A presentation I gave to media folks in Singapore in 2009.

1. hi

2. hi, i’m noah

5. Brand Tags:
The basic idea of this
site is that a brand
exists entirely in
people's heads.
Therefore, a brand is
whatever they say it is.

8. 1.9 million tags
Since May, 2008

10. What is the future
of creative
development in
media?
Changing rules behind the creation of content and the
new roles brands and agencies now play.

11. First let’s agree on
a few things.

12. Everything is
N media.
At this point most people have the ability to create
content, whether that means taking a picture with their
phone and posting it to the web, publicly saving a link
or writing a blog read by millions, individuals are
content creators and media owners.

13. The medium is the
O message.
"The 'message' of any medium or technology is the
change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces
into human affairs."

14. Content was
never that
P important.
Sure on a micro level it can matter, but the types of
changes we're seeing are macro, not micro, and
focusing on content can cause you to lose the forest
for the trees. (McLuhan once wrote that the "'content'
of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by
the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.")

15. The internet isn’t
Q killing anything.
It’s easy to say it is, but when you really dig in, it’s just
not true.

16. Right, so how is
the creation of
content
changing?
1. Creation
2. Distribution
3. Consumption

17. Creation

18. “The opportunities
for media creation
have been rising
for decades,”
Danah Boyd recently wrote.

19. N O
P Q

20. The majority of
the content being
created is
personal.
The stuff that sat on VHS cassettes and scrapbooks in
years past: Media that wasn’t easily sharable.

21. The majority of
the content on
the web was
never created to
be monetized.
What’s particularly interesting about this explosion in
content creation is the different players. Whereas
worlds and business models used to be segmented,
they all now sit in the same sea of content, competing
with one another.

22. Everyone is
N playing the same
ibpplk
game ... by
different rules.

23. In the old days,
media companies
fought media
companies.
They were always willing to take down a competitor,
but never at the expense of the industry.

24. Today, media
companies fight
brands who fight
consumers.
They are all locked up in the a battle for the same
eyeballs.

25. It’s always
dangerous to fight
the guy with
nothing to lose.
Brands make money differently than media companies
and then consumers generally don’t care about making
money at all off their content. Things can get messy.

26. Take brands for
instance

32. Distribution

33. In the past
distribution was
one of the most
valuable assets.
Even above the costs of creating content, distribution
kept the regular Joe from getting his word out there.

34. Today everyone
has distribution
available to them.
Sites like YouTube, Flickr and Blogger turn out to be
pretty powerful platforms.

35. But the most
powerful
distribution
channel is people.
Web users can spread content at incredible speed.

36. People are as
obsessed with the
O idea of spreading
ibpplk
an idea as they
are with the idea
they're spreading.

37. For the first time
the consumers of
the news are also
its creators.
That unprecedented look has provided them with a
newfound fascination with how news moves.

38. The real content
of any web story
is how the story
spread.
"As more and more Americans become aware of the
patterns and forces that shape culture, they begin to
develop their own hypotheses about what will spread
and what won't. Online with minimal cost or risk, they
can test these theories, tweaking different versions of
their would-be viral projects and monitoring the results,
which in turn feed back into how future projects are
made. In viral culture, we are all driven by the ratings,
the numbers, the Internet equivalent of the box-office
gross." [Bill Wasik, And Then There's This: How Stories
Live and Die in Viral Culture]

39. “In a networked
culture, there is
also power in
being the person
spreading the
content.”
Danah Boyd. The spreader is a creator, a medium in the
vast sea of web content.

41. Consumption

42. What happens in
a world where
there are more
creators than
consumers?

43. 20 hours of video
are uploaded to
YouTube every
minute.

44. That means every
hour, enough
video is uploaded
to YouTube for
you to watch for
50 days.

45. That’s 10,512,000
hours of video a
year

46. Or 1200 years of
content uploaded
in just 12 months.
(And that's only if we continue at our current pace.)

47. There is more
than enough
content out there
for people to only
watch unique
YouTube videos
for the rest of
their lives.
Think about that for a second.

48. Quality is in the
P
ibpplk
eyes of the
beholder

49. Quality matters to
you, not
consumers.
It’s something the industry tells itself to feel better
about what we do.

51. What is the most
popular video in
YouTube history?

53. 106 million views

55. 75 million views

57. 138 million views

58. So what does it all
mean?

59. Try things and
iterate.
Face it, you’re not as good at predicting success as you
think you are. It is well-established that things become
popular mostly randomly. Sure you can spend against
it, but even that isn’t a guarantee.

60. Stay out of the
middle.
This is where content producers are really being
squeezed. As The Economist put it, “As sales become
ever more concentrated, it is becoming both more
urgent and harder to establish a foothold near the top
of the market. A book or film that fails to attract a mass
audience tumbles quickly into the depressed middle.”

61. Build on prior
success.
Too many brands rebuild their audience for every
campaign, spending the same money to reach the
same people over and over again. Even if you’re not
sure what to do with it yet, you’ve got to recognize the
value of building an audience.

62. Stop focusing on
the content.
If I am to leave with one thing I want to leave with
McLuhan. "The 'message' of any medium or technology
is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it
introduces into human affairs." If you want to better
understand how things are changing, dig in to the
medium, not the content.

63. Awesome. Thanks.
Noah Brier
nb@noahbrier.com
http://www.noahbrier.com