Frankfurt.


I'm following on directly from this first keynote at Prosumer Revisited. I don't think the audio recording worked, but here's the presentation at least. It went pretty well, I think, though I still find it hard to present this work in German...

Technorati : Produtzung, Prosumer Revisited, collaboration, produsage, prosumer, user-led

Del.icio.us : Produtzung, Prosumer Revisited, collaboration, produsage, prosumer, user-led

Frankfurt.


The Prosumer Revisited conference begins with a keynote by Frank Piller, who presents the perspective from management research. He begins by describing the story of the ice cream king of upper Manhattan - a small old-fashioned store which sells only a small range of flavours and does not mix them. This is the old market model - where the quality of products means that producers have no need to respond to the needs and interests of consumers. But we've moved away from this, as Chris Anderson's 'long tail' model shows - while such old-fashioned marketing models focussed on extracting profits from the short head of the long tail distribution, stores like Amazon have emerged to cater to the long tail, offering a vast variety of products but selling only a relatively small quantity of each title. What Amazon has managed is to build a sustainable business model from this.

Frankfurt.


I've arrived at the Prosumer Revisited conference in Frankfurt, where we've gathered in the very stylish main hall of the Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe-Universität. We begin with a welcome by conference chair Birgit Blättel-Mink, and a representative from conference sponsor eBay, who notes the site's own contribution to prosumption culture (and describes what eBay generated more specifically as an 'auction culture', from which the site is slowly moving on, however - a culture of buying and reselling goods relatively rapidly, of a transient ownership which I've also touched on in the final chapter of my produsage book).

Sydney.
Following on from the last two very informative sessions here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress, we have a social networking panel. Akamai's Stuart Spiteri kicks off by asking about the impact of continuing change, and Andrew Cordwell answers that this is indeed difficult. For MySpace, local people talking about local issues will always continue; the challenge is to build on this in a more global fashion, and to connect these levels. Francisco Cordero also points to the importance of continuing to develop the technology.

Sydney.
Next up here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Francisco Cordero, General Manager Australia at Bebo, a social networking site which is big in the UK and has recently moved into the Australia/New Zealand market in a more substantial way. Indeed, the promo DVD that Francisco is showing here still has a strong British accent, in contrast to the MySpace promo we saw in the previous session.

The DVD compares Bebo profiles with users favourite music and media to a typical teen's bedroom, incidentally. It also highlights the made-for-online drama series Kate Modern as an online marketing tool, which was used to promote new bands, for example. The Bebo term for brand engagement with Bebo users is 'open media' - even though the DVD promises in the same breath that brands control content, distribution, user experience, and advertising.

Sydney.
We're now starting the second and last day of the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress here in Sydney, and I'm speaking about the impact of online media on broadcasting around noon. We begin with Andrew Cordwell, Director of Sales at Fox Interactive Media, though, which runs sites such as MySpace, IGN, Rotten Tomatoes and Ask Men. Globally, there are 122 million users on MySpace, with 300,000 new sign-ups per day and some 8 million users online at any one time.

Sydney.
We're now starting the post-lunch session here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress. The speaker is Tony Surtees, CEO of Australian regional broadcaster Prime's digital arm iPrime. He begins by noting that complacency is the enemy of innovation - and for that reason, starting new businesses during times of recession is actually very appropriate, as this added pressure means that complacency goes away.

By way of a very funny video from Bring the Love Back, Tony suggests that consumers have changed, but advertisers haven't. Time investment and advertising spend on different media no longer match - online advertising significantly lags behind take-up, while newspaper advertising remains significantly above circulation figures. Additionally, of course, people increasingly multitask (especially also between TV and online). Each time new media are introduced, we begin consuming them, but we consume them in multiple, different ways.