Think inclusively and watch people help you
This past week saw the departure of my good friend, Richard Titus, who had been chief executive of Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND) within the Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) empire. I introduced Richard to DMGT chairman Lord Rothermere at a lunch in September 2008. And sometime later Titus was selected to energise the Associated digital business.
Titus is an interesting animal. An expat American, like myself, he has sold businesses to WPP, built firms in the media tech space, and worked at the BBC where he was part of the senior team and a key driver of the iPlayer.
He is not the only media executive to be changing jobs. Will Lewis, who resigned as chief executive of Euston Partners, the Telegraph Media Group spin-out, reemerged as group general manager of News International last week. It is thought his job is to stem “unsustainable losses” at Wapping. Lori Cunningham, digital strategy director of Johnson Press, left her role recently as well.
What’s going on with this game of musical chairs? As the media moguls enjoy the legendary Allen & Co Sun Valley conference this weekend, the meta-information is not who’s buying whom, but who’s building the new business model for firms which will organise our lives online.
Murdoch has been the most vocal about the paid content battle, but the battle lines between Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook are where the real action lies. Each comes at the prize from a different location. Google has created a multi-billion pound empire aggregating anonymous personal information for advertisers, and giving no economic benefit back to users other than a free search. The information we are confiding to our Facebook pages is largely untouchable by Google, so a massive threat to its plans. Apple started the remapping of media business models by busting open the mobile carrier cartels with its iPhone and challenging the record labels with the iPod.
Microsoft has the right strategy insofar as it’s giving the user something back in return for their personal data – an opportunity to have cash back or to give it to a good cause.
The winners of the media landscape in the next decade will be those companies that think inclusively about their business model – cutting in the artist, the user, the developer, the gamer.
Like most things in life, if you make it in someone’s interest to help you, you will go further.
Julie Meyer is chief executive of Ariadne Capital and a dragon on the BBC’s Online Dragon’s Den.