Op igennem firserne og halvfemserne havde MTV virkelig godt tag i de unge. Men hvordan står det til nu, hvor de unge er jaget vildt og ikke længere bare sidder foran fjernsynet?

SPEAKERS: Casper Bengtson (DK), Country Manager, MTV Networks // Kenneth Kristensen (DK), Channel Manager, MTV Networks

N.B.: Casper Bengtson meldte afbud og deltog ikke i præsentationen.

I denne session kan du høre MTV Networks fortælle om deres indsats for at holde sig ajour med de unge og deres forbrug af digitale medier. Hør også hvordan kanalen skaber og opdaterer indhold på tv, internet og på mobilen – og få mere at vide om den internationale satsning på spil, som de i sommer annoncerede at investere over 3 mia. kroner i.

Relateret:
Blog: Conference Crunching #3 – MTV Guitar Hero Conquering the Young at Heart.

Jon Lund and his Google search results point to the fact that some people now find they spend less time blogging, because they’re busy with Facebook. Others, for instance Morten Remmer, find that the microblogging trend (Twitter, Jaiku etc.) also has little to offer in view of Facebook’s status wall. So is Facebook the only personal, output channel we need? And how long before Mr. Zuckerberg launches World of Facecraft to quell the advances of online gaming too?

Few would disagree that the blog as a communication platform has lost its overall news value during the past 2-3 years, but measuring up a coffin seems a bit rash. When weblogs started to gain popularity in the late 90s it was because the platform offered an easy-to-use interface for sharing opinions. Since then multiple formats of personal, online expression have emerged to compete for the user’s attention and some of these certainly fit a broader portion of web users better than the blog ever did.

Facebook is a unique example of this change; a university experiment becoming an indispensable, worldwide hub of services bridging microblogging (Status wall), webmail (Inbox), calendar (Events), pictures (Photos), commercial websites (Pages), casual gaming (Applications) not to mention personal details on every person, you want to stay in touch with (Friends.)

Facebook’s nose for market direction + guts to revitalize their product in spite of customer satisfaction is deserving of respect. Most people now get their need for online expression satisfied right within one URL. Facebook is the mall of social web apps. Who would ask for anything more?

Eventually most of us will. Parking our online attention with Facebook is easy and comforting in a fragmented media landscape, but special interest content and services we’ll look for outside; in the rough. I love the status feed, but don’t count on it for the well-argued opinions or detailed research that I find in some blog posts. I often flick through photos of my Facebook friends, but go to Flickr or Google when searching for specific motifs. Facebook is a convenient constellation of services, but every one is done better elsewhere.

Take Twitter. (In my view Twitter (“What are you doing?”) should switch catchphrase with FB (“What’s on your mind?”) and make both fit better.) If I want nice-to-know information about my friends’ whereabouts or concerns, I consult Facebook. If I want to stay on top of news from around the world, I go to Twitter – or actually Twitter runs on my desktop all the time; a constant flow of (mostly) relevant news that I wouldn’t want to be without.

The nature of your Twitter flow is also fully customizable. It simply depends on whom you choose to follow. I only have a handful of duplicates from my Facebook friends list on Twitter and consequently get two very different feeds: One work related (Twitter) and one personal (FB). I think Twitter does microblogging better than Facebook, but at the end of the day I would like to have them both, as they fill different needs.

All in all it’s great that Facebook is taking some steam off the blogosphere and the twittersphere; fragmentation in this respect is not a bad thing and will hopefully lead to blogs regaining some lost authority, while Twitter continues to provide for a different kind of public sphere communication – as opposed to personal.

This is not arguing for an elitist quality-purification of blogs, tweets and other non-FB services, but simply saying that perhaps the Facebook Monster isn’t so much killing off other services as helping them crystallize their strengths – like Myspace is now synonymous with music.

Is this naïve and overly simplistic? Or perhaps just stating the obvious?

Related:
New Media Blog: Lifestreaming – Connecting the social dots

The Bivings Report: Facebook’s Challenges in Going Global

PR 2.0: (ebook) The Art and Science of Blogger Relations

Promo Magazine: Casual Games, Serious Marketing

To kick things off Danish spokesmen on IT and media politics, Ellen Trane Nørby and Mikkel Dencker, were joined on stage by CEOs from the media business, namely Chris Mottes of Deadline Games, Stephen Stephensen of Mingoville and Christian Peytz of FDIM.

After a quick presentation round that revealed some media shortcomings and old hat media uses on the part of the politicians, the business boys had prepared one video argument/question each for the politicians to reflect on. I’m just going to give you the short version. If you want to follow the full argument (in Danish) be sure to look out for the conference webcasts coming online very soon.

Chris Mottes, CEO Deadline Games.
“Which initiatives are you putting forward to support innovation in the media business and prevent developers from moving abroad?”

ETN: I think we’re doing a lot as it is. You’re a game developer and for instance we’re focusing on supporting learning based games because research has shown that children actually learn more by engaging them this way.

Stephan Stephensen, CEO Mingoville
“It would help new businesses to prosper and innovate if they could keep their earnings for three years before paying income taxes.”

MD: Interesting proposition. We’ll have a look at that. But of course it’s important to secure competitive balance across businesses also. Businesses would have to apply for this model and be approved.

Cristian Peytz, chairman FDIM
“How do we secure the privacy of the users and also equal business competition, when services such as Facebook follow American laws?”

ETN: I think the users will start to react and regulate much of this themselves. I’m totally against applying too many top down rules to the principles of the internet. Information should be able to flow freely.

MTV Denmark did their presentation of present and future development at New Media Days, October 2007. Two years earlier MTV had bought it’s way into the Guitar Hero franchise. Only one year earlier the Danish branch had launched the national website. And in early 2008, Channel Manager Kenneth Kristensen told us, Denmark would see a launch of a new IM music service from MTV. To my knowledge that never happened, but Kenneth gave us a good view of some 2007 MTV user research.

If the teenagers won’t watch TV someone like MTV is looking at trouble. The international research analysis, “Circuits of Cool”, had the goal of tapping into the young customers’ needs of technology, media and networking to point a twenty-year-old media conglomerate safely into the new century.

Points of notice:

-    Danish youngsters value tech functionality and ease of use more than their American or Japanese counterparts, who are more into the latest – but not necessarily greatest – gadgets.
-    Friends (ie. networks) are valued more than family – at least in the Western hemisphere. In more traditionally minded cultures, such as India or Brazil, family still take the lead.
-    Old media, especially print, still scored high with young people when asked where they look to discover new music.

The primary strategy for the future, Kenneth Kristensen told us, was continuing to focus on exclusive content. That will get you the eyeballs. Being a major cross-media organisation, MTV Networks International has a real advantage in that respect. With two mobile TV channels running on the Danish network in October 2007, MTV was quite well positioned. They even customised the mobile content, unlike any other Danish service provider at that time. However the mobile TV market in Denmark hadn’t at that time taken off – and actually it still hasn’t.

Post Session:
Guitar Hero III was about to be launched when MTV Denmark did their presentation. Once out it became a huge success, but MTV really didn’t have a part in it since they bought into Harmonix and thus “only” secured revenue from past versions of Heroes. Instead MTV developed the concept into Rock Band – another gaming success to show that interactive music is the right place to aim.

A brand new release from MTV is due next Monday the 15th when MTVNHD reaches its first public eyeballs. The complex abbreviation stands for MTV Network High Definition and it prides itself in being the first ever international high definition service dedicated to music and kids. To begin with it is launched in Belgium, Finland, Norway, Poland, Sweden and yes, Denmark.

More on the subject:

Computerworld: Danish article on the MTV.dk session.

Microsoft Advertising on the “Circuits of cool” research findings.

MSN.com on MTVNHD.

This kind of parallel entertainment distribution across media platforms is a strategy gaining in popularity as revenue from video game sales are actually surpassing that from box-office ticket sales. It’s speculated that the two media platforms are actually competing for the same audience.

The Wanted MMO is free-to-play, however. Rather than being a parallel revenue-maker, it’s a FIG. Swedish game developers, Stillfront, specializes in FIGs and in the press release announcing WantedTheGame, they explain:

“Fan Immersion Games (FIGs) are casual, massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) that are free to play yet also include opportunities for players to buy advantages and premium accounts using micro transactions payable via SMS messages and credit cards. These games deliver high fan engagement through their story-driven design and community elements.

According to the Casual Games Association, the North American online casual games market is estimated to reach $690 million with worldwide revenue of over $1.5 billion. DFC Intelligence states that the worldwide online games market is forecasted to reach $13 billion in 2011.”

So even though it incorporates a microtransaction model enabling players to buy and exchange weapons and hit orders, the Wanted FIG is not primarily launched to secure game revenue but create awareness about the whole Wanted universe and get people in line at the box-office.

Two weeks ago the Wanted brand became even more immersive when the game was officially ported to the iPhone. Besides taking advantage of the iPhone tilt-function for navigation, the mobile edition has in-game benefits for players who log in on a regular basis. Regular immersion is rewarded so to speak.

I would love to hear from anyone who’s tried the game. Wonder if it has an impact on the Danish premiere as well. I doubt it.

Must know more?

Wanted FIG is not enough. A video game is coming out later this year.
Age of Conan MMORPG will tie in with Age of Conan movie scheduled for the future.
MMO and movie are potential untapped opportunities for BioShock, the video game.

To top it off, Apple expanded their iTunes branch to include the Application Store where developers and users can respectively up- or download new features to spice up the iPhone. According to voices from various areas of media business this user-driven shopping experience coupled with the (deserved) iPhone hype is going to drive mobile use to the next level:

Mobile gaming has never been an essential need of the average user. But even so ABI Research has found that 64% of mobile phone subscribers have games on their current phone, making it the most common feature. This discrepancy is about to even out according to Screen Digest who expects the user-experience of touchscreen interfaces will drive the growth of the mobile gaming market, especially in North America, and double its market value by 2012.

Of the first 10 million downloads from the iTunes Application Store roughly 1/3 is believed to be games, but according to Screen Digests Senior Analyst, this demand for mobile games could however soon come to a halt if developers don’t overcome technical challenges and deliver more enticing games to a wider audience of gamers.

Mobile gaming and advertising is an obvious match that could provide for a broader – and more targeted – game distribution. In an interview with AdvertisingAge Brian Bos of Ford Motors hints at an iPhone-exclusive ad campaign in mid-August that will take on and play with the components of the device. He feels the brand is able to come alive on the intuitively interactive iPhone, providing for a deeper and longer engagement with the product. The article also emphasizes that iPhone users fall in a highly sought-after target group: The well-off, male 25- to 34-year-olds.

Another marketing-friendly feature of the iPhone and other smart phones is the built in GPS. In mobile web browsing as well as application use, context-based banner ads can cater to both user and advertiser interests by linking to offers available in the local vicinity of the user. A much disputed scenario, for sure, but nonetheless one that comes closer to reality with every GPS-enabled mobile device being issued.

On a slightly different note, marketing strategist Steve Rubel predicts how wifi-enabled smart phones will change the way we interact with audio. Internet radio applications for the iPhone like Pandora and Last.fm (unfortunately neither is available in Denmark) where you continually personalize your musical profile could prove to be disruptive for broadcast radio. Not only does it make for a gratifying user experience, but advertisers could also benefit from the user’s input and target ads according to musical tastes as well as GPS-information.

So the iPhone buzz is more real than ever and the predictions point to new mobile habits and two-way interaction. Let’s just hope the marriage between user interests and commercial ditto will be of mutual benefit.