There were times during The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit when it felt more appealing to stroll down to Kings Cross and feed myself to the pigeons. Rory Cellan-Jones, the Beeb’s technology correspondent, was charged with marshaling proceedings and, at times, I wondered whether it was indeed him or whether he had been replaced by a startled cabbie, as is the BBC’s want from time-to-time.
There was the odd blip in proceedings… ChartBeat’s CEO Tony Haile seemed to think he was auditioning for TED/a job presenting a Comic Relief vignette whilst EBuzzing’s Pierre Chapaz may have misinterpreted his brief, but what cloud there was glistened with a bright silver lining. Kate Burns, Brian Wong and Saul Klein took part in an engaging panel-debate about start-up culture in the UK which featured the Kiip CEO lambasting wi-fi on the tube – ‘Not putting it in the tunnels is just f**king stupid!’ A round of lightning pitches saw the launch of the beautiful Believe.In and a fantastic sales job for Fluxx before the headline act, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Perretti, stole the show.
Perretti’s talk, centred on the success of BuzzFeed, raised several interesting points, my favourite of which was that ‘publishing is a Parisian café’. He continued to explain how, at said café, you may be reading Sartre one minute and swooning over a cute dog the next – Humans have the capability to do both and our web browsers do too. Just ask the world’s biggest audience – The Bored At Work Network (which has now welcomed British procrastinators into the fold).
The relenting theme of the day was that we need to continue to evolve our thinking in both planning and evaluating our work. Social media holds advertising to a higher bar, says Jonah Perretti, and we need to think about what this means and what we want consumers to actually do with our content, our media, and our brand.
Key takeouts from the day:
- ‘Innovation is the only strategic advantage you can have’ – Darren Childs, CEO, UKTV
- ‘You need to understand data. Media owners should know more about your audience than you should’ – Stephan Shakespeare, CEO, YouGov
- 8.3% of UK GDP is digital – Why aren’t brands and big business spending more online?
- 47% of iPlayer users go there without an intention to watch a particular programme
- Creating content is all very well, but why are people going to share it?