In my last blog I wrote about The Mobile Patent Wars and how it will also impact Mobile Marketing in the near future. It is an accepted view that patents will play a role in capturing market share and even creating dominant standards for the industry. So how could we try to predict how patents in the Mobile Marketing will be used, and also how they will impact business models based on Advertisement revenues.

As the world’s greatest ice-hockey player Wayne Gretzky once said:

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.

He also said …

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

So lets use the Gretzky approach to looking patents in Mobile and Mobile Marketing

Previously I mentioned the ongoing patent battles between Mobile giants like Nokia, Apple, HTC and others. However looking back at what has previously happened in the Mobile industry could give further insight into what can be expected.

One example of a company that has utilised patents to play a key role in the Mobile world is Qualcomm, who become the largest fabless chip supplier in the world by focusing on developing their technology backed by strong patents and a licensing model. There are of course other companies like ARM and others with similar business models who have based their development of technology backed by strong patents and know how to license to the industry. So was it all friendly licensing that took place as Qualcomm’s CDMA technology took a strong hold? Of course not, there were well documented battles with Nokia (here), Samsung, Broadcom (here), and others. Also it is big money we are talking about as in the Nokia settlement in 2008 the amount was $2.3B to Qualcomm. Especially the battle between Qualcomm and Samsung, settlement of $1.3B was an interesting one as Samsung is one of Qualcomm’s largest customers.

Without a doubt it is not nice to get a letter demanding licensing royalties or someone asking you to stop selling your product or services, but the reality is that it is part of business in a globalised world and patents will be used strategically to gain competitive advantage. So who will be the Qualcomm of Mobile Marketing? Well anyone who acquirers the CVON patent portfolio will take a significant strategic position.

Where is the patent for Mobile Marketing now?

With the entry of Google (here) and Apple (here) as key players in the Mobile Advertisement market in the last 12 months it is now widely accepted that advertising will be a key ingredient for mobile. Established players like handset manufacturers; Nokia, Samsung, and the operators like Vodafone, Telefonica (O2), T-Mobile and others have a new competitor. However looking at the companies with the most patents in Mobile Marketing in the world, June 2009 the entry of Internet players did not come as a surprise. However, it would have been a surprise to many of these companies to find CVON amongst themselves:

1. Yahoo
2. Microsoft
3. Google
4. CVON Innovations
5. Nokia
6. NEC
7. Qualcomm
8. IBM
9. AT&T
10. Sony
11. Motorola
12. Sony Ericsson
13. Hewitt Packard
14. Hitachi
15. Alcatel-Lucent

All of these players are in the midst of an arm race building an arsenal of patents that will help them protect their own position and of course also be used against others once the time is right. As discussed in The Mobile Patent Wars there are several of these top patent owners in Mobile Marketing who have locked horns before in US patent litigation.

Where is the patent going to be for Mobile Marketing?

Ad-funded business models are already starting to play a big role in Mobile Marketing. The number of Applications at the iStore that were adfunded was > 50%

earlier this year and I would expect that to increase as better targeting and relevance is achieved between the ad and end user. Microsoft was the latest to include adfunded mobile applications compatibility in the Windows  Phone 7 platform when launched recently (here).

Gartner has a similar view of the importance of Adfunded applications in the ecosystem of applications …

Worldwide mobile application stores’ download revenue exceeded $4.2 billion in 2009 and will grow to $29.5 billion by the end of 2013. This revenue forecast includes end-user spending on paid-for applications and advertising-sponsored free applications. Advertising-sponsored mobile applications will generate almost 25 per cent of mobile application stores revenue by 2013. – Dec 2009 (source).

Then it should be a case where all these providers of mobile platforms with adfunded applications and gaming should take a look at the granted CVON European patent EP1970854B1 (here), which covers Adfunded mobile applications and was filed as early as 2003. Messaging based Mobile Marketing is also taking off in many different markets. Only the other day was it announced that O2 now has attracted more than 1 million users of the O2 More service with as high as 26% response rate on certain Advertisement campaigns (source). The messaging based segment is still the largest revenue generator of Mobile Advertisement.Further InMobi, the world’s largest advertisement network, said 48% of all its display ad impressions were carried on Nokia phones in July 2010. With Nokia having about 40% of the smartphone  market (here).

All the in messaging advertisements will need to be highly relevant to the end user and also optimized to work well in operator networks and telecom infrastructure. CVON has developed technology and patents to achieve just that with more than 300 pending and granted patents, such as US7653064 and US7606562 as a mere mention of two.

So historically players now looking to dominate the Mobile Marketing space have been at each other in some ways with patents. All these players have been building up their weapons arsenal in the last 5-6 years, and no matter what the winning types of mobile marketing ends up becoming the most preferred in years to come patents battles or wars will be taking place.

Another complexity to this story is of course the Non Practicing Entities (NPEs), or patent trolls as they sometimes also are called, who are also looking to make an impact in the Mobile Marketing world, but that is for a later blog.

However, the Jury is still out to who will be best positioned for the future patent wars but I would not be surprised if someone called CVON the Qualcomm of Mobile Marketing, so whoever buys the patent portfolio at the upcoming auction on 11 Nov 2010 will be a force to be reckoned with.

BEIJING — Authorities in China’s restive northwestern Xinjiang region on Sunday approved a bill making it a criminal offence for people there to discuss separatism on the Internet, state media reported.

The bill passed by Xinjiang’s standing committee bans people in the region from using the Internet in any way that undermines national unity, incites ethnic separatism or harms social stability, the China News Service reported.

The bill requires Xinjiang’s Internet service providers and network operators to set up monitoring systems — or strengthen existing ones — and report anyone who breaks the law, the report said.

This was released by Associated Press this week just gone. Read in association with Freedom For Sale: how we made money and lost our liberty

Podcast of John Kampfner speaking at the RSA

In a Times review,

Marx was wrong, according to John Kampfner. It is not religion that is the opium of the people, but capitalism. Give them good shopping opportunities and they will forget about liberty, equality and fraternity, and cease to care about who governs them and how. And while they worship at the shopping malls, the governing class gets on with managing the state according to its own ideas. But this is with the consent of the people, who value prosperity more than they fear for their freedom.

In China and Russia, journalists and activists may risk their lives as well as their livelihoods, but the bargain with the ­people is the same: in some degree the open society is sacrificed for stability and wealth. Given their history in the past 100 years, there are many reasons why this is attractive to the average ­Chinese or Russian. The result is a sustainable authoritarianism enabled by the efficiency of the capitalist system. This means, says Kampfner, that we may have been wrong to believe that the spread of capitalism would lead to democracy. The authoritarianism by consent of Singapore that had hitherto seemed an isolated and ambiguous case turns out to have a wider application. Whether this will last remains to be seen. The story of China is not halfway through. It is developing intellectually as well as economically; the turbulence of ideas may yet spread into politics. Russia, too, has deep moral and political resources that may not be satisfied by the drug of materialism.

JG Ballard had a thing or two to write about that, The Times continues,

What is certain is that the media is under pressure everywhere (perhaps it always has been: commercial and government control are both problematic). What ought to worry us most in democratic countries is the decline of our parliaments. They are the ones who should devise regulatory systems for the media and roles for public service broadcasting; they should be the primary constraint on the executive. None has done much to prevent the gross errors of the executive on either side of the Atlantic. The expenses scandal in Britain seems to signal a group of people who have lost pride in their function and instead exploit it for personal gain. Democratic assemblies are the heart of representative democracy; if they have lost their ­purpose, then we are in serious trouble.

And I completely agree with that. But we should also not forget that in the UK we have the highest percentage of CCTV cameras almost anywhere in the world – so how free are we? This is a very rich and interesting debate to be had on Democracy per se: Participatory, Representative, Monitory, Networked?

Jared Diamond in his book Collapse makes the simple point that civilisations do not last forever. If you want things to stay the same you need to change. This world in which only the systematic human being striving for ‘more’ is left standing is in stark contrast to many of us who are beginning to ask what ‘more’ exactly means. Chindogu: is a Japanese word for all the useless things we might be tempted to buy, if ‘buoyant consumer demand means a world full of junk, its hard to see why we would want to work so hard for it. And, may I add work that makes us so unhappy, says Charles Handy in the Hungry Spirit. Finally the Times summary,

In the end, it has to do with our conception of man. It is not just what people want that matters, it is what serves human dignity. Having struggled so long to govern our own lives, did we escape the grip of dictators to fall instead under the spell of Louis Vuitton? The city states of Athens and Renaissance Italy that strove for democratic or republican government stood for something nobler, reflected in their great works of art. Dubai may rent these from the Louvre, but neither the Gulf nor Singapore seems likely to produce a Michelangelo or a Sophocles.

And Richard Sennett had a point of view on that too as does John Keane in The Life and Death of Democracy

SB: Right now there seems to be a lot of confusion between social media and the definition of community. The idea of community is right now as fairly elusive one and is being bandied about like it’s some sacrosanct term. Community built around consumption is, for me fairly transitory. It reminds of an unruly mob during the time of the Paris Commune. We’re  not going to get a whole lot of sense out of this right now.

Then there’s these dire warnings coming from people like Forrester, that brands will be excluded from consumer choice because somehow they are now being defined by communities and no longer by the brand owners themselves. I think this is both disingenuous and untrue. Forcing brands out of their hands via social media created communities is only part of the story. While even as early as 2005 Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore warned marketers, in their prescient work ‘Communities Dominate Brands‘, that if they didn’t cut loose the shackles of the traditional advertising agency and TV network model they would lose their brands. I’m seeing many of the same warnings again this year, particularly in the wake of the great financial crisis. But what real, if any, changes have we seen to this paradigm? No brands have fallen by the wayside because they didn’t have a social media strategy or because they continued advertising in traditional media.

JB: Brands may not fall by the wayside as such, but brands will become stronger because of their consumer engagement strategies. For example, the well known Dell Hell scenario certainly impacted on that organisation negatively, but by engaging with the community they came back stronger and more relevant to their client base. If they hadn’t done that who knows where that organisation would have been.

Some brands come to social media like Dell in a ‘reactive’ fashion knowing they now need to engage with consumers due to a negative event/issue. Other brands initiate the online engagement strategy ‘proactively’, understanding it will add value to their knowledge base, understanding the client better, product development and customer service.

SB: Ahonen and Moore predicted the consumer and their connected communities, would select the products and brands that are engaged in the most relevant dialogue with them. Somehow this would become the centre of a new modern and sustainable marketing model. While I think there are some massive shifts occurring,  I don’t think we’re quite there yet with this because I’m not sure anyone understands these kinds of ROIs yet.

Metrics, metrics, metrics. I can’t count so I am unable to help, but the fact is one can see where commerce is to be made, if one digs around a bit. And the big question is what is advertising and marketing in the 21st Century? When we live in a search economy, a participatory culture, where 25% of al media is made by us and there are 3.5 billion mobile phones of the planet. Networked economics?

Some called Tomi and I polemicists – I like to think we highlighted something critically important for brands, business and organisations. Remember our subtitle was, “business and marketing challenges for the 21st Century”. This went way beyond in my view the social media paradigm that so many are so now engaged in.

While the government’s initial efforts to censor the Internet were blunt and often ineffective, it has started employing more sophisticated tools to thwart dissidents’ attempts to communicate with each other and the outside world. Iranian dissidents are not alone in their struggle, however, as several sympathetic hacker groups have been working to keep them online.

One such group is NedaNet, whose mission is to “help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize.” NedaNet project coordinator Morgan Sennhauser, who has just written a paper detailing the Iranian government’s latest efforts to thwart hackers, says that the government’s actions have been surprisingly robust and have challenged hackers in ways that the Chinese government’s efforts at censorship have not.

Thompson described “the plan” as “potentially the holy grail of future public service broadcasting provision in the UK”

The plan Stan is this

The BBC said its proposals to share its online and digital technology would provide help with the production, distribution and exploitation of content across the television industry. The corporation said the plans would generate more than £120m a year for UK public service broadcasting by 2014.

And the BBC is planning to share some of its content with the Telegraph Media Group in a deal that could see the iPlayer embedded onto the Daily Telegraph’s website. The BBC refused to confirm the identity of the newspaper group, but confirmed that it was in talks about a “non-exclusive pilot scheme” which could eventually be rolled out to other newspaper groups.

More on the BBC PSB (Stephen Fry Lecture) Much to the reported consternation of Channel 4, and I would imagine many other players as well.

Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

But then they (other media players) could have gone there first. The idea that news – as in newspapers is Print and that news as in Broadcast is Audio-Visual, and never the twain shall meet is complete bunkum.

It was always the “settled” technology that decided: formats, business models, distribution and job descriptions.

As technology evolves so does the job description.

I thought, back in 2005, when we published Communities Dominate Brands that we were seeing some significant markers in what was to come. I think that we have really only just begun. My observation was then, and still is, that we are in the process of building the necessary infrastructure for the Networked Society. Look at it this way…

The full deployment of the enormous wealth-creating potential brought forth by each technological revolution requires, each time, the establishment of an adequate socio-institutional framework. The existing framework, created to handle growth based on the previous set of technologies, is unsuited to the new one. Thus, in the first decades of installation of the new industries and infrastructures, there is am increasing mis-match between techno-economic and soci-institutional spheres, as well as an internal decoupling of the economic system, between the old and new technologies. The process of re-establishing a good match and creating conditions both for recoupling and full deployment of the new potential is complex, protracted and socially painful

And many are feeling the pain right now. I mean who in their right mind is going to stand up in front of the board and shareholders and say,

You know what, having looked at our road map and having looked out the window, to sum up – we are fucked. My best observation is lets cut our losses and build for the future.

It is not going to happen is it. Which is why the BBC medicine, or the principal, is all the more painful to digest. But I think policy wonks, and others interested in communication, and enabling the flows of communication (because any constraint placed upon those flows of information, harm the economy, and harm society), need to think beyond short term to the long term.

Lord Currie of OfCom at a Royal Television Society dinner famously said

The rapid growth of first multi-channel, then digital, then PVRs and soon higher-speed broadband are simply the pre-tremors of the real volcanic eruption that technology is about to unleash. At the risk of being over-dramatic I would say that most traditional television broadcasters are today standing about the equivalent of one mile from Mount St Helens. When it blows, frankly, that will be too close and it will be too late to run.

Talking of fatal eruptions, the fall of the Roman empire was helped on its way by paper becoming in short supply and therefore, information could not be successfully transmitted throughout the Empire. And 1000 years later the newspaper owners in the UK, paid for the laying of hard roads for the postal service, paid by tolls, so that newspapers could be more widely distributed at greater quantity and greater speed. Does that commercial desire ring any bells?

The holy grail for public service broadcasting, I suggest the issue is rather bigger and broader than that. My fear is that we destroy all that is good about our broadcast culture, all of it, for the sake of a few short term vested interests, that’s the tragedy of the commons. And that really would be a fucking shame.

Oh and don’t forget the word Trust, Trust in media brands will be one of the biggest deals going. I know the Beeb has suffered, But if you were to say who were the most trusted media brand sin the UK I reckon its the BBC and the Guardian.

The rest are the grocers.

The changing of customers habits and behaviours wrought by technology means the old ways just do not work anymore. The crisis of many businesses is the crisis of meaning. Leadership for brands and businesses will be through the creation and management of meaning. Brands have to co-create value and experience to deliver added value a value+ if you will. And why is that? Because our ideas of shopping, having relationships, being a parent, having a job, etc., are being modified from the old models of the past. A job is no longer for life, shopping can be done far more easily on ebay and Amazon, or a host of other internet sites.

And in the Age of Connectedness – people will have public and private and semi-private personas, which coexist in the network and are connected independently. The single most visible thing in the Connected Age, is that we suddenly have permanent access to our peers, our friends, our colleagues and family members. Our communities which previously only existed at given points in time now become ever present.

We are no longer alone As space and time have collapsed.

In an Economist article we get a snap shot from real life by what we meant by this

At the Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café’s wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn’t usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad.” That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her ‘work stuff’ at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads.

Indeed – we can be Placeless but permanently connected what this also implies is that we have the context of a mobile social presence. A bit like how skype works in some ways. And for a more indepth look into the habits of Generation C read They ARE the Borg: Youth, Mobile and SMS text messaging

The owner of Nomad describes his regulars as techno-Bedouins That could me! I also have the added piece of equipment called a Honda Fireblade.

In fact this article reminds of a guy called Leo Plaw who I have never met, who completely overhauled my company SMLXL weblog recently. Leo is Australian, lives in London, has a German girlfriend in Berlin. So the other day, I skyped Leo as he is always “present” – I got an IM back saying

I cant talk, as I am in a café in Berlin and I left my headset at home.

I IM’ed back

Can’t you borrow one?

And that is exactly what happened. So I am in Cambridge Leo is in Berlin designing my weblog in a café?. Networks Economic, Cultural and Media are becoming the nervous system of society argues Manuel Castells – and I am inclined to agree. And of course we could not forget Howard Rheingold who describes these interlocking technologies as technologies of co-operation that amplify human talents for co-operation.

This suggests that our: society, media and communications is evolving from the straight road of an industrial era to the more complex and networked world that mimics nature. Our new media world isn’t about content and distribution. It is about people, connections and social networks. And what happens when Petrabytes seem like flows of kilobytes?

This changes how we will work, how we will collaborate, what we make and who we make it with.

The changes wrought by the networked environment is structural. The above story is a case in point.

Urban nomads like their antecedents are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other ?smart phone?. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Further

The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing”, says Manuel Castells

Indeed The language of our post-modern culture is one of flexibility – fluidity – portability – permeability – transparency – interactivity – immediacy – facilitation and engagement. These individuals are seeking new consumption choices that can redefine commerce. The new individuals want to make a difference, they want to be heard, and each wants to matter.

This also has a significant impact on our identities described as psychological-self determination. In a post-modern world where our identities are not constructed and defined by, tradition, geography, and economics. We can have many selves, as we undertake a quest for self identity.

This is described as Psychological self-determination the ability to exert control over the most important aspects of ones life, especially personal identity, which has become the source of meaning and purpose in a life no longer dictated by geography or tradition.

These new individuals shun traditional organisations in favour of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The new individuals thus demand a high quality of direct participation and influence. They have skills to lead, confer and discuss, and they are not content to be good foot soldiers.

So In a post-modern world we can have many selves, as we undertake a quest for self identity. And this is very important because without an identity we become very noisy ghosts in the social machine of life.

Accelerating into the future

Devices, too, are on a steep trajectory. Just as Sony’s Walkman once planted the notion that music can be mobile, the BlackBerry by Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian firm, has since 1999 made e-mail on the go seem normal. And just as the personal-computer era entered the mainstream only in the 1980s with Apple’s commercialisation of the ?graphical user interface?, the mobile era arguably began only last summer when the same firm launched the iPhone, with its radically new and user-friendly touch interface. As a result, Google, for instance, has received 50 times more web-search requests from iPhones this year than from any other mobile handset.

Back in the distant days of 2005 we wrote about The Birth of the mobile information society As Timo Kopomaa wrote in The City in your pocket

THE FREEDOM PROVIDED by the mobile phone means that people are always available, even when moving, i.e. they are maximizing their contact potential. The more people have a mobile phone, the more complete this reachability becomes. The “need” behind the use of the mobile phones is not just a need for contacts but for autonomous life management, a need to expand the scope of this management both geographically and temporarily. The mobile phone is used to increase the potential in life and to decrease the feeling of possibly missing something.

Kopomaa extends his thinking

As an instrument for maintaining contacts, the mobile phone can be viewed as a ‘place’ adjacent to yet outside of home and work place, a ‘third place’ in the definition of Ray Oldenburg (1989). Oldenburg defined his concept on terms of physical spaces, applying it to coffee-houses, shops and other meeting places. Also the mobile phone is, in its own way, a meeting place, a popular place for spending time, simultaneously a non-place, a centre without physical or geographical boundaries. The mobile phone offers a space where you can withdraw when you feel like it. In addition to small-talk and managing everyday chores, the mobile phone also provides an arena for more serious and intimate discussions which one may not have at home in the presence of the spouse, for example.

The mobile phone has become an established part of urban culture and lifestyle. The use of mobile phone is connected to the fact that urban space is more and more becoming a ‘common living-room’. The freedom and public anonymity of the downtown area streets and squares promote the use of the mobile phone, which also has a lower treshold of contacting than in other types of interaction. Mobile phones have brought added vitality to the public space and allow users to find new ways of attaching themselves to the hub of the city. The mobile phone, as a tool for managing affairs and maintaining the network of social relations, serves to futher condense the use of space.

This is the world of the 7th Mass Media and all that implies.

When the economy is shaken by a powerful set of new opportunities with the emergence of the next technological revolution, society is still strongly wedded to the old paradigm and its institutional framework. The world of computers, flexible production and the internet has a different logic and different requirements from those that facilitated the spread of the automobile, synthetic materials, mass production and the highway network. Suddenly in relation to the new technologies, the old habits and regulations become obstacles, the old services and infrastructures are found wanting, the old organisations and institutions inadequate. A new context must be created; a new ‘common sense’ must emerge and propogate.

Such massive economic transformations involve complex processes of social assimilation. That encompass radical changes in the patterns of production, organisation, management, communication, transportation, and consumption, leading ultimately to a different ‘way of life’. Thus each surge requires massive amounts of effort, investment and learning, both individually and socially.

Tired of the propaganda yet? I know I am. Watch the news on TV. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, it doesn?t matter. They?re all broadcasting propaganda. They all have their agenda to fill. I?m tired of reading and hearing how the ?liberal left? own the media. When I watch TV news, especially Fox, I see and hear nothing but the neo-conservative viewpoint and agenda. It?s the same with reading the papers. Everything seems so one sided. One really has to work in order to find the many sides of a story these days. Once you do find the different sides, it?s difficult to figure out who to believe, and sometimes you may need to believe more than one point of view.

And

I grew up with television. I watched a war on the nightly news at a tender, pre-teen age. I grew up believing the media could be trusted. We were told the truth. It was the Russians, the Cubans and the Chinese people with their communist systems who were lied to, who believed the propaganda their governments told them. It was their state owned media that lied. I came to find out years later how wrong I was. Talking to colleagues from former communist states, I have come to discover it is I who had believed propaganda all those years ago. We were lied to all those years back and we continue to be lied to. Our own government documents and admissions prove this. The mass media has been complicit in this. It is sad to say that I no longer trust any news without documentation, and I especially do not trust the mass media conglomerates. I never take a story at its surface. Even though it takes time, I dig and read many sources in an effort to evaluate and determine for myself what the truth is. I don?t always like what I find, but I feel it is worth it if the story is important. After all, the truth will set you free, and propaganda was created to enslave.

The erosion of Trust
The erosion of trust in governments, the institutions of state, the commercial sector. Sadly, all have been proven to have; misled, lied, cheated and deceived. From; Enron, to Dasani in the UK, to why we went to war in Iraq, and the trustworthiness of the news and media. This is not of course a recent phenomenon, however the reach of communications is.

Either directly or indirectly, people today are far more skeptical about the precise intent of any form of communication. They look for intention, even if it doesn’t exist. They look for the motive. It has become a society whereby organisations are guilty until proven otherwise.

Also The invasion has begun – Trust: the most precious commodity any brand or business has – Advocacy vs. Push – The erosion of trust – The last presses we ever own – redefining newsprint media – Citizen Journalism and the new media ecology – Blogs and trust – Breaking news – Jefferson blogs – What is the future for newspapers? – The Chosen – Blogging the war – Fake Politics vs. Authentic Politics. engagememt vs. platitudes – Big business putting the squeeze on Newspapers

ITV may well become another example of what happens where ultimately hubris leads organisations. Compare ITV with the BBC or indeed the Guardian, who have maintained high standards, whilst embracing the future of a digital world.

It seems incredible that the mighty ITV, which only a few years ago dominated Britain’s television viewing figures, should be reduced to its current feeble state. For the first time the audience share of its flagship channel ITV1 has sunk below 20% for the year to date. Having pinned its hopes on getting a boost from the football World Cup, ITV instead mirrored England’s performance: mediocre results, underperforming stars, eventually trounced by a cunning old rival (the BBC, in this case). The rest of ITV’s line-up has also performed abysmally. This week it suffered the indignity of canning the latest attempt to get Saturday prime-time viewers – a show derided as a “mush-fest” – after one episode.

It was ownership of an ITV franchise that media mogul Roy Thomson once described as being “a licence to print money”. Now not only is that licence being revoked but the press that minted the currency appears to have broken down. The question is, can it be fixed?

It seems incredible that the mighty ITV, which only a few years ago dominated Britain’s television viewing figures, should be reduced to its current feeble state. For the first time the audience share of its flagship channel ITV1 has sunk below 20% for the year to date. Having pinned its hopes on getting a boost from the football World Cup, ITV instead mirrored England’s performance: mediocre results, underperforming stars, eventually trounced by a cunning old rival (the BBC, in this case). The rest of ITV’s line-up has also performed abysmally. This week it suffered the indignity of canning the latest attempt to get Saturday prime-time viewers – a show derided as a “mush-fest” – after one episode.

Dire viewing figures have meant falling revenues and a summer drought of ad bookings. The industry rumour is that August’s results announcement will be grimmer viewing even than Love Island, the tawdry reality show gracing ITV’s schedule. So bad, in fact, that the company’s chief executive Charles Allen will preempt his critics by leaving the sinking ship.

It was Mr Allen and Michael Green who orchestrated the merger of the franchises Granada and Carlton, with the talk at the time of synergies and savings to be made. In fact the reverse has happened. The company is simply not producing new programmes that people want to watch. Meanwhile the company is slashing spending on drama, which will only make matters worse. Its after-midnight schedule is now clogged with desperate money-spinning quiz shows of the very lowest quality.

ITV already faced a struggle for its future, in that the approaching digital switchover would remove its protected status as a “terrestrial” broadcaster. To cope with the coming of the multichannel world – already spreading rapidly through Freeview – ITV needed to be bold and redefine itself. It has failed to do so, and may instead be trampled in the rush. This matters because British television would then risk being carved up by a BBC/Sky duopoly.

Who succeeds Mr Allen is thus of prime importance. It needs to be someone who knows television, the medium not just the industry, and who can revive a line-up and attract talent. Because at this rate, there may not be an ITV around for that much longer.

ITV’s share price drop puts BSkyB in the red and Bebo and the Lost Generation. Oh you mean Generation “C”

More on ITV

One of the great mysteries of large distributed systems – from communities and organisations to brains and ecosystems – is how globally coherent activity can emerge in the absence of centralised authority or control

This is the thing that perplexes large organisations I think because it flys in the face of received wisdom.

On this blog, I think we have tracked and demonstrated how dynamic and powerful communities can be. For good and bad.

But their existence, is now part of our world in a way that perhaps was not obvious before.

Says Duncan J. Watts, from his book Six Degrees, the science of a connected age

Other bits and pieces that inspired me were

For now, it’s enough to say that we don’t just have friends, rather we have groups of friends, each of which is defined by the particular set of circumstances – some context… The groups, however, are connected by virtue of individuals who belong to more than one group. In time, these overlaps between groups many grow stronger, and the boundaries between them blur, as people from one group start to interact with people from another via the intermediation of a mutual friend

So, of course it makes sense that networks are made up of many overlapping communities and that they are never static.

So, what we are witnessing are the greenshoots of networks emerging into our economic world, where we are conscious of them perhaps for the first time.

The more I think about it, whether, its music or mobile communications, broadcast, travel, finance there are ways to engage communities, and to build new socio-economic platforms.

In a connected world, communities hold great power, and not just via hyperlink analysis on the Web. The groundbreaking book “Communities Dominate Brands” provides a truly realistic glimpse into the way communities have affected the way we market. Communities have huge pulling power on brands and at search engines. Tapping into those communities using multichannel programs and radically rethinking old-style advertising techniques is the future of marketing.

Thank you for the thumbs up

Via ClickZ

and thanks to Jackie Danicki for the hat tip