 Hello, this is Gerrit Leonhardt. Welcome to another edition of Meeting of the Minds. Today, I have with me from Sydney, Australia, Ross Dawson, futurist, author, strategist and a good friend. So, Ross, let's talk about the future of media and news and publishing and all the stuff that we look at every day. A key trend, I think, is what is happening with print. I mean, clearly, if you see all the global curves, there's the client pretty much everywhere but Brazil. Brazil is up if you look at the graphs. Southern America in general is still up. So, what's going to happen with the future of print? Do we still need print in the future or can we even afford to have print in the future? We will have print in pockets. And it's one of actually very interestingly, if you look at my newspaper extinction timeline, I put India and China or rural China as to past 2040. In fact, we've got some more recent data showing that in fact the trend in newspapers in India has moved very rapidly in the other direction. And so I think there's a real acceleration of more generally news going on paper formats with a few exceptions. The free newspapers still have their role. I mean, it's hard to see quite how long that will go. Another key one is in terms of highly regional, so suburban papers. These are things that can be supported by advertising. They don't have to be timely. So anything on paper is out of date. But if you're just looking at the community news, that's not so important. So I think it's suburban or very local or very rural, particularly in developing countries. We will see paper for a long time to come. But if we're looking at urbanized, developed countries, news on paper is heading on the way out. I mean, news of course has always been funded by advertising and advertising paid for the eyeballs. Now clearly what's happening here is that people are shifting to digital means of consumption and the advertisers have not really shifted a lot yet. They're starting to. And so when you think this will happen, for example, here in Europe, where most of the budget is shifting to digital, and basically I think a lot of print, especially in Switzerland, a lot of print magazines and newspapers had sort of an attention monopoly to where they were the only ones getting so many eyeballs. And that's rapidly ending. So how will advertising shift and when? That's one of the big questions. So we get a lot of statistics showing, well, this is the proportion of people's attention and this is the proportion of people's advertising. They're very skewed, as in far too much spent on TV and newspapers compared to mobile or internet. But these aren't always the right measures. I think part of it is that advertising will be transcended. Advertising is always this push. There's other ways to be able to spend money potentially, but be able to get engagement rather than just trying to insert a message within a stream of information that you want. So I think that the marketing and advertising budgets will be allocated, reallocated massively. This is partly around the content creation within these domains. I think that broadcast TV in particular is going to be massively challenged in a similar scale to a newspaper on print. I guess though I don't necessarily believe that mobile will become this place where all advertising is spent or where advertising really has an impact. Do you see mobile as the place where advertising will go? Well, I think that if we forget what advertising used to be, which is basically interruption and lying to a large degree, saying things that are not actually true. In most cases that is really what happened. So the burger looks a lot better on the picture than it does there. And a lot of the advertising that we used to have was useless and senseless and we just couldn't get away from it. So now because of digital empowerment of the consumer, we are essentially at the point where we can cut out all the noise, that kind of noise. And so advertising is useless in that way if it's trying to interrupt us. It has to be meaningful. So therefore I think on the mobile we have yet to see the kind of creative context of how that is meaningful. For example, this is why Google bought Waze. The idea of saying I use the map and as I'm driving it says, you know what, you like hamburgers and here's a special today coupon here 200 meters away. And it tells me that because it knows my context. And that's not advertising, that's content. But it is advertising. So that is the future where we're going and most of the money will go in that direction as my view. And most print cannot get anywhere close to this because it's fixed. It's a fixed medium. So my view, the biggest chance for print is to converge with digital, for example, with augmented reality, with superimposed information, digital codes and make nice interfaces and things that you can smell and touch like magazines and so on. But in general, my view is that print will be second, not first. So digital will be first and print will be second. And now we still have print first and digital second. And that is a painful shift for publishers. In many ways, I'd be interested in you taking this, but when I talk to my publishing clients, it appears to me that in many ways they have a paradigm problem and that they come from a background of very high revenues and very high margins that they somehow fell into their lap because they had this huge attention monopoly. And now that's removed, they're angry. And they want to go back to what it was. And that's not going to happen. So then it's basically gone. This idea of having this monopoly, the future is going to be over the top and direct and fragmented and individualized and customized. So that is a paradigm problem. And do you see it the same way or...? I have consistently said that the future of the media industry, if we think about it in the broadest possible sense, is enormously positive. That that is in a way almost the future of the entire economy as we shift to the creation and dissemination of media messages where all value a Y almost. So what we have unfortunately seen is that those incumbent players who have been participating for a long time have not been trying to hang on to what they've had rather than trying to embrace what is new. I agree with you on the value, but you have to actually add value to be part of this. That's right. Because they're discovering right now they never actually did add much value, but they only find out now. So in other words, because there was no other way to reach the market, they had it, but now there's other ways they find out they never had in the first place. Though if you look at today in the landscape moving forward, you have better capabilities to take advantage of that than any new players which don't have the scale, don't have the capital, don't have the relationships, don't have the access. So they're enormously, the incumbent publishers are in a very strong position, but the cost of adaption is enormously high. And so we're seeing this diversion. There are some publishers that are managing that transition that many that are not, and we've already seen some go along the way. Martin and BMW and Audi are in a great position to organize the world's public electric cars. They are, but do they believe they should do that? Well, ask them, right? Google is doing that. So the publishers think they can do it, but they don't perceive themselves as being the player that should be doing this. And this is the big problem. Well, there are big opportunities here and what it does look like is more that the new players, be it from other industries or just emerging from out of nowhere, are the ones which are going to take more of this opportunity. Though it will take a long time because there's so much big slices, particularly the capital intensive, movies industries so capital intensive, news on paper for whatever future it still has, very capital intensive, broadcast also capital intensive. It's only when that starts to get fragmented into online videos, into online news in terms of all sorts of podcasts, different mechanisms that new players are able to emerge and take that value. I think the only survivors here in media will be those that are outside of their silos. So you have these people who are thinking, oh, it's all about content, content is king, that's a silo. That's not untrue, but it's still a silo. You have technology, you have what's happening with data, you have advertising, you have devices, you're now in all those silos. And the smart media organizations like The Atlantic or The Economist or Bonnier Publishing or others are realizing there are no longer in that silo of content. They're in all of those pieces. And Apple and Amazon for example, they go from the tech silo into the content silo. And they're hopping from one silo to the other until they end all of them like Amazon. And so for a publisher to realize that they have to think we're not a publisher anymore. We're a media organization, just like Google is a media now, it's not a search engine. So you're meeting in the middle. And this is the paradigm shift that if you stay in your silo, you'll be squashed. I think that's the reality of a digital, what I call digital Darwinism. Because you make an easy target, a sitting duck. I think my message to people who create content would be to say, okay, let's think of this as a royal family. Content is king, context is the queen. And then there's lots of important people around this. But it's not just one thing. You have to always add value to what you're doing. So the content is in the middle. But the reason that people will buy or pay is, as you showed in your own chart, it's all around this with interface, with context, with creating new products, with reason to buy. So I would say that you have to replace this idea of forcing to pay with the idea of reason to pay. And this is a crucial change of paradigm that they have to find enough value for people to actually come and make the payment, like the economist does or others. Create extra value like the audio track that the economist has. But my advice would be to think of yourself as a different beast. The content is at the core, and that's not going to get any less important, but to add the other pieces around it. I think the summary, if I had to really distill my recommendation to major organizations, is around experimentation. Because we don't know what the business models that are going to work are. We're beginning to discover. We have some evidence so far. But it is going to be unique for every organization based on where they currently stand, the audience they have, the country they're in, the attitudes there. So I think multiple experiments, new business models, new search for revenues, being able to look very broadly at that scope. So I think there's a lot of experimentation and a lot of learning required. And only those publishers that try many things and find out what works from that in their particular context will succeed. I think there's one extra thing that's very important is to go beyond the obvious, which of course is our job as futurists. But for example, if you look what's happening with recruiting and finding jobs on the internet, so you have jobs sites like jobs.ch and other sites here, and they are the same in the directory and papers and she classified. And you can see that there. And that has a good window. But the real innovation is, for example, what Twitter is doing, which is putting a hiring on Twitter. So you can fill out a job card and you can apply through Twitter. And the whole thing happens on Twitter. This is true innovation that is beyond the obvious because a social network is a really great place to be hired, like LinkedIn has created. So if I was a publisher, I would say, I have this website for jobs, that's cool. But really what I should be doing is using social media to find jobs and to sift through people and using APIs to create value like those guys have done, going beyond the obvious. And this is the mission, I think, that is also to take some imagination of who you are to go beyond the obvious. For example, radio. If radio doesn't start going beyond the obvious, then they're dead. There's no reason for radio to exist, except for local news and sports, music, reports, podcasts, in the car, and people have devices in the car now. So they have a big job ahead of themselves to find a new way to create value. Well, I look forward to seeing a rich media landscape moving forward and we'll see who the winners are. Indeed. So this concludes today's episode of the Meeting of the Minds. Thanks very much to Ross Dawson for being part of this today. If you want to know more about the show, you can go to meetingoftheminds.tv. We're also taking questions and inputs for the next show. Just use the Twitter hashtag meetingoftheminds and we'll be responding and trying to work your comments into our next show. Thanks very much for joining us.