Peter Turi hat ein Video - Interview geposted, dass er mit mir auf dem DLD 09 geführt haben. Darin stellt er solche spannenden Fragen wie:

1) Ist Rezession eine schlechte Zeit für Startups?

2) Wird sich bei den Startups die Spreu vom Weizen trennen?

3) Wird YouTube sevenload verdrängen?

4) Was ist das “nächste große Ding?”

Hier sind meine Antworten:

Link:

Reflecting on the current discussions, last at the Delphi Executive conference in Bonn, and at CeBIT which I both attended as a speaker, I recalled the very lively panel at DLD 09 around online video and social media. If you are interested in the topic, the video gives you insights with Brightcove, Endemol, sevenload and Termor Media and a great moderator, David Kirkpatrick from Fortune Magazine.

Feel free to comment! I also embed the video here:

About the specifics of how we perceive the value of recurring WebTV Content, please check my Interview at ETRE in Stockholm:

After a number of trial runs and the establishment of a channel for ETRE, we were very happy to get DLD 09 conference as a high profile client for our conference application. We feel it was a great success, and are looking forward to a number of new event partners.

The application lets you relive the conference, jump from session to session and speaker to speaker, all in HD quality and with, of course, all the player functionality of ffw and rew, embed, fullscreen etc..!

This will be an interesting application for companies and media as well.

Travelling through the US once again and hearing comments about the recession every day, I was struck by the elasticity of US business once again. As much as the business climate is intoxicating to the point of being hectic in boom times, as seen in 1999/2000 and once again in 2007, in bear times everything gets very gloomy.

I was riding in a cab in Las Vegas headed to CES and for once in the habit of European cab fares I forgot to tip the cab driver. He commented “You Europeans never tip, do you?”. After paying the due tip, I reflected on how dependent employees in all services industries were on tips for their regular income. I also noticed that tipping behavior on the part of Americans differed strongly from what I had experienced just 6 months ago on my last extended trip to California. People now, out of need or out of fashion, were downright stingy. Given that such large portions of the US economy are service based, I could not help but wonder how that had the same effect as a wage cut in many of these industries. At the very least, it shows that employers, who deflect part of the necessity of paying market wages to the culture of tipping and its encouragement in the policies of their businesses, thereby have an instrument to reduce and flexibilize their labor cost. In boom times employees earn more from tips and in bust times they earn less without the employer having to enforce wage cuts. This benefits the employer because he remains at his (low) wage cost basis, keeps his prices stable and lets the customer reduce tips if he feels he needs to. Since tips are part of the price structure of using a service, this means that lower tipping amounts to a deflation of service prices from the point of the customer. Thus, in a way, the business owner is leaving part of the pricing to the customer who can deflate the price he pays at will if his pockets are tied - as is the case in a recession.

Now while this, from a European perspective, could be perceived as an unfair advantage the business owner has in his relation to employees and customers, it could also be described as an “entrepreneurial risk” of the employee. Employees that commit particularly well to the service they are a part of and endear themselves to customers will invariably in good or bad times reap better tips from the customers. An employee who does well will probably convince a business owner to give him the responsibilities (assigned tables, assigned services) that will have the highest likelihood of earning him tips. One can already observe that some businesses compete on a labor market by installing policies that encourage tips.

A hamburger chain called Fat Burger places a small tip box next to a big tip box at the cash register and each time a larger tip is paid into the so called “fat tip box” the cashier yells out “FAT TIP!” and all other employees chime in yelling “FAT TIP!” as well.

As ludicrous as a discussion of the macroeconomic effect of tipping might seem at first glance, the impact on the US economy must be sizable. Considering the service industry is a 10s of billions of dollars segment of the economy and that average tipping is between 10 and 20 % of a purchase, tipping could well amount to several billion dollars in the economy. Adding or subtracting billions of dollars of volume to the price structure of the service industry could in turn have stronger than imagined effects on inflation and deflation, as well as on purchasing power in low income segments of the population.

As I am not an economist, I will leave the discussion at that, but I sure would find it interesting to know if this has ever been explored academically.

In a recent post, emarketer quoted a study by Deloitte stating that TV was still the lead influencer of purchasing decisions by consumers, even in the US.

I beg to differ.

Studies on the share of TV in media consumption do not differentiate enough as to the level of attention that the medium is consumed with. So many households have TV running virtually all day with a minimum of attention as opposed to an online usage that is still predominantly active, targeted (in the sense of the user pursuing a search or e-commerce activity), or socially interactive, that the two types of consumption cannot be equated - it’s comparing apples and pears.

The is all the more true if we consider the demographics, with a larger portion of low-income households letting the TV running indiscriminately. Besides, if you discount the number of TVs running 12 hours a day in Bars and Restaurants, I would wager that in terms of full attention media consumption, online has already overtaken TV.

We lack a study that compares - from the vantage point of an advertiser - conversion rates on campaigns running on TV and non-display-ads online.

The trend will increase with the further roll-out of online video.

TecCrunch has commented on how live video failed us during the inauguration speech of Barak Obama as 44th president of the United States, arguing that live video streams will need much further investment before it can seriously compete with Television. While I agree that the technology still needs much improvement, the fact that millions of concurrent users brought the servers down clearly shows the tremendous potential of live streaming,  a point I’m sure TechCrunch certainly does not disagree with. So, we are slowly getting there.

Incidentally, we at sevenload haev our own live streaming solution for Big Brother - in a subscription model, with surprising success.

…and I certainly hope I don’t get shot for managing to put Barack Obama and Big Brother in the same blog post.

I am very proud that we won this Award (after winning ETRE 100 as one of Europe’s best Startups). Red Herring hands out this Award after a year-long selection process and winning a regional Award is a prerequisite. Red Herring is known to most as the chronicler of the tech industry, and has picked the global 100 from industries as diverse as biotech, optical technology, energy, cleantech and even pasteurized Eggs.

sevenload was one of two media companies selected and one of only a dozen IT / Internet / Software related business. So it is fair to say that Red Herring thinks we are one of the two hottest internet /media companies in the world!

We were also the only Social Media company to get the award!

Past award winners include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube.

Here is the official picture of me with Alex Vieux, Founder of Red Herring!

Thanks to Jeff Braverman (click picture for site)

And this was my reaction to the award

This year, all Las Vegas was abuzz with the expectations of attendance to CES - and how they were not met. From cab drivers to convention exhibitors, everyone was touting the scale of the downturn.

To us, the convention presented a more mixed picture. As often is the case in downturns, in an overall downbeat environment, a few interesting developments could be observed:

1) The Slingbox by Slingmedia: offering some 14 Mil. subscribers of its parent company, a midsize cable operator in the US, the opportunity to access Web TV content through their cable content.

2) The advent of HD to TV and other screens, including a number of interesting personal camera devices.

3) The increasing dissemination of “cloud” (now there’s a buzzword) logic to the consumer world: first through “thin client” notebooks that are not much more than windows to web services, and second through a push towards homes servers, ranging from Windows solutions to proprietary home hifi systems. Its too early to name this a significant consumer trend, but slowly we are seeing the first applications for the “internet of things”, “cloud computing”, and “semantic web”.

Recession is the best time for entrepreneurs, Ken Morse (and others) says. Now is the time to see and grasp the potential of these new technologies as they slowly approach end consumer relevance.

The “Gretchenfrage” most discussed in the advertising industry right now is whether we will have a full-fledged downturn in advertising spending across all media, or whether there are niches and segments of the advertising /media industry that could even benefit from the recession. This being the 2^nd downturn that I have experienced in my career, I am firmly convinced that the latter will happen.

I make this assumption based on several factors:

1. A new generation of marketing decision makers now has control over most large budgets. This generation understands the power of digital communication- even though in the past years it has underestimated the potential impact of Web 2.0 and has continued allocating a disproportionate amount of money to traditional media without measuring that performance.
2. Cutbacks in marketing and sales budgets are rather absurd when the real problem is crumbling sales, but this happens in every recession and it will happen this time around again. Since at the same time marketing performance will be measured more and more in terms of contribution to sales, marketing decision makers will focus on campaign tools and media that either directly or indirectly increase sales performance. Gone are the expensive TV commercials with bikini clad, young beauties on a tropical island, and in comes unsexy sales-driven below the line marketing. The past 2 ½ years have proven, however, that marketing in a Web 2.0 world need not be dreary at all even while contributing directly to sales lead generation.
3. Web 2.0 advertising formats and communication models have reached a level of maturity and a critical mass among users that allow them to have a measurable impact on brand communication and sales lead generation.

The coming year will see providers of Web 2.0 campaign solutions and media ad placements achieving disproportionate success considering the downturn and cutbacks of media budgets. This will happen for precisely the reason that in the past 1 ½ years many showcases of Social Marketing have been started that have proven or will prove to have been successful to an unexpected degree. After the Beacon disaster these showcases will turn the tide, much in the way keyword advertising established itself in 2002 – 2004.

Our best reference is http://bmw-web.tv, which generated considerable brand awareness for our client BMW. BMW itself doubled that success by creating, at the same time, a national web TV project that was equally successful called BMW TV which greatly enhanced traction to its own site. For confidentiality reasons I cannot give you figures, but trust me the impact was measurable.

Advertisers of the old school often argue that performance marketing or traditional lead generation marketing does not help the brand gain emotional traction and awareness. That dichotomy is of the past. Social relevance, rich media and video formats allow the digital sphere to create a branding experience that is as emotionally compelling as television and as measurably successful as search engine marketing. That has always been the holy grail of advertising, and we seem to have found it.

If you want more information or need help achieving that success, contact me.

Amidst all the depression caused by the financial crisis, attending SIME this year was like a breath of fresh air. Ola Ahlvarsson worked his magic once again. A very entertaining 60+ year old professor of medicine demonstrated an exciting new technology to create visual statistics called Gapminder, which was acquired by none other than google.org. Rockstar entrepreneurs and investors ranging from Morten Lund to the founders of Bwin infected the audience with entrepreneurial spirit.

Blowing away any clichés about a gambling company, Bwin demonstrated that they have a particularly modern HR Policy.

David Sifry showed how a leading rockstar blogger can become a travel tour guide entrepreneur. Among the most fascinating aspects of the conference was a panel of leading entrepreneurs from exciting international markets such as Vincent Fong for China, Joi Ito for Japan, Mahesh Kumar for India and Michael J. Wolf for the US. That was especially exciting for me as sevenload is in the midst of its internationalization. The most inspiring thing about the conference was the infectious “can do” spirit that the entrepreneurs’ presence radiated, especially those from Holland and Sweden- two countries with a distinct positive attitude that I sometimes miss in Germany.