Live from Future of Media Summit 2008 Part 2

Continuing on from the previous post at the Future of Media Summit 2008 ... there have been plenty of interesting comments, many of them based very much in common sense ...

Mark Pesce spoke of the move from time-based aggregation to salience-based aggregation, where people consume content based more on the recommendation of friends than of network controllers.Mark Goldman spoke of the need of the audience for relevancy, which was met by handing content generation back to the audience, but in a way that still encompassed an economic model.

The issue as I see it however is that there are always two competing forces - meeting the needs of the consumer for good content, and meeting the needs of the advertiser to reach an audience. In the era of free-to-air television the equation is heavily weighted in favour of the advertiser. The emerging model sees control going back to the consumer. Part of the reason why organisations like Current are turning to user-generated content has to be that it is cheaper to produce - and this is necessary to offset the loss of control by the advertisers (and hence the loss of dollars to the advertisers). 

There has also been a lot of discussion of targeting and measurement. I still question tho whether people really are willing to give away personal information to advertisers - or at least, what it will be that the advertisers need to give them to make it worth their while. Also - the people that are most worth reaching are not necessarily the ones that will respond to rewards. Finally - personalisation does not fit the current advertising model of spending thousands of dollars on an ad and then blasting it out to everyone. New tools will be needed to tailor offers on the fly (check out Qmecom as a potential model).

Once again, more questions than answers ...