There’s loads of talk about the future of everything – of newspapers, of advertising, of brands, of music.  most of the time what we’re really talking about is the future of the business models behind those things.  Here are the platitudes I find I constantly repeat:

• People don’t buy newspapers because they really want to accumulate a stack of newsprint in their homes.  Paper is the delivery mechanism for news; the physicality of that mechanism begat beautiful and useful ways of organizing and designing information.  We shouldn’t throw out beautiful and useful hierarchies and design elements because we aren’t using paper, and we shouldn’t believe that the desire for digital delivery means that people don’t understand the value of the information being delivered.  In other words, don’t confuse your century-old business model with the thing people want to buy.  Readers don’t care about your ad contracts, they care about what’s happening in their communities, and in, fundamentally, what’s new.
• Clients and agencies fill out a survey almost every year expressing their essential dissatisfaction with one another.  Clients say their agencies aren’t strategic partners to them, agencies say they want to be strategic partners but are shut out. Again, the model trumps what either of these parties say they want.  Agencies will solve any problem you have that can be solved with advertising.  Clients will view their agencies as mere vendors of art & copy.  Neither is engaging the other on a level of true strategic consultancy (there are of course notable exceptions).  Instead of asking, what can we solve with an ad campaign?, try asking (as i try to do with my clients), what needs doing?
• Everybody wants everything to be a brand, but not everything is.  Sometimes what you have is just a product; sometimes you just work for a company; sometimes you’re just a bloke.  It’s okay, it really is.  People want to know how to monetize platforms, and brand experiences, and infiltrate conversations.  Sometimes that platform is actually just a tool; sometimes that experience is best because it’s not branded; and sometimes conversations are private.  Focus on making the thing as good as it can be, as useful and flexible and versatile as it can be, and then let the folks who use your thing decide whether it’s a brand.  That’s how it really works anyway.
• Oh, music… I still believe in my favorite platitude, and that this applies even here:  give people respect and make good stuff.  I’ll hear about it, stumble across it, find it, and buy it. I promise. A lot of people will.  But I think there is some essential tension these days between ‘the long tail’, and piracy and pay structures.  You can complain about Steve Jobs strong-arming record labels and book publishers over the price of content, but you can not deny this democratizes content.  It suggests that the value of a song is 99 cents, whether it’s by Metallica or Timberlake or She & Him or the kids who practice every night in the garden apartment of my building. I’ve found, while working on brands like Zune, and television shows, that people will pay for content if the price is right.  What’s the right price?  It’s an amount of money that has less value to the payer than the time it would take to procure the same content illegally, and is a reasonable investment in avoiding the perceived negative outcome of not having the content. I saw 18 year olds tell me that they still run Lime Wire while they sleep so they can get the latest Gaga single; then heard 23 year olds express some remorse for continuing to do that; and then watched 28 year olds explain that they’d rather just pay the 99 cents and get the song now.  They’re on a sliding scale of time to money:  the more time and less money, the more likely you are to ‘steal’;  the less time and more money, the more like you are to pay.  It’s not generational, it’s about life stage.  So what’s that mean?  Keep making great music people want to experience. Some will steal and some will pay. You want to make money as a musician?  Rethink the business model. What needs doing to produce your music?  Do that, and skip the other bullshit.

Over at Music Think Tank, they offered some sound advice lately that I think all four groups should consider following (I’m paraphrasing to go beyond the band application):

1. Get feedback from friends who have a POV, other creators, and industry pros.  If most people love what you’ve made, promote it.  If not, learn to make better stuff. Back to the drawing board.  This is a variation on the theme of lead user innovation.
2. Get advice from people who’ve had good ideas recently.  Not the same old blow-hards who haven’t had a good idea in ten years.  In planning our innovations dinner at H&P, I was adamant that I didn’t want the usual ad wizard suspects circle-jerking for the cameras – I wanted people who were actively grappling with ideas: how to make them, and how to sell them.  And that’s who I still want to talk to – and who I want to work with.
3. Seek out experienced craftspeople.  My friend and colleague Whitney Collins Miller likes to call this “tradesourcing” – don’t assume you can teach yourself Flash to the degree you’d want to be able to use it; don’t think you’ll just pick up a bass guitar and lay down some hooks.  You need experienced people who know how to make the parts of what you want to build.  Not people who say they’ll figure it out and some unspecified date. I recently ran into this with what was a pretty simple piece of Flash coding – 6 weeks later we still didn’t have the deliverable, and we’d finally figured out how far outside our coder’s expertise we were.  I trusted her, once.
4. Collaborate! Co-promote! Reblog! Link back! Retweet! etc.
5. Expand your definition of what you do – VICE Magazine does this well by having Virtue Worldwide.  They are experts in their readers – they can leverage that expertise for brands and advertisers.  So yes, they’re a magazine, but they’re transmedia content producers, and strategic consultants, and makers of advertising – that’s a lot of revenue streams with much higher margins than subscriptions and ad rates.  Mad Dogs & Englishmen (may it rest) did the same thing by opening up side doors for strategy and creative.  The ad agency closed, but the strategy and creative boutiques survived and thrived.

I attended an event for the UO Alumni group here in NYC last night that was theoretically about “Journalism and Media in the Digital Age.”  Jodi Kahn from iVillage and Carlos Lamadrid from Woman’s Day, and Tim Gleason, the Dean of the Journalism School at the UO were the panelists.

This is not a review of that event.

There was one strand of the conversation though that really struck me – and that I think is one of the biggest problems all big media companies face as they’ve been muddling through the last 15 years of ‘digital.’  There was a real sense of ‘all or nothing’.  Either paid or free.  Either protected or open.  Either web or mobile.  This is not to say that the panelists are not exploring ‘hybrid’ approaches, or taking their brands into other channels, but they are thinking about things in those ways: hybrids, channels, etc.  There is, it seems to me, a singularity of vision that comes from this way of thinking about things.  And it wasn’t the kind of ‘singularity of vision’ that equals ‘clarity of purpose.’

You could tell because their favorite answer to most of the questions was, “No one knows.”  I believe this was honest.  It also suggested they should try harder, do some more experimenting, play with more ideas.  Not just try to port over old models into new structures, because as Dean Gleason kept saying, those models are broken.

The need for a closed environment, a safe place, in which to try new things – a vacuum in which to run experiments – seems to be the dream of all big corporations and marketing departments.  But that’s hard to create, and limited in its usefulness.  I propose instead that you prototype in public – don’t insist on an answer that is provably good or true; look for the path to the answer.

Make some things and try to sell them.  Learn about them by the way the prototype works and doesn’t.  Learn about how people will react to your message by whether they sample or purchase your prototype.  Learn about how to make the prototype better by how people actually use it.

Now, here’s the tricky bit.  You do need to have a direction in mind.  That direction should be rooted in who you (A) are today, and (B) want to be tomorrow.  It should be immersed in the way people live their lives and have a point of view about how to augment or disrupt people’s habits and assumptions.  That takes living in the world where your brand lives, but as a conscious, conscientious observer.  It takes respecting the other people who live there, the people who have a bit of green in their wallets that you’d like to put in yours.  And it takes making something worthwhile.

Some examples, hot off the presses.

DailyCandy sent their email out today…

The profile was of Wintercheck Factory‘s new line of sunglasses.  I poked around the site this morning and am very impressed by the openness of the business model.  They are keeping track of and teasing their prototypes on the site. And in some cases, they show you how to do it yourself.  This is, by any big brand’s measure, foolhardy – why give away the store?  But Wintercheck is simply showing us the thought and effort that goes into making their products.  Yes, we could make our own, but we don’t really want to.  We want the thing, and it’s even better if there’s a story behind it.

Here’s how they made their Julian Scarf:

This got me thinking about something else I’d seen recently that I really loved – the new Ok Go video.

So I went back to their channel, and sure enough – the guys at Ok Go don’t just want you to see their brilliant, single-shot videos, they want you to see some of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ action.  Check this out:

Prototyping helps you work out the kinks.  It can be a lengthy process, but it’s alway a fruitful one.  You see how the thing actually works – not just how it’s supposed to work – and you get to have a real sense of the thing, not just the messages and positioning around it.  When you do it in public you inspire other people – you demonstrate the benefits of creative effort, you lift the veil, you reveal your methods, and you earn their trust and admiration.  This is way more valuable to any brand than a transient transaction.  People come back to see what great new idea you have, and they want to have proof that they were there.