I went to my first “Disrupterthon” last week. When I told one colleague that this was where I was going, she said that that was how she considered every meeting that I was in. (I’m sure that’s flattering if you think very positively about it).
This was a TV Disrupterthon run by the British Screen Advisory Council with some excellent guest speakers including Claire Enders, David Abraham, John Gisby from Magine and Group M’s Jakob Nielsen.
The debate was framed as a way of exploring what the Black Swan’s of TV would be and how and when they’d hit us.
Notably David Abraham welcomed us to a world of change, to the “meta connected data world” where one in three 16-24s have signed up to hand over their data to C4. C4 are training a generation of viewers to interact with VOD ads in a mould breaking fashion. Equally notably Claire Enders gave us the view that it is women over 40 who drive UK culture (outside gaming), and that therefore on mainstream TV things would be slow to change.
Both views have their merits of course. But true disruption will come from one of two sources in my view. It is possible that the consumer will lead true disruption because they will adopt a new way of consuming TV content at scale. Given that fairly heritage ways of watching TV content continue to grow and let’s face it to satisfy, this would depend on a real swing in technology and indeed rights distribution. The second form of disruption will come from a disruption in heritage trading practices. This is long overdue and indeed necessary for longterm growth. For this it would be good to have two developments please. We are indeed entering a world of big data of all kinds. More and more granular information will be available to give insight into what is and what is not working. What we still don’t have is a single audience rating measurement to feed into modelling versus sales across media to drive a simple solution to how everything works. The second development is a move towards a shared risk trading model, not as an exception but as a mainstream choice for clients.
Twitter by candlelight
Wednesday, February 27th, 2013Did you have a romantic Valentine’s Day? Did it go to plan or were all your dreams and hopes crushed ?
My love life is perfectly intact but my plans didn’t exactly pan out. I don’t like going out for Valentine’s Day but I had planned a nice home cooked dinner (Spag Bol but with Buffalo mince (no horse) to be precise), oven roasted butternut squash and celeriac mix followed by a red velvet cake.
At 6pm we had a power cut. Just like the 1970s. No stove, no TV, no lights, no oven, no hot water and no heating.
In every other respect my evening was nothing like the winter of discontent.
iPad operational I found the UK Power Networks website and was invited to tweet them for updates.
Their response was very comforting. Instead of just sitting in the dark not knowing what was going on, I at least had the feeling that Mike and Dave @UKPowerNetworks were paying some attention to my plight.
Then up came a neighbour – hitherto unknown to me – @carriesparkle and said “Hello, I’m without power too. Whereabouts are you? I’m on the Estate and both cold and hungry.” After a bit of banter with Carrie (can’t even go out to eat because its Valentine’s Day and restaurants full of “romantic” couples) another unknown neighbour @azeem joined the conversation saying : “I see you and @fhuszar are both having power outages in NW2”. Turns out all three neighbours are in the comms business in one way or another. No longer was I sitting lonely, hungry and cold in the dark. Customer service from UK Powernetworks were at hand with cheery updates, and there was a community spirit going around in the local virtual world. As well as my new acquaintances, I also heard from @battylala and @durranimix (thanks for the cheery comments people).
Lights came back on at 935 pm, just after we’d given up hope of home cooking and ordered pizza.
So Twitter was both a great customer service tool, and a community building vehicle. As @brucedaisley said “what an amazing episode”.
Twitter by candlelight – highly recommended in case of emergency, keep your iPad charged.
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