Wherever You Go, There You Are
Illustration 1: The KCTS 9 television studio
From a remove of 12 years, it’s clear
The Harvard Business Review article “Welcome to the Experience Economy” (Pine & Gilmore, 1998) offers an accurate prediction of things that were then yet to come. Although the authors focus primarily on physical world retail and dining business as staging grounds for experience, many of the concepts of experience have shaped the virtual worlds of media as well.
As has been happening so often in my recent readings, I can almost catch glimpses of myself in the pages, a ghostly figure peeking out from behind the words. The article tips its hat to the Walt Disney Corp.’s entertainment experience expertise, then in the next paragraph describes Recreational Equipment Incorporated’s experiential shopping approach. For me, these two companies are more then just interesting examples in support of a thesis.
Disney and REI are former employers where I helped turn the experiences they offered into something that could be delivered over the Internet. Now, at public TV station KCTS 9, I’m trying to do the same thing. What I’m coming to realize is that while much of television has moved towards experiential programming, public television’s brand identity is built around a premium presentational style that doesn’t lend itself easily to experiential remediation.
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Like The Who, I Sell Out
In 2002 Richard Florida’s concept of a “creative class” resonated with many readers. In his book “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” he had identified that in the latter decades of the 20th Century many of the more lucrative occupations in America did not fit existing economic classes. (Florida, 2002). I didn’t read it, and one of the reasons was certainly due to an aversion I had at the time to anything that carried with it any whiff of the dotcom era. While I’d hardly had to be dragged kicking and screaming into five years working at Internet startups, I’d always resisted the inflated rhetoric that came with them. I wasn’t looking to be part of any “new economy” or “new paradigm.” I was looking to do good solid work that returned profit on investment.
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Introduction
There are many ways to approach studying the business of mass market entertainment. Approaches in material I’ve recently read ranged in focus from a business history of American movie studios written for a popular audience (Epstein, 2005), to sociological perspectives on the culturally transformative nature of creative work (Peterson, & Anand, 2004), to business case studies of prominent entertainment companies (Pisano, & Wagonfeld; Rivkin, & Meier, 2005).
All of these readings have focused on the unique aspects of culture industry. To be sure, as a business culture production sits in a unique spot in society. The mechanisms of creating and distributing cultural goods at any given time and place have not only been similar to, but sometimes have been identical with, the mechanisms for creating and distributing political and religious power. They all deal in display and performance, content creation and content distribution. This contributes to the enormous stature culture production holds in our society.
What I wonder is if sometimes we take this exceptional aspect of culture production too seriously and expect that since it is a unique type of business, the business practices at successful companies in the industry must also be unique. This thought cropped up a number of times during my reading.
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I went to this year’s South By Southwest Interactive conference and returned from Austin with my brain buzzing like a flock of mopeds. As with any conference experience, the value of SXSW is as much about what you experience as it is about what you learn. Months, and even years, after a good conference your experiences there will trigger useful connections and marvelous epiphanies.
To make sense of the whole of SXSW, I’ve written two different blog posts. This one is a review of the mostly tactical information I took in on while trying to maximize the return on my employer’s expenditure in sending me there. For the MCDM program’s “Flip the Media” blog, I hearkened back to the sort of writing I used to do for the late Mr. Showbiz Web site and reported on the SXSW experience in full-on gossip column style: My Employer Sent Me to SXSW and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.
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I felt very honored when I received a message from my UW Master of Communication, Digital Media colleague Peter Luyckx that my post Every Company is a Media Company was selected as the MCDM “Flip the Media” blog’s best post for 2009. I also was the only author to have two posts in the “best of” list, as my post Social Media Survives Budget Slashing at Many Companies… Why? came in at position number five.
The entire list is here: 2009 Editors’ Picks: Top 9 Posts
Friday, December 18, 2009
This is my final paper for the Master of Communication in Digital Media program’s Emerging Markets in Digital Media class, taught by the insightful and capable Anita Verna Crofts. I had a lot of time for research and preparation in writing this paper, and was drawing on topics in which I have considerable professional experience and personal passion. But I also began my full time job at KCTS Television at the same time that I was writing the paper and preparing the accompanying presentation. In the ensuing time crunch I was unable to give the paper as much attention as it deserved and feel it is essentially a first draft. I believe that there’s potential to turn this idea into a real business model that could do much to help the living conditions in many countries.
See also: eCommerce Cooperatives in Emerging Markets Flash Presentation for an animated presentation on how the business model might work.
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Friday, December 18, 2009
This animation illustrates a simplified hypothetical case for using mobile phones to provide the payment and distribution infrastructure for ecommerce consumer cooperatives in emerging markets. For more on this proposed business model, please read: eCommerce Co-operatives for Emerging Markets.
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Saturday, November 21, 2009
The fallout of the Iranian elections was a Twitter moment for me. As protestors took to the streets of Tehran, clashing with Basij on motorcycles, I followed the #iranelection hashtag. After a young woman’s death from a sniper’s bullet was seen around the world, her name became another search column I kept open in TweetDeck, another hashtag: #neda.
Through social media, I developed a simultaneous sense of deep involvement in the events in Iran and a complete feeling of helplessness as the crackdown began to suppress the protests. For a moment, it looked as though a genuine media revolution was at hand, but then it slipped away. But drawing conclusions about what the outcome might be is up to us, and it’s something that requires breaking out of our own cultural preconceptions.
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Friday, November 13, 2009
In reading the articles When Radio Meets Mobile in Pakistan and Mobiles in Citizen Media, I found myself having a strange reaction for a media technologist. I became excited by the first article as it described the ways in which the widespread use of cellphones with built-in FM radio receivers in Pakistan has enabled access to news, even if it is sometimes given in code as in the example of “bad traffic” being used as an accurate, if euphemistic, way to broadcast locations of urban violence. But reading the second article, I was wary of the long-term implications of citizen journalism in developing countries that is enabled by digital communications devices.
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In his article, “Connecting a Nation: Roshan Brings Communications Services to Afghanistan,” Karim Khoja provides a fascinating first-person account of the challenges of introducing a mobile phone network to Afghanistan. What little communications infrastructure the country had did not survive decades of war, so when Khoja arrived in 2002 he was part of an effort to build a system from scratch.
Paired with the article by Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie, “M-PESA: Mobile Money for the ‘Unbanked’ — Turning Cellphones into 24-Hour Tellers in Kenya” some commonalities in establishing new services in challenging circumstances arise. Although M-PESA’s widespread adoption coincided with a period of civil unrest in Kenya, the situation there is very different from daily life in Afghanistan.
In both markets, it was necessary to train new employees to fill roles that hadn’t previously existed in their countries, navigate a maze of different languages and dialects, and solve cultural and logistical problems. But what I find most interesting is that both projects were the result of partnerships between for-profit companies, foreign government agencies, local government regulators, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Clearly we are in the era described by Prahalad in “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”: The excesses of colonial capitalism have become overshadowed by the pragmatic reality that nothing generates wealth like private enterprise, and that countries’ capacity for wealth generation is the single thing that most separates the global haves from the have-nots. These projects are post-post-colonial.
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