I recently attended Future of Media 2010 conference which assembles industry leaders from across the globe to discuss the latest thinking on the current digital landscape and the changes that are set to transform the media industry.   This conference is organised by Fairfax Digital, one of the significant players in Australian digital media and part of one of the largest traditional media players in Australia.  

True to its promise, the conference indeed provided me a view of the digital media trends and its landscape in one busy day. There were perhaps about 10 speakers that day.

There was a good selection of speakers with

1. Jack Matthews (Fairfax Digital), Moeed Ahmad (Al Jazeeera) amd Marc Frons (NYTimes) representing old media transitioning to new;

2. Richard Titus (AND) and Simon Gallagher (Hulu) representing pure-play digital media; and

3. Saneel Radia (Denuo), Ming Chan (The1stMovement) and Russ Fradin (Adify) representing the agency among others.

The conference was live blogged by Brad Howarth, Australian digital media journalist with notes coverage of each session.

A few highlights:

Jack Matthews, Fairfax Digital

"We are going through the biggest disruptive change since the invention of the printing press"

Richard Titus, Associated NorthCliffe Digital / Daily Mail & General Trust

"Enterprise is dead, with the consumer and enterprise worlds getting so squished together that the differences are practically invisible."

"Internet is like a huge collaborative copying machine that produces content that never dies, and where the incremental value of content shrinks as the amount of content grows"

"Attention is now the new scarce commodity in media, not access."

"80 percent of money in advertising is spent by SMEs, but none of it is spent in digital, creating another opportunity for publishers creating locally-relevant content."

"As content and distribution commoditise, we need to find new sources of scarcity."

Marc Frons, NY Times

"Having captured our readers' attention .. the challenge is how to continue to engage them."

"It is multimedia that drives that engagement and accounts for 20 percent of NYT's traffic, and has the longest dwell time for any news site."

Nik Fulon of Reuters Media quoted Barney Kilgore's "Today's appear should be about tomorrow's events, not yesterday's.

Adrian Holovaty, founder of EveryBlock talked about reorganising information, living information and taming streams.

Frederick Filloux, Monday Note:

"The advertising model is no longer able to sustain quality journalism."

Oliver Reichenstein, CEO of information Architects in Tokyo, and creator of the Web Trends Map:

"Twitter is my newspaper."

Simon Gallagher informed the audience that Hulu, the Web site for premium video content has Australia in its top 10 shortlist for launch.

Moeed Ahmad, Al Jazeera: 

"Content consumers are becoming your marketers, by letting them take your content and republishing it themselves."

Tim Harris and Saneel Radia (Denuo) talked about the seven sacred cows that are stifling creativity in advertising and marketing.

Ming Chan (The1stmovement) talked about the death of the agency of record.

Read notes of all sessions. Did you attend this conference? Let me and other readers know about what you think about the ideas discussed there.

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Posted in categories: Publishing and monetization   Creative content and production  Digital industry and markets  

Tags: future of media 2010 fairfax digital