 We're at the Mobile Innovation Congress. Welcome Gert. You're a futurist. What is a futurist? What is a futurist? I didn't know what a futurist was until I became one. Basically, a futurist is somebody who develops four sites. It's not what people think like predictions on Nostradamus, you know, there are people who do this and they are very good at it like Paul Saffold and others and of course Ray Kurzweil. But I'm working for example on a three to five year time frame. So futurists are really about four sites. In many ways, I always say it's seen the obvious. So you're a near futurist. Yeah, you could say I'm a presentist essentially that has a different meaning though. Yeah, but that's quite cool because that means that the stuff you predict or the stuff that you see is estrangeable and makeable in the near future. It's not something that will happen in 2016. It's more about seeing stuff than I mean basically anybody could see what I'm saying, right? But you have to spend time on it. So if you're running a business, you spend 95% of your time chasing after money or, you know, delivering quarter results, you just can't do that. Then I have a question. If you would take a picture of the current mobile advertising space landscape because it's everyone's using mobile but the advertising money isn't there, seems. What do you see if you would take a picture of the current mobile at space environment? What do you see as trends that are happening? I'm gonna say in my speech later, but basically I think that the advertisers, I mean the agencies and the brands, they are a bit like the record labels now. They know this is coming, but they're deeply worried about whether it's gonna have the same return. So they are not ready to jump and they're getting ready to jump now. You can feel it, right? But they should have jumped five years ago. And only when the iPhone came around, the touchscreen, is when the whole thing became like really urgent, right? And so Steve Jobs is to blame for that or to bless for that, you could say, but basically I think the the real push effect now is coming that you have two billion people connected to mobile devices. The price of device dropping to 10 euros, which is realistic, you know, for a tablet even. In India, it's 30 dollars. High-speed broadband dropping to very little money or being free in many countries. And so we're like at the cusp of this thing where you can see over the hill, right? And I think we've gone up the hill now for years and it's coming, the peak moment is coming. So we're going to reach what I call peak mobile in three years. And there will be a different place there for many reasons. But then still, is a mobile phone, is it an adequate display at format thing? No, mobile phone is primarily a sort of remote control lifestyle device, you know, where I save my data, I communicate with others, but I may not be actually having the data on the device. So if you put together the cloud and the social part, the location part, the mobile phone is like the command control. So when I'm at home, I want HD television. I use the phone to control what I see, but I don't see it from the phone. So it's kind of like an enhancement of yourself? Yeah, well, some people call the second brain, which is kind of scary, but it's already true. You know, there are possibilities, for example, of using Wikipedia while you hold a speech. With your hands, but imagine you have that on the iris, which is coming, right? It would be essentially a second brain. So not primarily a mobile phone is a display format something, as in display advertising, but it's much more an enhancement of the human being where you manage your whole life and the surroundings around you. Yeah, well, one of the common problems with advertisers is that they're always looking for a space to sell. They should be looking for spaces to engage. Because when they do that, when they get the audience and the audience generates value, that's when the selling happens, right? So it's the interaction that actually counts, not just the transaction. And this is a very common problem with mobile is that the advertisers are saying, show me the proof. You know, and this is just not the way it works here, right? With SocialSolomo, right? Social LocalMobile, the proof is in the network, is not in the metrics from the old world. Clear. You walk around in media land, you visit a lot of big media companies. Probably a lot of big media companies are your clients. Could you say something more in a generic way, which are the most common between big brackets, mistakes that they make? Well, a mistake that we all make is that, especially in Western countries, that we're too risk adverse. So that we like to talk about it. But when it's ready to leap, we're not making the leap because it's not proven. But if you look at all of the innovators, you know, Jeff Bezos and the Twitter guys, and of course Google and QQ and Tencent and China and what have you, right? They're taking leaps all the time, every day. So in Europe, we have this real problem is that, you know, especially in Switzerland, where I live, you know, we're not going to be first. And that will kill us, basically, because, you know, the speed is getting so much faster, the speed of innovation that if you're not leaping, you're always going to be after things, right? So you're already off the cliff when you're trying to build an airplane. So that's a very big problem. The other one is, I think, essentially, a question of not having foresight as part of your plan. So many companies looking, you know, three months ahead or a year, right? But they're not seeing what's over the hill like companies like Amazon do, right? They invested $10 billion in the Kindle before it became anything. They made a market, right? So being a market maker is the most important part now. And those companies don't like doing that because inherently it's a gamble. Let's talk about the dominance here in Western Europe of, for example, Google, Apple, even Facebook. Do you still see a role and a relevance for local media players? Well, I mean, I'm not concerned about Facebook, Google or any of those guys because, you know, their time frames are shrinking. I mean, we used to have a 25 year dominance of Microsoft. That will never come again. And then we had a 20 year dominance from Vodafone and T-Mobile. And, you know, that's all shrinking. So let them be big. You know, the next Facebook is already around the bend. So I think innovation and technology and in social media can be generated anywhere now. It's a question of understanding what goes on. So this is the reason, for example, that Chinese entrepreneurs invent differently and those products don't really fare too well here, right? Because they're culturally so different, right? But understanding culture and technology all together creates really unique products. Like we have, for example, in Switzerland, we have a company called Paperly, which is a great reading tool. And that's really it's a very sort of European center. I didn't know that was Swiss. Yeah, they're from Lausanne, actually, right? So it's a cultural question whether you allow people to innovate and whether you make enough room for that. Wondering around in and around media companies, I can imagine that you have a lot of insights in media and marketing, advertising. What kind of advice would you give classical media companies to make sure that that their innovation is stimulated? Well, the first thing I like to do is to say, let's question our assumptions or beliefs, how the world works. Because when you're my age or even older, running media companies, you know, then you have certain beliefs. You know, record labels believe that when the copy is free, their business is dead. You know, turns out not true, right? It's the opposite is true, right? That was clear if you looked from the beginning, but their belief was different. So question your assumptions, you know, as what do you really believe is true? Like people should pay for news. That's true. But how? So a belief like the paywall is a belief, you know, it's not an economic tool. It's a belief. So that's one thing. The other thing is to say that, you know, you should enable your staff to basically try to run over the mothership, you know, to create a second entity that tries to eat the mother. You know, so eventually you have the dual plan. You have the current business and you have the new business to compete with each other. That has to because it's very hard to do both at the same time. So to sort of have an entity that you own that competes with you, right? And it could be on the outside, it could be on the inside, right? And make room for the innovation of the staff because all the staff usually has great ideas, right? But they're silenced. And this really starts at the top, right? So if your leadership is not, you know, it's not actual leadership. As I say, a real leader doesn't create followers, they create more leaders. If they don't do that, then everything is sort of blocked at a certain level, right? Those companies won't survive. You know, it's very Darwinistic now, clearly that if you don't have that speed, then in five years nobody will know who you are.