PowerPoint Presentation

key publishing trends 2015

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Social distributionFast and slowCollaborationVideoMobilePersonalistionEvolving business modelsWearablesGetting content right

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1 DistributionIf content is king, distribution is queen and she wears the trousersJonathan PerelmanVice President, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures

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Social: The new path way to newsFacebookYouTubeLinkedInTwitterPinterestGoogle+InstagramMyspaceTumblrVineRedditPercentage of U.S adults who use each social networking site & percent of U.S adults who get news from each social networking site

64%30%Use siteGet news on site51%10%3%8%4%1%1%1%2%19%16%15%14%12%5%4%3%3%

#According to Shareaholic, social is now the number one source of traffic over and above search on the web.Nowhere is this more true than for News, and its pretty clear why when you look at these figure from the Pew research centre in the US. 30% of US adults now get their news from facebook, 10% from Youtube and 8% from Twitter.As a recent readwrite.com article said, Facebook has us on lockdown. While teens may fine facebook uncool, more than half of online adults aged 65+ are on facebook. Facebook is still used by the vast majority of the population and people are spending longer on it than ever before. Facebook is part of our daily routine more than flossing our teeth is.This is very much a trend that weve seen in action already in 2015. Daily referrals to Guardian content from facebook exceeded google for the first time for two days in January driven by the social reaction to the Charlie Hebdo tragedy.4

You can trick someone to click, but you cant trick someone to share80%of the time people preferred headlines that helped them decide if they wanted to read the full article before they had to click through.Facebook August 2014

#This trend towards social is important as received wisdom tends to be that social traffic is more valuable than search. And this is why.This is why social is an increasingly important driver of traffic. Facebook and Buzzfeed have made it clear that clickbait headlines like the one you see here, have been declining in effectiveness for five years. Research from Facebook has shown that consumers want headlines that help them decide to whether or not to read an article rather than headlines that trick them in to doing so.If you dont trick a user in to reading an article and they click on it of their own volition and then engage with it, then they are theoretically much more likely to share it. This is why a user driven by social is potentially more valuable to a site.However, its not quite as simple as that.

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The considered share

#Research from Chartbeat has actually shown high amount of shares (not just likes) does not necessarily correlate to an article's total page views. A large amount of shares happen through readers who themselves never read the piece. Often they want to be seen to be sharing an article for kudos.In an effort to stop a rise in potentially indiscrimate social sharing theres a new social link sharing service in town, but The Atlantic-incubated This has a catch: you can only share one link per day.This is the polar opposite of the endless feeds that Twitter power users are used to. This General Manager Andrew Golis said in an interview. We wanted to create a platform that is specifically about getting the highest quality content recommendations and getting fewer of them.6

Quality, not quantityWhile the amount of attention people are willing to give to media and the Internet in general has skyrocketedlargely due to having a screen and connection with them everywhereit eventually is finite.

Evan Williams, CEO Medium

#So while This has adopted a quantity over quality approach, this is indicative of a broader trend where publishers shouldnt just be focusing on a numbers game.This is why new site Medium reports on TTR, which stands for total time reading. Its an imperfect measure of time people spend on story pages. We think this is a better estimate of whether people are actually getting value out of Medium.This is an interesting point in itself and is why the Guardian has integrated Upworthys attention minutes metric in to Ophan, but more broadly it also raises the issue of quantity vs quality when measuring success online.Despite the trend of social over-taking search as a traffic driver, it actually only represents the minority of Guardian traffic despite the two days we saw in January where facebook referrals overtook google on our site.However, we dont need to be too apologetic about this. While we are one of the world's most successful publishers in regards to our amount of shares, likes etc according to Newswhip (driven by the frequency with which we tweet, our vertical specialisation and huge number of followers according to econultancy) social only accounts for a minority of our traffic precisely because we have such a high amount of direct destination traffic. For advertisers who want to associate their brand with ours, these users who specifically want to visit the Guardian should be worth a lot. Also, a significant amount of our Google traffic comes from brand searches i.e. people specifically searching for the Guardian.

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2Fast and Slow Content

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How do you measure fast and slow? Pages per visitTime spent per page

Deep SnackSpends time reading a few pages of interest

Deep ReadSpends time reading many pagesFleeting visitBrowses a few pages of interest and leavesPage scanFlicks through many pagesLowHighHighLow

#Its often assumed that engagement metrics like time spent and page per visit are doing one and the same thing when helping us measure the quality of user relationship. However, its clear that they tell us very different things about our users browsing behaviour as you can see from our approach to classifying editorial content above (explain chart).These differing approaches to content appeal to different sides of our brain.Daniel Kahnemans dual process theory tells us how the brain responds to these differing types of content: (Driving on motorway example)1) System 1; Unconscious Attention = Fast Content = Fleeting visits and page scans = Social Media, listicles, BREAKING NEWS!, Snacking, Younger Demographics.2) System 2; Conscious Attention = Slow Content = deep snacks and deep reads = Complex editorial (= more comments)As one blogger said last year, its for this reason that media owners shouldnt game content (i.e. through clickbait) but instead should game emotional psychology i.e. produce content that appeals to these mind sets and need states.9

The squeezed middle?Word countValue500 800 words

Source: Quartz

#This is why long and short form are important, but anything in the middle isnt.Quartz have found that whilst people like to read short, fast digital content, they also really appreciate longer, more analytical pieces. The dangerous ground is in the middle. Turns out that for them, articles that are 500-800 words are too long to be a highly shareable, short, sharp take but too short to be an in depth, insightful analysis. Or as Editor-in-chief Kevin Delany puts it:The place between 500 and 800 words is the place you don't want to be because it's not short and fast and focused and shareable, but it's not long enough to be a real pay-off for readers. The standard of production for most traditional news organisations is still somewhere within that range. For a digitally native organisation there's an opportunity.

In Emily Bells most recent Cudlip lecture she talks about the Tabloidisation of new online. Not necessarily as a negative thing, but as a description of the dual strategies that many news organisations are pursuing. Tabloid or popular journalism is being done by the same outlets that produce the most serious chin-stroking think-pieces. In 2005 the Huffington Post pioneered this mullet strategy for journalism, which looked neat and respectable at the front, wild and hairy at the back. The overall effect might be jarring, but generally people are choosing to only look at one side at once. That approach is now refined by a new generation of digitally native news organisations like Buzzfeed, Vice, Upworthy and Mashable.10

#Weve got the long-form side of things pretty well covered with a dedicated long-reads area of our website which aggregates the best of the long form editorial and opinion pieces from the Journal section of the daily paper. 11

The rise of short form

#For example, theres the Vox Sentences newsletter: 'A daily reading list people who want to stay informed but don't have the inclination to stay on Twitter every dayExplainer Sites are going to be huge, - take three sentence science. which explains scientific principles in just three sentences. (e.g. the physics of whiskey and the more humid your home, the more tonal your voice.News organisations have caught one. Heres an example of some explainer journalism from WSJ.com. After Alibabas $25bn dollar IPO, WSJ ran an explainer on the site which although huge in China, meant little to American audiences.The BBCs coverage of the Indian elections last year got about as short-form as it can get distributing news to users in India on whatssapp

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Robots vs Humans

Robot / Short?Human / Long?

#So what does the future look like for Long vs Short form? Will Robots compile the short easy stuff and humans the more complex reads?Last year, the LA Times trialled an algorithm called Quakebot that wrote a piece on an earthquake within 3 minutes of a tremor being felt Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LATs content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.It was later complemented by a human editorial piece.13

Collaboration3Do what you do best and link to the restJeff Jarvis 2007

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Wheres the scoop?

#Jeff Jarvis makes a very eloquent point when he points to the thousands of journalists who were despatched to the Vatican to report on the identity of the new pope. As he pointed out, there was no scoop here! Is this really the best use of the worlds vast media resources?The process of Matchingwhen one or more news organizations writes a story based on a news item that another outlet broke firstis a similar institutional problem deeply rooted within many mainstream newsrooms. In both these examples media organisations are becoming part of a squeezed middle that neither differentiate no add value from a content perspective, hence Jarviss now eight year old quote Do what you do best and link to the rest.However, we think theres a big opportunity for media organisations to do more than just link in a one way transactional relationship. Theres potential for media owners to collaborate to create content that is greater than the some of its parts.Perhaps we should say Do what you do best and collaborate with the rest?

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Why just link when you can collaborate?

#A great case in point can be found in the partnership between Vice and The NY Review of Books who have collaborated to form a Talking Heads series.It was director Martin Scorsese who brought old and new media outlets together when he suggested that The New York Review of Books meet with Vice Media chief creative officer Eddy Moretti. The first episode of "Talking Heads," uploaded last week, features a discussion onabout the shift in U.S.-China relations since President Jimmy Carter established diplomatic ties 35 years ago.

The Guardian and the St Louis-Post collaborated on Ferguson coverage.Journalists from both organisations got chatting on twitter and decided to collaborate when they realised the story was going to be so much more than a regional or local story.The Guardian brought its digital expertise and experience in curating journalism from other media owners, while the St Louis Post brought local expertise.The project solicited reader submissions about their own experiences with racial profiling from the police. They each put a submission form on their websites, sent out calls to readers to share their stories on social media with the hashtag #FergusonVoices, and also included links to the form in other stories on Ferguson.

Commercial collaboration can make for some unlikely bedfellows.We wont just be seeing more editorial collaboration thus year, but more commercial collaboration too.ANP 2.0 A cross platform multi-channel planning tool that we launched a couple of years ago and have been making a lot of noise about recently after bringing the telegraph on board. Conversations are being had about further collaboration over the next few years until the NRS is reworked.Johnston Press, Local World and Newsquest have all united for 1XL digital sell. The platform will draw on data from each publisher and third party data, alongside semantic and contextual targeting capabilities, to optimise audience targeting and maximise performance of advertising campaigns.

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Video4Five years ago, Facebook primarily consisted of text. If you fast forward five years, its probably going to be mostly videoMark Zuckerberg, 2014

#TV is becoming more like the web and the web is becoming more like TV. People arent just reading content anymore, theyre watching it.Most people working in this building grew up with text and banners, but theres a whole generation below us for whom video is or will be - their key media. If youre a teenager in 2017 then desktop wont even the majority way people access the web.

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We are watching more online video than ever beforeSource: Youtube, IAB, OfcomNearly 50%

of 11-15 year olds watch online video clips every day

More than

1 Billion

unique users visit YouTube each month

By the end of this decade, 16-24s watching live TV will drop to:59%

from 93% now

#Viewing TV set is declining, especially in the younger generation. By the end of this decade, live TV will have dropped from 93% of 16-24s viewing TV viewing to just 59%. Those extra minutes of viewing increasingly shift to mobile devices. This is in part due to the environments their parents offer them - the numbers of children with a TV in their bedroom is declining, decreasing by 1/3 over the past 5 years, while the amount of children watching TV on a tablet has gone up by 1/3 since 2013 (now at 20% of total)

Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube that's almost an hour for every person on EarthFacebook has 3 billion video views a day (up from a million a year ago)

Media owners need to tool up for the growth of video. Snapchat, Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram all launched video ads in 2014Last week Netflixs CEO made a bold claim that broadcast TV has 16 years leftFacebook spent $500m on video ad tech company Live Rail last year

However, its unlikely that well forgo broadcast TV all-together we need TV to meet different need states, some of which are facilitated by broadcast TV. VOD excels at satisfying personal approaches to TV, specifically indulging and escaping, but it is less equipped for more social needs such as unwinding and seeking comfort.

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Video has grown beyond cat clipsVICE is no longer known as a magazine publisher, its known as the number one, single most important purveyor of online video in the world bar none

- Alex Miller, Global Editor of Vice

Sources: Vice, Youtube, comScore, Independent

#Vice News is the fastest-growing Youtube channel of all time, now with 150m+ views and racking up over 1m subscribers since launch. Vice News has been heavily backed by Youtube. Why? Youtube know that they need premium content to guarantee repeat viewers Vice News takes them beyond reach and offers an audience

Youtube (which by the way is now 50% mobile) have spent a huge amount of money on promoting Vice News, contributing to its meteoric rise the channel now has 1m subscribers, and is the fastest-growing channel since launch. Their 42-minute documentary about Islamic State, shot on the ground in Syria and Iraq, got seven million views in a week and if comScore is anything to go by their core audience are males, 18-34. While Vice isnt necessarily replacing traditional news for all millenials, there are a core group of young males who are hugely engaged with Vice and their content.

For Youtube, creating an online video channel such as this turns their old offering mass reach into an audience that they can define by channel. Its likely that theyll keep pursuing avenues like this, stretching the amount of time we associate with spending a video on Youtube and evolving from cat video central to a media owner that also offers web series and news.

And potentially round the corner for Youtube rumored to be spending A BILLION DOLLARS on Twitch the world's leading video platform and community for gamers when people record their screen of them playing games. A billion sounds a bit much, but does sound wonderful if you want to future-proof your business and become *The* way to connect with Millenial males

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Vine gets serious

#When C4s chief news correspondent Alex Thompson started creating short videos, it shifted Vine from comedy clips to a serious medium - that carries significant emotional weight.Vine has been used by journalists reporting in Ferguson and Sierra Leone as well as locally, to deliver coverage of the Scottish referendum.

Has anyone heard of Jordy Mir?Jordi Mir captured the horrifying footage of the two assailants murdering policeman Ahmed Merabet as he lay on the ground, part of the horrific attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices.What he did next, Mir told Agence France Presse, was he put it on Facebook. He reflex to publish came from his frequent use of social media. I take a picture of a cat, I put it on Facebook. It was the same stupid reflex. Stupid or heroic?After ten minutes or so Mir, still in shock, reconsidered his decision to publish the film to his 2,500 Facebook friends and took it down. But by then it was too late. Someone had uploaded the video to YouTube. Within an hour, Mir was alarmed to see his own film on the television news.

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#If you cant beat them, hire them. This is what we did when we hired Vlogger Myles Dyer as our video marketing manager at the time he had more youtube subscribers to his own personal channel than the Guardian did. Fortunately hes done his job properly and our youtube channel has increased subscriber number significantly.To get a feel for the sort of quality video content we produce, take a look at this short highlights reel from last year.

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Mobile5Smartphones are repositories of the self in that they store our memories, our autobiographies, they contain a paper trail of the self in the form of texts, images, searches, wish lists, and secrets

Dr Simon Hampton, UEA

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By 2016, two thirds of our internet consumption will be mobileSource: Enders Analysis UK forecast

Share of UK internet consumption (%)

33%

37%

36%

#As these figures from Enders show, by next year, desktop internet browsing will be a minority pastime.Ofcoms Digital consumption report released last week revealed that the laptop was still considered to be the most important device for getting along among the UK population. However, for those who own a laptop, tablet and smartphone, the tablet is considered the most important device pretty amazing when you consider how a few years ago there was zero demand for tablets and apple had to invent a market for them.And unsurprisingly this trend is increasingly going to be reflected in client ad budgets. According to emarketer Mobile ad spending is expected to have risen 96.0% in 2014 to just over 2 billion ($3.16 billion), up from more than 1.03 billion ($1.61 billion) in 2013.Mobile will account for 13.4% of total media spending in the UK this year, compared with 13.6% for newspapers. In 2015, mobile will surpass prints total, at 20.5% of all spending vs. 17.0%.This is both a threat and opportunity for news publishers. Not only are we managing the transition of our audience from print to desktop, but now desktop to mobile too.

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11-15 year olds would miss mobile devices more than any other mediaWhen I have downtime, I hardly ever just sit and think, I prefer to check my smartphoneWhen Im out with my friends, I will check my phone if theres a lull in the conversation

44%Source: IAB and Firefish, Realview Q. Here are some statements that describe how people behave with their devices. How much do you agree or disagree that each one describes you? Base. Total Respondents 1376, 55% Young 47% Parents, Ofcom 2014

52%

37%

Smart boredom: We cant do nothing anymore

#Probably the one trend that has accelerated mobile usage to new levels of total pervasiveness in our day to day lives is that we simply cannot do nothing any more.Weve all been there, but these findings from the IABs realview research show how important mobiles are to our day to day lives. They fill gaps in out downtime and keep us entertained in moments of boredom.We use our phones on average 16 times a day, for 2 minute stints.Ofcom has even shown us how worryingly engrained mobile devices are in the day-to-day lives of kids too (an audience weve decided to call mini-llennials credit Iona Murphy in the Guardians Audience research team with that one!). Most 11-15 year olds claim that they would miss their mobile more than any other media, and that its the first thing they check after waking up in the morning.1 in 2 people (same study say that their smartphone is their most personal device, and its hard to argue with that. The IAB have enlisted Dr Simon Hampton of the UEA to help them with their mobile research, and he rightly points out that mobiles are as personal as diaries. They are repositories of the self. Just think how uncomfortable youd get if we told everyone in the room right now to swap phones and start to have a look through them.

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Its all about appsSource: Flurry Analytics, Benedict Evans% of our mobile time spent on apps

#The vast majority of our mobile browsing time happens on apps as opposed to browser according to Flurry analytics.A lot of apps are walled gardens there isnt much connecting them. Without the URL structure of the web, mobile app developers are forced to implement deep linking schemes to build back some of the basic functionality that the open web was originally built upon.But thats all changing - Facebook, Twitter and Google have all taken steps to improve deep linking in the past two years and have all started working harder to promote app installs and return to apps.One particular success story with apps are cards - the things you see that allow you to complete an action from one service within another service tunneling through the walled garden, so to speak.

Its this app-ecosystem that is of vital importance for news publishers to get right.Its not just that mobile is a threat to digital ad revenue (and a future opportunity), but that it also rapidly accelerates market consolidation amongst news and especially news app publishers. Guardian (or New York Times) desktop readers might visit up to 12 sites during their typical lunch break, which is why we could survive so long without ever fully entering the business of fast breaking news organisations. In the mobile and especially the app space, however, this portfolio of daily used apps shrinks to 2 or 1 app. This explains why in many markets, one or two news organisations' apps show stellar growth while the rest of the news app products remain on a plateau. They might be good with feature journalism, investigations, long reads etc., but are missing the breaking news layer to ever weave themselves into their potential readers daily habits and thus don't make it in the app space. In this sense, mobile is a double-whammy: if it doesn't grow complementary to your desktop traffic, but as a substitute, it cuts down your digital ad revenue, while it also forces newsrooms to expand their breaking news operations 24/7, something that only a few news orgs in each country can shoulder, the majority of mid-sized publishers who had a fighting chance on desktop now fall by the wayside.

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What were getting paid for you to read this

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Cards: the future of mobile native?Images: http://blog.intercom.io/the-end-of-apps-as-we-know-them/

#Both the Android Kitkat and iOS8 operating systems had significant changes in the way that notifications were presented with a focus on the user completing the action within the notification without ever leaving the home screen.The experience of our primary mobile screen being a bank of app icons that lead to independent destinations is dying. And that changes what we need to design and build. The idea of an app as an independent destination is becoming less important, and the idea of an app as a publishing tool, with related notifications that contain content and actions, is becoming more important. This will change what we design, and change our product strategy.That means you wont jump from app to app, copying information from one to other. No more opening photos, editing, saving, re-opening, saving, re-opening, and posting. More efficient interactions, better user experiences, better productsWhat does this means for publishers? Can you serve an ad on a card?

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6PersonalisationPeople tend to get into this echo chamber where more and more of what they see conforms to the idea of who some software thinks they are. You start to become more and more like the image of you because that is what you are seeing

Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget

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The Swan like internet

Everything.me

Biobeats

#Technology drives ever increasing levels of personalisation and increasingly drives what is being referred to as the swan-like internet: Everything looks like its gliding smoothly along above the surface more smoothly than ever before with truly personalised content and experiences, but underneath everyone is paddling furiously / the technology is working harder.The Everything.me app provides a screen that recommends apps and services based on location and time-of-dayBiobeats - yet to launch - is an app that hacks the iPhones camera to measure the users heartbeat. Music is then created depending on the rhythm. Whether youre sleeping, jogging, concentrating or raving : the system creates a continuous track that is co-authored by you. Or by the collaborative inputs of the crowd.(From Mindshare trends report): Tescos facial recognition enabled self-checkouts analyse a customers features and determines their age and gender to beam suitable ads on screen as they check out.

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Personalisation for news brands?

#So what does personalisation look like for News Brands? (hopefully not this see slide)Personalisation is one of these things where most readers say they want it, when we interview them, but revolt once we actually address them in a personalised manner. Typical feedback is: "I want personalisation from Amazon, but not from the Guardian'. We still think we can gain enormously if we get personalisation right, but it will require us to tag our content in a much more granular fashion than just by topical keyword. Example: we are also thinking about tagging our content by tone (is this an overall 'happy or 'sad' story, is it 'brainy' etc. / When people hear personalisation, they still think 'Netflix' or 'Amazon.News orgs also have a much smaller inventory for personalisation algorithms to pick from (we publish 500 pieces a day) and the shelf-lives of our articles are also much shorter than that of a hollywood movie, which means we can't build as much profiling around it. That said, as the NYT innovation report showed when released last year, a lot of our vertical content isnt time specific. Can we package up our travel, film, recipes content etc in a much more bespoke, personalised way? A recipe is as relevant now as it was 5 years ago.Personalisation is important for news brands as it is the potential route to helping us retain one-hit wonders and grow audience enegagement, but there is a risk specifically for news orgs of over-selling personalisation.

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But personalisation is the enemy of serendipity

The death of serendipity?

#But doesnt personalisation mean the loss of serendipity? This is another factor news brands have to be aware of, with the world of book selling providing an interesting case in point.Bookshop browsing is a serendipitous experience that facilitates discovery , often of mid-selling titles that will perform incredibly well on word-of-mouth recommendation. Amazon is great at selling best sellers and is also good at sustaining the very long tail (the UK publishes 100,000 new books every year) of low-selling niche titles. However, what it is not good at is stimulating sales of mid-selling, lesser known titles the sorts of books that will be on every literary list and have a cute note underneath them singing their praises in Waterstones. Could over-personalisation translate this trend to the world of news? Could we see a small number of stories that exist within readers comfort zone promulgating an increasingly homogenous news experience?

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The ideal? Data with a human touch

#While some may welcome personalisation, as sensitivity towards the use of personal information and transparency of its use intensifies should we expect the authority of the algorithm to be questioned?Last year Facebook found itself in hot water after it was revealed that it had conducted a mood experiment on almost 700,000 of its users; the social network had tailored newsfeeds to positive and negative content and monitored how it affected those users own updates. In the backlash that ensued, users complained and protested at being used as digital guinea pigs for research.

This loss of serendipity that weve been talking about is caused by a wholly algorithm based approach to personalisation.A the guardian we have built, and continue to built are own real time data tools for the editorial teams to use to optimise the delivery of their content to users. It absolutely requires a human touch to be successful however. Journalists can be alerted to the traction that different stories are having on social platforms and chose to alert or deliver content accordingly.

If this process was fully automated then we would doubtless risk alienating and irritating our audience.

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7EvolvingBusiness ModelsThough digital is at the centre of our world, live is more popular than ever, the need to actually be live and connect with human beings and listen to people in the flesh seems to be the paradox of our age.Arianna Huffington

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News is hot property

#The news industry, more than almost more than any other, will continue to reinvent itself in 2015 as it looks to find ways to reverse the considerable structural decline in which it has been gripped for the last decade.Whats encouraging however, is that the new business models that are being developed are not simply band aid to an ailing sector, but in fact exciting new investment opportunities for venture capitalists.As a recent Wired magazine pointed out, the media sector is overflowing with capitalas of September 2014 it was the second-largest VC-funded area of the year, after software. Bad boy Vice Media is suddenly nouveau riche, everyone wants a piece of BuzzFeed, and while First Look may only have one funderthe founderit sure is one with deep pockets. (Plus hes promised $200 million more.) But you dont have to win the VC lottery to get noticed: Bleacher Report and HuffPo were both acquired before they hit the $50 million investment mark.

Whats also really telling, is the global foot print of this new breed of VC backed media brands.

Buzzfeed now operates in 8 markets including India where it launched in 2014 and opening dozens of foreign bureaus (including advertising for post in Nigeria). Mexico and Japan are next on the list.Huff Po exists in 11 countries, is launching in India, launching an Arabic edition and has a new focus on heavyweight journalism as it tries to shake the viral producer tag. Focus on long reads is part of that.Vice news expanding in to 7 new territories with the help of millions of dollars of investment in September. Already has 100 reporters in 34 countries.34

Membership or paywalls?

#So for starters, membership provides a new exciting business model for media owners to exploit.James Breiner of the International Journalists Network hit the nail on the head when he highlighted that an audience is just a group of observers, but that a community shares values and a deep interest in a topic or geographic area. It often has a bias toward action. That is where value comes in. Connecting these people and creating value for them is the beginning of a community. Only when you have connected them can you begin to get their financial support.There are some great examples of how communities have been built through membership schemes from around the world:LaSillaVacia, a Colombian website focused on investigative journalism about power and politics, has a membership group of 550 "Super Amigos" that in2013 contributed US $32,000. Their appeal is to people who want to support independent journalism. That is almost enough money to finance their operations for a month.

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Guardian Membership

#News brands have the power to convene:

And heres what weve got coming next year: Membership

Other examples from around the world:1) The Huffington Post will soon announce that it will host three conferences next spring built around its lifestyle rubric The Third Metric.2) In mid-October, Cosmopolitan said it would initiate two conferences in 2014 focused on women in their 20s.3) Atlantic Media, which publishes The Atlantic, National Journal and Quartz among other brands, now puts on more than 200 events a year, ranging from small exclusive dinners to weeklong conferences, and will add European and Asian events in the next year.

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8Wearables

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The human platform: the next wave of disruption50%of smartwatch users use them all day long

57%for wearable fitness devices users use them all day long

51%of watch users use them to keep an eye on their emails

Current UK Penetration:

6%Sept 2014

13%Sept 2015

#There is no shortage of statistics out there telling us about the rise of wearables as these forecasts from Enders attest to.Wearable Sales in John Lewis increased 395% y-on-y in 13/14 a sign of a medium in the ascendancy.However, the biggest, the real signal that things are about to get serious comes from the news that Apple is releasing a watch in 2015. 38

#Theres a lot of speculation on what the release of the Apple Watch actually means for their product suite:

1) Will The Watch will eventually be Digital Hub 3.0? Some analysts believe that in long run i.e. not this version of the Apple Watch, but the one several iterations down the line that the Watch will have cellular capability and the ability to interface with any number of objects, including accessories that have larger screens and will be the center of your computing existence. From Apples perspective, that means the Watch category is the very long-term replacement for the iPhone, at least for some segment of the population.

2) The Watchs competition is the iPhone This may seem a bit strange at first glance isnt the Apple Watch competing against Android Wear devices? but the truth is that the number of people who will start with the premise they want a smart watch and then decide which one to buy is miniscule. Rather, the Apple Watch is competing with non-consumption: people who dont wear watches because their smartphone is good-enough at telling time. For the Apple Watch to achieve the level of success that would justify it as a tentpole product for Apple, it must appeal to far wider audience than those who are already interested in smart watches; to put it another way, the Watch must be clearly superior to the iPhone in your pocket in enough ways to justify not only the additional expense of buying it but also the hassle of wearing it and charging it nightly. This means a vibrant app ecosystem that unlocks a wide array of functionality that no one company could ever come up with on its own

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News on wearables

#However, all of this is all well and good for Apple, but what does it mean for news providers?The Financial Times has alreadyput its fast FT service on Samsung devices using the Spritz reading technology. It's an experiment that the newspaper is fully aware is unlikely to become a big part of how it delivers news to its readers, at least in its first incarnation. But as an experiment it's a way of working out how the FT can reach people effectively any way they want.The Guardian for Glass offers updates of the Guardian's award-winning journalism with regular bundles of headline stories from the UK, Australian and US editions, as well as breaking news notifications making it even easier to be up-to-date with the news. Special features include the option to have short summaries delivered in audio, content sharing and the ability to save news items to read later on a desktop or mobile device.Google has killed off the current iteration of Google Glass, but has promised that new version is on the way. Why well this blog may give us an indication (next slide)

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Where do you draw the line?

#Are wearables getting too creepy however?Ask Chris Dancy what he ate on Aug. 11 of last year, and he can tell you (Chick-fil-A). He can also tell you about the weather that day (83F), what music he listened to (Kelly Clarksons Walk Away), how many e-mails he sent (21), how long he slept (8 hours and 35 minutes), how many steps he took (8,088), and when he took his dogs to the park (1:04 p.m.). Dancy, 45, doesnt have an amazing memory. Hes an extreme life hacker: He collects information about himself and his surroundings from 10 devices he wears or carries and 13 more in his home and car. He also catalogs virtually all of his online activity. The exhaustive record-keeping is an effort to discover the systems that shape his behavior so he can tinker with them and live better.

From CES this year:1) UVA Sunfriend: Wearables that measure the intake of UVA & UVB rays. Flashes when you need to reapply sunscreen and haveexceeded sun intake. Available Now: $49.992) Like A Glove: Designed to capture and store exact body measurements. Ensures all online clothing purchases fit. Eliminates common consumer pain points of online shopping3) Child Angel: GPS, WiFi and GSM bracelet that alerts parents of activities. Alerts if removed or outside of specified range

In other news, Fitbit data is being used in a court case in Canada:The first known court case using Fitbit activity data is underway. A law firm in Canada is using a clients Fitbit history in a personal injury claim. The plaintiff was injured four years ago when she was a personal trainer, and her lawyers now want to use her Fitbit data to show that her activity levels are still lower than the baseline for someone of her age and profession to show that she deserves compensation.

Clearly there is more quantified self data out there than we know what to do with. Where do we draw the line?42

9Content done rightThereadermustnever be confusedabout thesourceof content.

Jeff Jarvis 2014

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Why labelling matters51% of consumers confused about the lines between online advertorials and independent editorialHalf of confused consumers have been misled by content70% of confused consumers annoyed by obfuscation between the twoSource: Vibrant Media Nov 2014

#Branded content is nothing new. We have been creating advertorials, sponsored properties, advertiser funded programmes (both TV and radio) and digital content for years.What is new is that there is now a recognition of its value. That content should be treated as a yet another weapon in the marketing armoury and therefore a discipline as any other.The rise of the content is king mantra has been driven by a number of intertwined factors: 1) The proliferation of digital channels, 2) The loss of brand control over the brand message in the social sphere3) display becoming increasingly commoditised through programmatic,

Crowded with commercial messages, bombarded by brands, to cut through and to resonate with consumers, to drive preference and to build long term relationships, branded content offers an opportunity to create value for brands by creating new experiences and a deeper level of engagement when done right.

The question is what is content done right?

Authenticity and Trust are key.

According to research from Vibrant Media, 21% of consumers have mistaken online advertorial for independent editorial and a further 30% are unsure if they have done so. Nearly half of those confused consumers felt that they had been misled by the content, and tellingly 54% of this sample felt annoyed and 15% very annoyed by what at times felt like deliberate obfuscation. This is also supported by the October 2012 Harris Interactive poll, where 57% of consumers who had viewed a native advertisement on a key social network said they found it misleading.

Therefore key to content done right is clear and transparent labelling of content. For us that means a separation between sponsored content in other words content that is funded by a brand but remains editorially independent and makes no mention of the brand and advertisement feature content where we tell the brand story through powerful multimedia journalism.44

Social Advertising

#Content done well:Content done well is Social Advertising. It engages consumers, inspires sharing and provides something with social valueA fairly elaborate, nearly 1,500-word native ad for Netflix's original series "Orange is the New Black" appeared on The New York Times website last year, using video, charts and audio to supplement text about female incarceration in the U.S.It's among the first native ads from the Times' newly minted T Brand Studio, a nine-person team charged with creating content for brands.Commentators have highlighted that the content works so well because it is well researched, interesting, credible, naturally weaves in the sell and contains compelling multimedia45

The Guardian and British Academy

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#Content not done well:Example of BART (Bay Area Rapid Transport) elections ion San Francisco where a journalist endorsed candidate Nick Josefowitz in a blog post sponsored by the candidate.It later transpired that the blogger didnt even know the name of the other leading candidate!In the context of the vibrant media research, this kind of politicised, confused branded content will only seek to stimulate further confusion if it proliferates.47

What does all this mean?Implications for advertisersSocial DistributionIs your content worth sharing? Is it even being read if it is?Fast and SlowAre you thinking about consumer mind set (System 1 vs System 2) for content and brand messaging? CollaborationReach premium, quality, diverse audiences at scale.VideoIts all about Millennials, but is a 30 second pre-roll really the answer?MobileLag between consumer behaviour and the ad market. Brands need to get on board.PersonalisationUsing live data to create personal brand experiences. Brands acting like friends: do you really want a brand wishing you happy birthday?Evolving business modelsBrands and media owners partnering to offer live experiences. Consumer brands can leverage the convening power of media brands.WearablesThe most personal ad platform? The quantified self: What do brands do with all of this data?Getting content rightIs full editorial integration a good thing when consumers are becoming increasingly confused about the origins of content?

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Social distributionFast and slowCollaborationVideoMobilePersonalistionEvolving business modelsWearablesGetting content right

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