Redefining the media battlefield

Thursday, July 09, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Media sector | Tags: Alex Connock, entrepreneurs, media, diary, Ten Alps, competition, dbda, niche, Dawn Boyfield, Entrepreneur’s Diary

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps: Churchill – the wartime prime minister and holder of nude bathtub meetings, not Churchill insurance or Vic Reeves’s dog – once said: “No matter how enmeshed a commander becomes in the elaboration of his own thoughts, it is sometimes necessary to take the enemy into account.” Dead right.

In business, the enemy is obviously competitors and I see far too many business plans which fail to factor in their likely reaction to a good idea from someone new.

I would love to disregard the major media players, as we try to build Ten Alps as a factual media company fit for the fluid battlefield of 2010. But I can’t – because if we come up with something good, they often come and have a go themselves.

So the challenge is to avoid the traditional areas of competition altogether.

Take dbda – a company we own, making ‘corporate social responsibility content’: online, print, video, events, even a touring theatrical production.

It’s bang on for the times, and run by the amazing Dawn Boyfield, who – here finally is the news peg – just got an MBE for her services to society.

The dbda team creates high-quality content of all kinds to help companies engage with their wider audience, and to fulfil their desire to put something back into the community. They work for Corporates like Nationwide, Marks & Spencer, Zurich, National Grid and BMW, plus charities and local authorities. They produce materials from road safety to personal finance education, sustainability to engineering and constantly surprise with new ways of presenting it.

dbda didn’t invade someone else’s territory – it invented its own. It’s multi-platform factual media, it’s a bit marketing, a bit advertising, some PR… it’s a brand-new niche that defies conventional description.

And that’s the point.

To do really well in the media in the next decade – as a company or investor – chuck out of the window the 1990s view that there are monolithic, ‘pure play’ industries like TV or print, or advertising or PR to get into, and that the more pure play something is, the more likely it is to succeed

In fact, the reverse is true. Everything is merging. For me, the best opportunities are in the gaps between the old industries. I’ve got to get creative and help people to keep inventing whole new business models.

You can catch up on Alex Connock’s previous posts or view all posts from our Entrepreneur’s Diary series, in which we follow a male and a female CEO to discover what life is like behind the scenes of their business.