NOAH BRIER
NB@NOAHBRIER.COM

hi

NoahBrier.com

media
technology
culture
marketing

everything
communicates
there is a better way
people are your
partners
start with the
problem, not the
solution

my approach

the medium
is the message

the web

links are
fundamental

complex network

few many sites few
sites with with a moderate sites with
a few links number of links many links

are social networks equally
distributed?

so far, so good?

power law

before the web
we lacked a map

Why did we have to wait until 1999 to discover the impact of hubs and power
laws on the behavior of complex networks? The answer is simple: We lacked
a map. The few network maps available for study before the late 1990s had a
few hundred nodes at most. The enormous World Wide Web offered the first
chance to examine the intricate anatomy of large complex systems and
established the presence of power laws. As other large maps followed, we
gradually understood that most networks of practical interest, from the
language to the sex web, are shaped by the same universal laws and
therefore share the same hub-dominated architecture.

a network

how about the
real world, noah?

social networking

professional networks

better marketing

neural networks

truth = network

trend truth
you can find entertainment
on new screens
three minutes is the ideal
time for your shortened
attention span
if he can look like an idiot
and get millions to watch, so
can i

end of
part 1

beginning of
part 2

Horizontal Media in a Vertical World
1
• All of a sudden digital media comes along and
starts to screw things up. It doesn't know
boundaries. The figurative and literal walls
between departments are of little use when it
comes to digital technology.
• If companies are traditionally structured
vertically (silos) then the web is a horizontal
medium, cutting across the business.
• Communications no longer belong to a
specific channel or silo since nearly all
become digitally encoded at some point in
their life, allowing them to travel seamlessly
around the corporation without worry for the
havoc they're wreaking.

No More Campaigns
2
• In another era, you ran a campaign around a
specific time (say Christmas), but in Google's
world, where you only pay for clicks (aka
leads), it's silly to think that way. A lead in
March is worth the same as a lead in
December, so why aren't you running your
ads all year long?
• The website of the future may not be a flash-
filled affair that broadcasts the brands
position to its customers, but might instead
be a search box with mountains of content
sitting behind it that allows people to find the
thing within the brand that resonates most
with them. It's idiocentricity at its finest.

Life Lessons of Open Source
3
• Product = Free, Support = $$$
• Open source support on the other hand, is
paying to keep something running that costs
nothing. Using our current understanding as
a consumer, it's hard to justify. Why pay for
support on something that's free to begin
with? How is it worth it?
• The reason open source companies who exist
on paid support will struggle is exactly the
same reason they will succeed. We have
trouble seeing value in something that costs
nothing, despite the fact that it's obviously
worth more than that. We as humans are not
very good at separating cost and worth, at
least not at the moment.

Brainstorming “M Curve”
4

Creating an Innovative Environment
5
• Create a place where people want to bring
great ideas: One option is Google's 20
percent time, where you give you engineers
the flexibility to follow their passions for 1/5
of their week.
• Teach people how to think better: That way
instead of relying on a limited few in some
R&D lab, you can open up the process. In turn
you will create more value for both the
company and the employees.
• “Yes, but you’ve got to distinguish between
what I’m talking about and what George
Soros is trying to do. Soros uses his money to
push his views. I’d be more inclined to use my
money to give people the ability to make up
their own minds and express themselves.”
- Mike Bloomberg

Trust, Brands and Transparency
6
• Brands are reputations: A company uses its
brand as collateral when it tries to get you to
buy its products.
• Branding and marketing developed as a way to
help consumers know what was reliable. What's
new is: There's less differentiation than ever
before, the store has taken on much of the trust
burden, customers are far more savvy about
marketing than we once were and price
comparison tools have shifted the power.
• Brand relationships traditionally exist at the 100
or 1,000 foot level. Personal relationships exist
at the one or ten foot level. That's because
personal connections build reputation: There's
more on the line when you know someone's
name, number and their kid's birthday.
Transparency helps bring brand relationships to
this level.

Attention-casting
7
• We now have tools to broadcast our attention.
As a result, attention is now media.
• I am broadcasting my movies to friends
through Netflix, my music through last.fm and
my clickstream through Root.
• Blogs are so revolutionary because it's a
fairly unfiltered look at people. Linklogs are
even less filtered because they contain the
ideas behind the ideas. Now imagine if I
exposed every click to you, now you know the
path behind the ideas that make the ideas.

Baking Marketing into Products
8
• There's a big opportunity for marketing
agencies to enter the product development
cycle earlier. The end goal would be to bake
the marketing right into the product.
• When you embed marketing into the product
not only do you give the customer something
better, but you also save yourself money on
advertising. That's because great experiences
are contagious and contagious marketing
leads to viral results.
• Part of baking marketing into products is
about collaboration. Design, engineering,
marketing and sales need to be working
together to achieve lofty status

Reach vs. Influence
9
• The wonder of the internet to me is the ability
to have low-reach, high-influence. In an old
media world, such a thing is not overly
scalable, but online its an efficient and very
real occurrence.
• For someone like myself, there's no incentive
to trying to appeal to a broader audience.
People come here for a very specific reason
and if I tried to write on more general things
I'd probably attract no one at all.
• Go deep, not wide.

Niche Choices are More Meaningful
10
• Niche choices provide a whole lot more
insight than mass ones.
• When a person makes a conscious decision to
consume something niche it says much more
about their taste than a mass artist/movie/
etc.
• The best recommendations come from niche
choices (Amazon, last.fm, etc.)
• In order to compare niche choices effectively
you must have scale.

Insignificantly Interesting
11
• \"Old media is begging for attention. New
media is attention.\"
• \"'The Real World' went from exploring how to
get your adulthood started . . . to a recurring
drama of sloth, ill tempers, wasted days and
wasted nights. 'Real World' producers quickly
surmised that people prefer to watch other
people do nothing with their immediate
futures.\" - Hank Steuver (Washington Post)
• We are becoming the media and the media is
becoming us. One is not taking over the other,
they are just converging to become a single
entity. Blogging doesn't spell the end of
journalism, it spells a new beginning.

Marketing 2.0
12
• Unbundled media is a trend we will
increasingly see where people consume
media in bite-sized chunks rather than the
30-minute show or album that once
supported big media companies.
• Whether it's newspaper articles republished
on blogs or television shows downloaded with
BitTorrent, the perfect little bundle is being
unraveled and it's going to have big effects on
media companies and the advertisers that
pay their bills.
• “Aggregators are promoting a shift in the
control of content. They’re challenging the
idea . . . that users must view things in the
way we prescribe, and that our hierarchy is
best to present our content.” - Joshua Porter

A Call for Unbundling
13
• What needs to happen first is an inventory.
What pieces are held and what value do they
have. This is a general inventory, like ticking
off TV station in New York, newspaper in
Chicago. This is a specific inventory: Sports
writer in Chicago, prime time show in New
York. It's about finding the smallest pieces of
value. After an inventory it's time to start
assigning values and considering alternate
forms of distribution. That's sports writer
may hold value in more arenas than just his
daily newspaper column. What other ways can
you leverage his expertise to add revenue. Is
it a text-message service for sports fans? A
fantasy football consultation service? Media
doesn't mean newspaper/magazine/
television/radio anymore: It's any
information/communication vehicle.

Why Curation is Better Than Filtering
14
• Curation is what separates humans from
computers: In the future computers will filter
and humans will curate. While the computer
will help and be fairly accurate, it won't know
the audience well enough to recommend a far
out story that doesn't fit in the algorithm.

the end
NOAH BRIER
NB@NOAHBRIER.COM