Wake up to the fluid, all-media world

Wednesday, September 02, 2009 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Media sector | Tags: Alex Connock, entrepreneurs, media, diary, James Murdoch, Edinburgh TV Festival, web presence, BBC, multi-platform, Ten Alps, Entrepreneur’s Diary

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps : EDINBURGH – This was always going to be a TV festival in turmoil, with Big Brother on the way out (two years too late), Google capturing ad revenues from commercial broadcasting, and so much more to discuss.

But James Murdoch’s keynote MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International TV Festival really was incendiary, achieving exactly what it was supposed to. It was bold and well delivered – and it split the audience right down the middle.

Murdoch’s comments on the BBC and OFCOM will have seismic political impact, I’m sure, if not quite the absolute policy turnaround he would like – which is essentially a massive scaling down of the BBC.

But another passage caught my eye:

‘In this rapidly changing world, the boundaries between media have broken down.

People consume content in a very fluid way, and that is reflected in the way we provide it. What were once separate forms of communication, or separate media, are now increasingly interconnected and exchangeable. So we no longer have a TV market, a newspaper market, a publishing market. We have, indisputably, an all-media market.’

It continually surprises me that in late 2009 I regularly meet City investors who absolutely do not understand this, and do not realise that a change to an all-media world has taken place.

They will emphasise ‘focus’, predicated on the obsolete idea that (say) TV and publishing are islands to themselves, and proposing that the best strategy is to pick one discipline and run with that alone.

In 1997 such a view would have been bang on. It made sense for MTV to not run web channels, not least because the internet had barely been invented.

But today? In this multi-platform media world, focus on just one distribution platform, when the audience is seamlessly looking for your material on all platforms, can border on commercial suicide.

Would The Sun be more successful if it was not online at all? Would ITV be correct in not having the ITV.com web presence? Absolutely not so, in either case. The world has moved on as fast as the audience has shifted its taste. It’s fluid, as Murdoch said.

You might not agree with his hostility to the state-intervention of the BBC, and actually I don’t, although I do think it should be scaled back in some key competitive areas like where it competes with commercial radio.

But Murdoch has elegantly articulated the all-media market, and this should be a tipping point for the City to wake up and start realising the opportunities, even the need, for every company in media to go and be as ‘fluid’ and multi-platform as their customers.

You can catch up on Alex’s previous 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.