No one talked about the future of media. There is no focus. The battle continues.
The media blamed the agencies for not spending their client's money in proportion to the way the audience/customers spend their time.
Agencies sent three different messages to online media . . . 1) give us more design control . . . 2) give us your data . . . 3) If you don't, we'll keep telling our clients to pay us to design the media context where the client message is relevant and we have access to the data. (read: touché)
Traditional media said they are no longer pitching ad budgets based on CPM's, they are pitching marketing budgets with an integrated mix of content & both virtual and live interactivity. (read: Et tu bruté)
Agencies and media once found mutual benefit in partnering, but not anymore.
Michael Wolff was the only person to address the elephant in the room - how will content be funded? (He knows the reality of the "Make vs. Consume" ratio discussed by Scott Berkun here.) He was very pessimistic about selling $.99 content to one person at a time (do give me a call Michael Wolff, we've been there and have insights into what it takes) instead of selling the audience in bulk for $.005 per capita to advertisers, very efficiently, by calling on a handful of agencies. (those were the days, weren't they? . . . I remember eating lunch at 5 star restaurants and pb&j's for dinner when I started at Leo Burnett buying media for United Airlines)
Fred Wilson announced he thinks it's possible to sell content a la carte at scale - because of the behavior of young people.
Ev Williams said there's an opportunity for media to capitalize on organic fan engagement with paid sharing of their tweets on Twitter.
Separately, everyone seemed to agree that 95% of content sucks.
But Ev's idea probably isn't going to change that until the content is better because there will only be tweets about the 5% worth tweeting about.
No one talked about how to raise the bar in the future. For example:
- leveraging interactive technology to deliver more of the experience people pay a premium for when they buy a ticket to a live event
- improving the chances of the quality untapped talent to find the receptivity they need to cultivate their talent and rise above the 95% junk and be discovered by producers with high value video production and distribution assets.
