Fernando Samaniego - International New Media Consulting

Reorganization of Media Groups

During the last decade most Media Groups have organized themselves around their type of media properties, around their channels.  That is, papers, TV, radio…were independent divisions responsible for that channel and its production and sales functions.  Each division being very autonomous they were often located in separate buildings and also competed against each other.

There were numerous reasons for that: different types of expertise and skills were needed in each case, the strong medium was afraid of piggybacking the weaker ones…etc.  Most important, the consideration went, each medium had to follow the internal rules and logic specific to it and being apart was the right thing to do.  In the case of internet the real fear was that the more traditional and not very dynamic culture of newspapers would slow down the new medium.  Indeed, all those considerations were correct and “life apart” has probably helped many online players to develop fast and be successful.

During that last half a dozen years numerous dailies have shown a remarkable ability to reinvent themselves.  In parallel, online projects have shown a great ability to embed all other media and the leading media executives have discovered that the “living apart” solution had to evolve into a “back to living together” but in a radically different way.

The reorganization issue just reflects other strategic topics being debated.  As our societies become richer and more sophisticated and as advertisers and agencies try to reach increasingly differentiated consumers, shouldn´t media groups facilitate their job by offering target groups across all media?  On the content side, how come audiences are discovering multitasking and media groups are not doing anything about it?  Those and many more questions are advising media companies to abandon production considerations in favor of concentrating their efforts on audiences.

Once top management begins to travel this road the way forward is not a simple one and any reference to the solutions other players are using becomes important.  The consulting firm Innovation has either visited or led these experiments around the world and offers some advice on things to do and pitfalls to avoid.  This article by Chris O´Brien and Juan Señor from Innovation sheds some light on how to organize a multimedia group and offers many examples around the world. It´s worth reading!

In my experience, only companies with a certain degree of performance in each of those media should try to move as far as it is mentioned in the article.  For less developed companies, they first should prove themselves as adequate independent operators in each  medium since bringing the online operations next to the offline ones should only happen when the internet people have been able to develop their own culture and rhythm.

Chart copyright Innovation Media Consulting Group

TV and Internet Merger

Experiments to merge TV and internet have systematically failed but that has not discouraged new players from trying because most pundits believe that the right formula/s will eventually be found.  Previous attempts by Microsoft and Apple seem to point at that moment where the two media will work together through the development of creative formulas still unknown to each of them.  Multitasking, increasing lower third TV screens and the example of online video including support content are some of the trends heralding that moment.

A recent video in the Wall Street Journal showed the latest joint effort by Samsung and Yahoo! to achieve the active coexistence of TV and online.  But as an innovation from previous experiments, the merger has been performed using Yahoo!’s widgets. It has allowed the internet to coexist with the TV programming, and the viewer-user the ability to surf the internet without having to opt out from TV.  Like my first car of some 30 years ago - although the product can be improved, it does the job.

The implications for editors and local portals are not minor.  As time goes by, the site-only strategy will simply not be enough. The past news portals have represented the logical extension of newspapers into the digital era; however the time has arrived for them to open up.   Regardless of the beauty and size of the portals, users need more than merely accessing content through them. We should facilitate their access through doors- as many as possible-, windows, chimney, floor cracks…etc.  Easy to say and hard to do?  Yes, indeed, but a visionary company will slowly travel in that direction by developing easier access to its content: news portal/s, complementary sites, content conceived for mobile, widgets for specific pieces of information, IPod casting, presence in the big sites (YouTube, Facebook…)…etc, and now television.

Away from newspaper-like type of information where the content is mostly textual and long, online editors have to think in terms of data base type of content, ready to be complemented, expanded, commented, reused, searched…etc.  An article published in the paper is less and less relevant in the new environment of the “percolated house” since our products require content elements that can be linked together and repurposed.  A textual description of a new film is a short lived element in a newspaper, whereas the same film description can be formatted from its inception in smaller packages which can be permanently used online to support, for instance, even the movie protagonist’s bio many years later.  Those smaller packages can merge with images and video, they can be part of the skeleton for other sites such as trivia contests, affinity evaluations…etc.  They can be searched, reused, surfed in the PC, mobile…and now, thanks to Samsung and Yahoo! they will be repurposed when that very movie is being shown on TV.

Because of their tremendous content and their position in the cities, newspapers can count on a large network of collaborators. If they are to be the references of the on-goings on in their cities, the ability to gather “evergreen” information in the data base format will present an enormous competitive advantage.