 Hello, this is Gerard Leonhard Futurist, CEO of the Futurist Agency, together with Uri van Geest today. Uri is an accomplished writer, and his book is that he has co-written with Salim Ismail, it's called The Exponential Organization, and it's making quite a few waves, and we'll talk about that shortly. He's also the Dutch ambassador for the Singularity University. And so what we're discussing today as part of this debate about exponential organizations and digital transformation is the media publishing and entertainment business. We both have quite a bit of background there, I used to be a musician, producer, bunch of music startups, and this is actually how we met, long time ago. And so let's start with this whole idea of saying what has actually become out of the media business, you know, going from physical products and terrestrial transmitters and TV towers, you know, to the internet and over the top. What are the key things that you see in the next five years? Yeah, so I think the media business is quite different from, let's say, 10 years ago. On the one hand, the business models are different. You make more money using, let's say, offline events or spinoffs from your digital media outlets. Basically, the digital media itself or themselves are more for research or customer data points to aggregate, that you can leverage using alternative routes like, for example, education. You can go into training as a media company, there's a blurry boundary there. You can use those research insights to create offline events and monetize that instead of just digital publication. Can we slice it up into media being entertainment and content and advertising, because advertising is also media, right? So if we talk about the product, you know, or the service, there are key trends, for example, that everything is becoming fragmented. So I can watch anything I want to do with the internet. I have everything on demand as a flood of content. And then we have media advertising, which is becoming automated and using artificial intelligence once again. So there's a couple of challenges, I think, the disembodiment of media, for example, the DVD used to cost 25 euros, now Netflix is seven euros a month for essentially anything. And so the margin is going, you know, it's just collapsing. So what do you think is going to happen to media companies when that whole thing becomes from physical or from restricted environments like cable to an open platform? Yeah, so I think what you see in most vertical markets is a trend of technology, deceptive, then disruptive, then you have decentralization, democratization, demonetization, and that's the end of the story. So that's also happening in media. That means that there will be a lot of consolidation. If you are a medium category publisher, you will be in deep trouble. If you are a niche, you might survive on a global scene, in a global scene. If you are large, you have triple A quality, you will consolidate power like New York Times, blah, blah, blah, New York Washington, all. So there will be a lot of consolidation at the top end globally. If you are a local player, you will be increasingly in trouble because it will move towards a global playing field. So we can already see that in young leaders, for example, of viewers. If you have niche content, you might be able to survive and to monetize it. If you can create your competitive advantage on a global scene, that is. That's going to be harder. But isn't it a way that we had giant media companies in the past like the cable companies or Time Warner or whatever, or MTV or Viacom or whatever, dominating to a large degree. And now what's dominating is what generally are called the siren service. The giant things in the sky like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Alibaba, you name it, right? They are sort of running the show and then we have this giant over the top organizations like Netflix, who is not quite the same level and of course, being more close than all the others. But isn't that kind of replacing the old big guys with the new big guys? Yeah, to a certain degree, that's true. Even though there's also disruption going on there, right? For example, you have Netflix and then you had Ariel, but it was discarded. Then you have right now, popcorn time as disruptor. So there's a lot of interesting innovation there happening, but I do agree with you that right now, if you look at the big players, of course, it's Google, Apple, etc., Amazon and Netflix dominating the fields. Well, if you're looking at Spotify or Netflix, it's the same effect as an artist or writer or whatever, Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, the same thing. Your individual amount per stream, per use goes down from a lot, probably too much, too very little. And so that can only scale if you have 6 billion users. Yes, that's true. And so how do we get to the money there? Now, the point is, actually, you talked about that yourself 11 years ago, with music and the future of music. So what will happen is in most cases that you, at first, have to give away more value to your end users for a low price point. You get more customer data and research and data points. Then you can leverage using offline events or constructs, whatever, or offline events as a medium. So you have a different way to monetize your business. It's a more long term view. More added value. Yes, yes. In which you, at first, have to give away a lot of stuff and then later on monetize it. Yeah, so I mean, let's talk about the flip side of this. I think this is doable and I've been looking at possibilities and if you look at the new media companies like, for example, what the Atlantic is doing on Quartz, you can see this heading in this direction. But let's talk about advertising, because that's the other part of the equation. Advertising is currently increasing at 6% to 7% per year. So it's actually not declining, it's increasing. But the money is going to the new platforms now, actually. So I always tell the publishers there's money here, but you're not getting it. So what's going to happen with advertising in your view? And how can you be a part of that in the future and not lose out? Yeah, so I agree with you that most platforms will increasingly consolidate their advertising revenues like Facebook, Google, etc. This will be a hard play for classical media companies to monetize because it will move away from their core business. Advertising business itself will become more real time, more dynamic, more AI driven than already today. It will become much more personalized than today. For example, what I expect that you can ask higher CPM rates based on targeting on additional variables like NeuroStates, Quantified Self-Censor data outputs to personalize content, advertising, and services increasingly over time too. So you can monetize that at a higher rate as a publisher. I think there's two or three things that you speak to that are strapping the core with me. I mean, first, the fact is that advertising is becoming content itself because it's going to be good, otherwise nobody wants to see it. Second, the metrics are completely transparent. So you get almost 98% or so transparency of what the money is actually doing. And the third thing is fragmentation. So 90% of the internet in 10 years will be mobile. So that can be completely trapped, which is kind of scary for privacy and things. But that's really going to change. But my view is that to wrap this up in a way, I think the media business has gone to the valley of death, as I call it. Coming off the other end now. It's quite clearly going to be 5 billion people connected on mobile devices, advertisers wanting to find an audience. There is money there, in my view. The media business could be very, very strong again in a few years after reinventing the monetization model. I think I would like to build on that a little bit. I think it will move away from mobile over time because it will move into the environment, right? The internet of things, the wearables, it will be in your car, it will be in your building, it will be in your home, your toys. So you see a fragmentation of touch points and devices over time, different by the internet of everything. So this is going to be interesting because the interface is essentially, as you say, moving away from the fixbox into the environments of becoming invisible, could be any wall, could be anything, could be any projector, could be anything I wear on my iris, whatever, right? So the mobile becomes essentially every surface. And I think that is extremely positive for the media companies. It may be creating all kinds of problems with humans for their own interfaces. Having natural user interfaces is really quite different. Like Microsoft is doing with the HoloLens and those kind of things, that's going to be extremely powerful and be vastly addictive, if you can imagine. So if you enter that, I suppose it could generate lots of money. Anyway, it was nice to have you here, Yuri. We're talking about the Future of Media and the exponential organization. This is Yuri Fanges. I'm Gerd Leonhard. If you want more information, please go to thefuturesagency.com. Thanks for tuning in.