co-director of The Media Center; and Futurist John L. Petersen of the Arlington Institute. During a visit to the Pentagon, participants engaged in frank, off-the-record discussions with General Richard B. Myers, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary Paul McHale, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense. (more)

Berman's opening-night presentation, however, had participants focusing on an area that not many in the room have probably spent much time looking to for guidance: The music industry.

In his report, Berman characterized the MP3 phenomenon as "a music production format created for a specific use inside the film industry [that] was wildly adapted for peer-to-peer music sharing by a booming demographic group with adolescent scruples."

"People can't really multi-task," Saul Berman said to media executives at the forum. "People do what I call packet-switch. People are dividing their time into smaller and smaller bits. ... The brands that can hold our attention over the long term are the ones that are going to be successful in the future."

"Media consumers will be increasingly involved in the creative process," Berman said.

With an ever-increasing number of choices, audiences' attention spans are also becoming more and more strained. But while many like to characterize the change in audience behavior as "multi-tasking," Berman offered a different perspective.

"People can't really multi-task," Berman said. "People do what I call packet-switch. People are dividing their time into smaller and smaller bits. ... The brands that can hold our attention over the long term are the ones that are going to be successful in the future."

The report paints a picture of media companies evolving to the point where they pay much closer attention to what their customers want, and most importantly, to what they are willing to pay for.

Berman calls the phenomenon an "attention loop " that "will enable successful companies to determine the optimal match of digital content and access rights to consumer needs and demands ? and to create reciprocal relationships with alliance partners, vendors and suppliers, customers and consumers. "

For the music industry, this meant a re-evaluation of what it should be selling to consumers. In addition to selling an album in a retail store for $15.99 and over the Internet for $9.99 and selling individual tracks for $0.99 via the Internet, the approach is even more fractured. Berman told attendees that the music industry is making money with the sale of song clips for use as cell phone ring tones.

"Now, a piece of the whole is worth more than the whole," Berman said.

For news organizations, that could mean taking a fresh look at all of the content they have from a marketing perspective they might never have contemplated before.

"This is as big an opportunity as it is a threat, " Berman said. "There's lots of content sitting in your archives that is probably going to have a lot of value in this new world that it didn't have in the past.

"You might have to do some different things with it, you may have to do video, you may have to combine traditional video with text content. Even if it's just audio, think of your reporters doing interviews and recording those interviews. ... There's lots of fanatics on a lot of different subjects that might be interested in hearing that whole interview and would be willing to pay to access that content."

As the music industry moves to digitize all of its content for new uses online, it has run into a categorization challenge that news organizations should be able to avoid, Berman added.

"They tagged the album, and they tagged the track, now they're trying to sell the clip. They didn't tag the clip. They didn't anticipate, they didn't build enough flexibility into the initial attempts at this, " Berman said. "You've got to be able to deliver whatever content you want to deliver to them in the way they want to receive it."