Surviving the Slump December 2008

December 2008 will most likely go down in history as the month of total strategic disharmony. More large companies than I care to mention are on CPM- Career Preservation Mode. This means management and mid-management are ‘just hanging in there’. Few see opportunity in this great malaise. Even the venerable Danske Bank has parked most of it’s capital with the Central Bank rather than fuelling commerce.

Digital business continues to grow unabated in virtually every sector. I will this month provide some insights into where the ‘hot shot’ opportunities are in these crisis times. And a forecast for what digital growth lies ahead in the Nordic countries. Yes mundane companies like, banks, media and marketing are sitting on the best potential since the 60’s when everything went wild.

This potential is the socialisation of the web, and here I don’t mean Marx or Engels(or Obama). Quite the contrary , the application of social technologies in these industries promises to usher in a new era of growth. Even good old ‘IBM’ has seen the light, and has established a Social Networking Center of Excellence for corporations. More of this exciting stuff later…. So just hang in there…..

When ‘old’ media becomes ‘new’: Berlingske the case.

Lisbeth Knudsen made quite a stir at the SIME event in Copenhagen yesterday. She stunned critics in the strategy she outlined for Berlingske Media, the erstwhile ‘Berlingske Officin’ and currently a Mecom owned company. Her play on ‘Web First’ and admission that context is equally important in terms of content, was quite an eyeopener. ‘One editorial room for all media’ she declared with a follow-up comment that change for all, including journalists was mandatory or else they wold not be at Berlingske in the future. Interestingly the commercialization of the editorial role was key to the strategy and indeed any ‘old world’ notions of pure unfettered commercial news-gathering were definitely out the window. Kudos to this lady as she reinvents the most venerable of institutions and may I say it, what a difference it would make at  another venerable institution, DR the local public service broadcaster to have her qualities on board. Perhaps she will be soon needed to inspire them once again and the newly elected Chairman Michael Christiansen would be wise to invoke Lisbeth Knudsens council to survive where others have failed.

Financial crisis will drive online advertising

What a time to live in! Since the publishers took over the media world from the printers over 400 years ago, (which Peter F. Drucker describes in the new enterprise), they have determined public communication. Not only that they measured their importance by counting eyeballs. It did not matter that the heads behind the eyeballs ever bought anything- the publishers maintained their monopoly of advertising anyway. Enter online performance marketing and a financial crisis to boot, and this eyeball marketing is now threatened to extinction. The new mantra is now if you can’t measure the buying power or the Return on Attention (ROA), then why bother, it’s just spam.

Social media is for kids?

There seems to be this incredible misconception that Social Media a la Facebook is for the younger generation. I spoke with a number of media Bureaus last week and surmised that this notion was prevalent in the minds of creative advertising people. Somehow it is like the misconception that mostly young people SMS each other and we adults don’t. This is not the case. Social Media and SMS may have commenced life with the tweens and teens, but evidence  now suggests that these social activities are becoming more mainstream. This is the first example of young people bringing their behaviour with them into adulthood, and not as psychologists would have us believe, shedding ‘childhood’ habits. The ‘net generation’ is now mainstream and social media is proof of this!