Over at the Marketing Magazine site, I’ve posted a story called A glimpse into the future at SXSW and Web 2.0 chronicling the latest web, media and marketing initiatives I observed on my recent US conferences trip. There’s some really relevant information for Australian business considering the Rudd government’s recent National Broadband Network announcement. Please give the story a “Thumbs Up YES” if you find it useful.

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Source: David Dale from Sun Herald blogs

Channels Seven and Nine ended last week neck and neck, each with a modest 26.1 per cent of the prime time audience, while Ten got a healthy (for it) 23.8, ABC a mighty (for it) 18.5 and SBS a standard 5.5. You could say that was the big networks’ punishment for lapsing into repeats over Easter, but they’d say they don’t care, since “officially” it’s not a ratings period.

The big winner in times like this is Pay TV. Here is Pay’s account of itself: “Subscription TV was the number one source of television around Australia for week 15, 2009. STV channels accounted for 24.8% of all metropolitan viewing between 6am and midnight (up from 22.9% last week), was 22.8% of all regional viewing (up from 21.2%) and 62.0% of all viewing in subscription TV homes, up from 58.8% last week.

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This post originally appeared on MarketingMag.com.au in January 2009

The dawning of the digital age has created much hand-wringing among traditional media providers and the advertisers who feed them. A plethora of new options has seen rapid erosion of the once mighty traditional media power base.

The press is under grave threat as consumers can quickly and freely access specialist news content online at any time. ‘The death of press’ was perhaps viewed as a hysterical prediction by digital enthusiasts only 12 months ago, but is now actually looking like reality given the financial failure of many print media groups in the US recently.

Radio and television are also facing serious challenges as new generations of consumers decide to seek entertainment elsewhere, at their leisure

But probably the biggest threat to the traditional media and the advertising industry which supports it, is the fact that modern consumers are bypassing the ads altogether thanks to digital technology.

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The Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco is a slightly more staid affair than SXSW, but certainly still had its highlights. Here’s some of the things that caught my eye at Web 2.0 last week:

Union Square in beautiful San Francisco

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Pre-launch drinks in Austin

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Source: David Dale, Sun Herald blogs

What metaphor should we use for Channel Seven’s previously successful programming schedule: a line of dominoes or a house of cards? Either way, the removal of one show almost brought the structure down. Without Packed to the Rafters, Seven was on the brink of turning into number two. It was only the prayers of The Vicar of Dibley that saved Seven on Saturday night.

Seven won the week with 27.7 per cent of the prime time audience. Nine was winning until Saturday, but ended up with 27.4 per cent (and the highest share of viewers aged 18-49). That’s because its programming structure is just as fragile, built almost entirely upon Underbelly 2.

Only Ten had any reason to be cracking the champagne this week. Thanks to NCIS, Bondi Rescue, The Biggest Loser and SYTYCDA, it won with viewers aged 16-39 and managed 23.3 per cent of the total audience (with the ABC on a healthy 16.9 and SBS on a sickly 4.7).

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As we enter the first ratings recess of 2009, it seems that NBN and the ABC are the big overall winners in the Newcastle region. NBN has had a solid start to the year and are currently 2 points better than their progressive ratings totals last year. Likewise ABC have lifted 1.3 points so far this year against their 2008 performance.

On the other hand, total audience ratings for Prime down and Southern Cross TEN has maintained similar figures. Prime have dropped 4.1 points on their progressive ratings against last year, while SC TEN are returning almost identical figures to 2008.

Of course the overall ratings figures don’t tell the full story of how the stations are performing with various demographics, but NBN would be very pleased with the current results.

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Tim O’Reilly, co-founder of the Web 2.0 Expo and the person who coined the term Web 2.0, entered the stage to a rock star-like welcome for the first Keynote presentation of the event.

Tim wanted to talk about Web 2.0 five years on. He said that the term Web 2.0 was meant to explain what happened after the original dotcom crash; the second life of the Internet. It was never meant to signify new stages, like Web 3.0 and so on.

So what’s next for the web?

Tim O'Reilly

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Soren Stamer twitter.com/heartnsoul

Soren is a German entrepreneur who has applied the theory of Darwinism to business and the Internet. Darwinism is based on life without a creator and so life must continually evolve.

Soren believes that MASSIVE networking, such as what we are now seeing online, drives CHANGE. Our world is massively connected on global level leading to these consequences:
1. Increasing dynamics – life cycles are shorter. 6000 days of web life has changed world incredibly
2. Rising complexity – makes it impossible to predict, so better to stay AGILE
3. Increasing transparency – we know more and more about everything.
4. Global synchronisation – this is first globally synchronised recession. It creates opportunities too.
5. Collectively we are smarter
6. Abundance of options – declining GDP & explosion of services. Scarcity of attention.

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Presenter: Trae Chancellor from Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com has become successful and famous for moving their entire business operation online and into “the cloud”. Trae began his presentation with a big logo on screen saying “no software”.

The company drew up a vision of their business operating in the cloud:
Salesforce IT Vision: Get Salesforce on Salesforce
Organisation = Improve productivity & innovation
Operations = Improve efficiency
Infrastructure = reduce costs

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