Innovator IQ: New Medici Innovator Series (Open Q&A)
Year’s end, and we’re moving forward on our manuscript for forward thinkers in media and lifestyle innovation. Not limited to media, digital or social – we’re capturing those thinkers who game change society.
Social Mission Control
The real deal in big brands associating with social systems: PepsiCo’s global head of digital Bonin Bough on “how leadership in social is the new ownership,” as ownership goes away in a Facebook transparent world.
Bonin is clearly helping this global brand become “digitally fit.” Literally, digital experts vanish when whole companies become d-fit.
Love the NASA or Situation Room concept of having a veritable ‘Today Show’ live set or Gatorade Mission Control for all employees to experience daily as they walk into work. Talk about proactive social engagement.
New Medici Innovator Series: Brian Reich
I initially met Brian Reich when he featured my alma mater, Participant Media, in his book Media Rules! On a consulting basis, Brian worked with a number of the non-profits that partnered with Participant/TakePart including “Live Earth.” Today, he’s the SVP and Global Editor at Edelman, where he provides editorial vision and strategy for the company (and teaches at Columbia).
His bio in brief: Author. Sports fan. Media junkie. To quote Brian, he “spends most of my time thinking about the impact technology is having on our society.”
Brian connects with the New Medici perspective of different verticals redefining culture; specifically the role of tech on media influence, consumption and societal change. Like Sean Parker, Brian’s a “cultural engineer” caught in the open position of being a multi-vertical marketer and editor. Media + Lifestyle (and Technology)…
- What is an “innovator” in your words? A “game changer”?
Someone who pushes the boundaries of what is possible – by asking tough questions, trying new things, not being afraid to shake things up.
- How do you get inspired on a daily basis? What media do you consume? Environment? Tools?
I read. I watch. I consume a ton of media – a dozen newspapers, a bunch of magazines, thousands of blogs. I am constantly consuming media, looking around, absorbing the world in which I live and trying to make sense of it – find the context, connect what’s happening to what needs to be done. A partial media list: Wall Street Journal. New York Times. Washington Post. Seattle Times. LA Times. Boston Globe. Chicago Tribune. Politico. Denver Post. Miami Herald. Dallas Morning News. Sports Illustrated. GQ. Vanity Fair. New Yorker. Time. Newsweek. New Republic. Wired. Fast Company. In Style. Sports Illustrated. ESPN The Magazine. 1000+ Blogs. Twitter. Facebook. Sesame Street. Dinosaur Train. Word World. Criminal Minds. Oprah. Modern Family. SportsCenter. 16 & Pregnant. Friday Night Lights. 30 Rock. Fresh Air. Slate’s Hang Up And Listen. This American Life. PolitOptics. Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. Books. Ads.
Hack the… [Insert Industry Here]
What’s hackable these days? Answer: Everything. Every traditional vertical, agency and business line is on the “hacking block” with innovative entrepreneurs and executives trying to reinvent business by disrupting it.
Intrapreneurials are actively competing with their entrepreneurial brethren to breathe live into inefficient companies.
With Facebook making the “hackathon” a regular event, they’re challenging the concept of doing something faster with little devotion to the past. Basically, it’s the corporate-sized version of “pivoting” – or refreshing the process in favor of faster-better-more efficient methods. It’s not downsizing to reduce costs, but super-sizing business or brand thinking to reduce natural inefficiencies Read more >>
The “High-Flying” Brand Extensions of Angry Birds
If you haven’t played Angry Birds as yet, you’re probably not reading this post – it’s been downloaded 350 million times and is considered by many to be one of the fastest growing, individual brands – with faster growth than Amazon and YouTube in two years according to Rovio’s Brand Advertising and Analytics SVP, Wibe Wagemans, via StrategyEye.
From iPhone to social gaming, movie tie-ins, its own upcoming movie, merchandise at every mall and a console game in the works, it’s created an incredibly robust yet lo-fi ecosystem. One has to wonder the next piece of premium IP and launch strategy to create such a viral following. Definite a nice perch to swing from; and an IP that has remained concentrated instead of spread thin (note: Rovio created 51 games that didn’t “hatch” before creating Angry Birds.)
I recently ran into red hoodie-wearing “Mighty Eagle” (aka Rovio’s CEO), Peter Vesterbacka, at SXSW. After closing the “Rio” deal with 20th Century Fox, Peter was visibly flying around the conference, exultant in the growth of his company and its high-flying brand extensions. Kudos to Fox under Peter Levinsohn in digital and Jake Zim in marketing for advancing a spin-off tie-in that definitely “added wings” to their film’s performance.
Below, a casual (and already dated) infographic on Angry Birds. The “Facebook” of casual games or a model in “how-to really extend next-gen IP…”
Digital Hollywood: Capturing and Transforming Millions of Users in Communities
Looking to “capture, captivate and convert” millions of users across social communities, gaming, conversation and content? For your brand, your start-up or your content – we’ll be talking about the building blocks of targeting and transforming audiences into critical masses. We’ll talk also about how CRM has changed with this catchy “social” thing…
The panel via Victor Harwood’s Digital Hollywood is Thursday, October 20th, 12:50-2pm.
Social Media, Brands and Target Markets: Capturing and Transforming Millions of Users in Communities, Content, Conversation and Commerce
Charles Black, President and Chief Strategy Officer, Technorati Media
Laura O’Shaunnessey, General Manager, Social Code, a Washington Post Company
Thomas Gerace, Founder & CEO, Skyword
Dan Schechter, Global co-head, Media, Entertainment & Technology, L.E.K. Consulting
Kevin Pomplun, CEO, SkyGrid
Pauline Malcolm-John, EVP of Strategic Partnerships, WeeWorld.com
Mike Raffensperger, Vice President of Strategy and Creative Development, Magnet Media
Adrian Sexton, Co-Founder & CEO, New Medici LLC, Moderator
Topics we’ll cover: building brands in social, targeting (niche) markets, rolling up niche markets (where are the new audiences and their WOM watering holes?), capturing influencers and tastemakers, social CRM (what is it?), social media for social businesses (SalesForce.com just bought Social.com – wonder why?) and what kinds of content rafts float these new communities? Soup-to-nuts conversion of social communities.
New Medici Innovator Series: Mohamed El-Fatatry
I met Mohamed El-Fatatry, an Egyptian-born Muslim living in Finland at a Finnish Consulate dinner in Los Angeles. Talk about “fish sphinx out of water,” yet Mohamed commanded the room with his eloquence and forward thinking.
He founded Muxlim.com, a prescient new multicultural company that was soon mirrored by the likes of Ogilvy and other multi-adcongloms. New Medici helped Muxlim leverage its social media feature set and network of sites into a leading diversity advisory to brands.
Mohamed doesn’t think small – as a mid-20s startup entrepreneur his CV reads like a global political leader, veteran diplomat or travelwise Ram Charan. In his own words, he is the “World’s Top Evangelist for the $2 Trillion Global Muslim Consumer Market. Visionary Entrepreneur and Motivational Speaker with a Background in Media, Technology and Business. One of the World’s “500 Most Influential Muslims” & “Leaders of Tomorrow”.
1. What is an “innovator” in your words? A “game changer”?
A change agent, a minority of active individuals who take bold action to create disruptive change. A good metaphor is a bottle of medicine that has 98-99% inactive ingredients, but only 1% of it creates all the healing effect.
2. How do you get inspired on a daily basis? What media do you consume? Environment? Tools?
I get inspired by looking at problems that affect me in day-to-day life. Then I look at the problem from a macro-level, and try to figure out if there is something that can be done top-down to trigger positive change.
Vanity Fair: Tech Has Disrupted the “Establishment List”
Vanity Fair does an excellent job in redefining the new vanguard of media in their annual “New Establishment” List.
With much smaller hype than their patrician traditional media peers, the list of late has become a Silicon Valley hitlist. What will be interesting is seeing which Hollywood media elites (think the annual Sun Valley media retreats) can earn back their relevance on the list.
With cross media investment groups somewhat the rage, think The Raine Group, which we will analyze, and others where talent agencies are bridging tech with content, it’s time to see who can scale media best.
Not an easy bargain when you listen to the backchannel on the Hulu sale – minus the great UX (user experience) that Hulu provides – but rather that big tech is interested as it’s so hard to procure studio library relationships that innovate at scale.
So, for those tech visionaries who can communicate, i.e., distribute, in content, let’s see who your “bridge” team is in 2012. The list below with some commentary after the companies:
1. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook – could own the #1 spot for several years to come; now needs to bring content and brands in with further immersion; think fan stratification fwiw, and create tiers of users who influence online.
2. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google – like the new – is it new? – management as they’re taking big risks that feed into Android, YouTube, Google+. Especially excited for games – finding a new medium between console and social…
3. Jeff Bezos, Amazon – I buy 70% (okay 80%) of all my retail at Amazon. Would they, should they compete with Apple Stores in retail as they expand the Kindle. Love to see them also become a bigger media machine with Hulu acquisition.
The rest of the top 50 after the jump…
Infographic: Anatomy of a Fan (Who Needs to be Rewarded)
Via FastCoDesign.com – a great online complement to Fast Company magazine – a breakdown of how to qualify and quantify fans. The real context that still eludes “brands seeking social” from our New Medici POV is that there is no real “fan stratification or appreciation,” i.e., the fans that give you, the brand, the biggest word of mouth exposure receive no rewards, and the brands have no way of even recognizing them using FB Insights.
We get the network effect, but want to reward top influencers…
Example: Will Smith’s 22 million strong fan page posts get 110k likes and 14k comments on average. If I were Will or his PR/management team, I would want to know the top 25-1000 fans who are interacting and sharing. I would want them to become a core group that I can focus test with (with permissions), I can reward for joining my brand militia, and I can throw some traffic at should they have individual fan pages, blogs, etc. Sure, I cherish the growing quantity, but I want the contextual quality.
If you’re going to use the FB Marketplace or buy direct with the sales teams and spend $XX(XX)k, I want to know more than the demo insights and fan CPAs; I want to be able to communicate with the “biggest” fans directly, transparently and with collaborative integrity.
I would like these alpha fans to speak for my brand above the masses. Forget personal branding, I want a fan recognition and rewards’ program. Time for some Fanticipation!
More infographics after the jump…
New Medici Innovator Series: Robert Tercek
With a company name like New Medici, you pretty much have to celebrate the renaissance in innovation.
Our tagline being “Media + Lifestyle Innovation,” we created a hit list of the modern day innovators who speak to us on these fronts. Who disrupts our waking digital sheep sleep?
For our inaugural run, we’ll do a multi-post from celebrated innovator, Robert Tercek, “one of the world’s most prolific creators of interactive content” and a media class act or “multiplatform-hyphenate,” as we like to call him.
His background: MTV, Sony, OWN, Royal Society for the Arts and one-time label: “TV Anarchist.”
But first, the New Medici Innovator questions asked of all:
- What is an “innovator” in your words? A “game changer”?
- How do you get inspired on a daily basis? What media do you consume? Environment? Tools?
- What in your background helped makes you an innovator?
- The biggest mistake innovators make?
- The one question you ask yourself before launching a new project?
- Three other contemporary innovators you speak to regularly? Why do you consider them innovative?
- If you had $10 million right now, what would you build and why?
- What’s the one question you’re never asked that you have an answer to…?
The first of Robert’s answers after the jump… Read more >>
Moneyball: First Look at a Sports Game-Changer
Billy Beane changed baseball management with the Oakland Athletics, and there’s a movie to boot following the bestselling book by Michael Lewis. The adaption stars Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill with a script by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian. Pretty good pedigrees with a little comic foil.
Not sure if this will be The Blind Side meets baseball, but it has critical success and audience sleeper potential (“sleeper”s a good Hollywood word for non-tentpole movies that perform over a long period, like Blind Side, fyi). Love the Jonah Hill line about the undervalued players being like “an island of misfit toys.” Everyday extraordinary.
Socially Networked: The Plugged-In Producer
I’ll be moderating an interesting panel this Saturday am at the Producer’s Guild “Produced By Conference 2011″ on the Disney Lot at 9:45-11am.
Socially Networked: The Plugged-In Producer
Social media outlets are now an essential component of a project’s overall production plan. Even if you’re a low-budget indie that doesn’t have millions for traditional P&A, you can now build a strong target audience through savvy use of social media sites and tools. Whether your project is a traditional feature or television program, or expressly created for digital media, this session gives you the answers: What do producers need to know and do when navigating social media for production, marketing and distribution? What are the best social practices for film, television and online? Most importantly, what methods give producers more control, and what approaches should you avoid? Jump into the debate and tweet questions: #sociallynetworked
MODERATOR: Adrian Sexton, CEO, New Medici (former EVP, Digital at Participant Media; Head of Digital at Lionsgate)
SPEAKERS:
- Brent Weinstein, Head of Digital Media, United Talent Agency
- Bedonna Smith, Producer, Stand Up To Cancer, Digital Media Producer, 83rd Academy Awards, Co-Developer, BMW Film Series ‘The Hire’
- Nick Turner, Senior Vice President Digital Media, Relativity Media, LLC/ROGUE, Limitless, The Fighter, Catfish
- Elias Plishner, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Digital Marketing, Sony Pictures Entertainment, The Social Network, 2012, Battle: Los Angeles
TEDxTercek: Reclaiming Personal Narrative via Social Media
Via TEDxMarin, Robert Tercek is a master of digging beneath the surface of media. His recent TEDx talk about story expression and acknowledgment or validation on a global level is a must-view.
“For the past 60 years, we’ve outsourced our storytelling through professional media” … and now it’s time for us to do it via social media… “It’s like a great lover, and why we’re falling out of love with television.”
Can Data Save the Studios in the Age of Social Media?
By Nick DeMartino - Warner’s acquisition of Flixster is Hollywood’s savviest move yet to survive a wrenching transition into the age of social media.
It’s not just that Flixster is the leading social movie site on the iOS, Android and Blackberry mobile platforms with 35 million downloads to date – or that its sister site, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, attracts 12 million monthly visitors – or that Flixster powers Facebook’s Movies app, also the market leader.
No, this is about more than traffic and traction. It is about data. Data is the secret sauce of social media that will empower Hollywood to take control of its own business, rather than to cede it to intermediaries, e.g., the disruptors from Silicon Valley.
With this deal, Warner gains direct access to millions of movie fans, and to the data generated by their social interactions around movies – both essential ingredients to build a direct-to-consumer movie business owned and operated by Hollywood.
All this, at less than the cost of a single comic-book movie!
Social media fosters a flood of consumer interaction and generates massive streams of data, enriching companies that collect the data, and penalizing those who don’t.
This is a very different model than Hollywood (or anyone else) has ever known. It’s worth billions, because data can be tracked, measured, mined, parsed and monetized in countless inventive ways. All of which are counter to Hollywood’s old model.
To wit: Studios have been wholesalers who sell to retailers, not end-users, e.g., individual humans. Hollywood’s biggest customers have been theatre chains, TV and cable networks, and big-box stores – and now digital distributors like Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon. All of which have been very busy building a consumer ecosystem powered by data.
To reach customers directly, studios will have to build new businesses to distribute movies and leverage behavioral data. Which means Hollywood must compete with the best-in-class e-retailers like Amazon and Apple. Are they up to this daunting task? Studios have tried before, and failed. (WB’s Entertaindom and NewsCorp’s MySpace debacle come to mind.) Read more >>
Infographic: Real Cost of Going Social
While there are still companies that hold back on social, the network effect that happens when people share content, the sheer content management ease of use and low customer acquisition costs are simply overpowering arguments.
With an “are you crazy?” quote from Seth Godin to kick it off, the infographic below reveals the resource costs, “if you build it, they will come” fallacy on cost-free social advertising and a real-world breakdown or anatomy of a social campaign.
Social budget/ROI example: $52k for a social media strategist, $93.6k for a community manager (well paid imho), $15-30k for a micro-site, $20k for a mobile app (too cheap imho…). The ROI benefits: 85% customer engagement, 65% direct customer communications, 60% speed of feedback, 48% brand building and 42% market research. With Twitter, a 43% ROI, the monthly value of a follower is $2.38 and cost per follower: $1.67. Low CPA (cost per acquisition), indeed.
New Medici Advisory
New Medici is a next generation media strategy + lifestyle network working with studios, consumer brands and social media startups. On a go-to-market basis, New Medici models new digital businesses, providing product strategy, social marketing and distribution. Links: Media Strategy | Social Strategy
SXSW in Illustration
Returning from Austin this week, the number of great social contacts made alongside great food, cinema and musical events is put in some “relief,” so to speak with OgilvyNotes.
Ogilvy teamed up with some quality illustrators to record the seminars as infographics (one of our favorite ways of conveying information). Given that each keynote or panel went about an hour – making it an artistic challenge to keep up with the fast-talking social experts – here’s our early favorites from SXSW 2011:
More after the jump! Read more >>
Jack Dorsey’s Circular Focus in Square
Following Vanity Fair’s Sean Parker sketch, Jack Dorsey of Twitter and now Square makes the editorial cut under David Kirkpatrick’s steel pen. The focus on both is primarily their focus and their market timing.
While Parker carries a precise gut instinct for the right opportunities, Dorsey employs a predictive ability towards where community needs lie.
Intriguing about both is their singular or circular focus. Having worked with Jeff Skoll, dined with Larry Page and met Zuckerberg at a Google Zeitgeist conference – I notice the clean lines of their expression mimic the intensity of their entrepreneurial passions.
Theirs is a cleanness of personality; an ability to concentrate on one thing above all others, which is ironically anti-social given their social projects.
Also ironic, Parker had to convince Zuckerberg to think big on Facebook, and Dorsey’s direction has been for purity of the product design of Twitter and now Square, a plug-in to smartphones and tablets for credit card transactions.
Peter Thiel—the billionaire hedge-fund manager and co-founder of PayPal, who became Thefacebook’s first investor—says that around that time “Sean consistently argued that Facebook was going to be really big. If Mark ever had any second thoughts, Sean was the one who cut that off.”
Via the Dorsey VF piece, “Twitter Was Act One,” there’s definitely a management learning curve, which has put Jack Dorsey into a better stead.
More control over his products is also what connects these digital characters. Call it a focused ownership and particular attention to detail, like another chief innovator: Steve Jobs. Read more >>
Angel Investors ABCs: Patrons of Innovation
Venture Hacks does a great walkthrough of “How to Be an Angel” – from Naval Ravikant, who breaks down the three must-haves: access to capital, proprietary dealflow and good judgment to how to evaluate pitches and start-up teams.
Netflix’s Rise, Infographic Style
Via NYT’s DealB%k, a great Online MBA Program infographic on Netflix’s meteoric growth in the DVD and VOD space – chasing Blockbuster then moving past their brick-and-mortar storefronts into how the movie service eats into the pay tv and cable models.
With strong leadership, a great recommendation engine and a service which is considered a “utility” by many, Netflix will need to move internationally and optimize for the social networks to stay ahead of the Amazon Prime VOD bundle.
