Digital Battlefield, they said…

By Fabian Tilmant on 26 January 2009 in New (ways of using) Media | Comments Off

Very interesting event organized by BMMA. A one-day trip through all aspects of digital media here in Belgium.

The most interesting debate was from far the one dedicated to consumers. Well, in this new era for digital media, triggered by global Social Networks and Web 2.0 trend, it’s quite logical

Joëlle Lieberman and Melanie Mc Cluskey highlighted very well the paradox situation where consumer are stuck in: they are super powered towards brands and companies, but have so much choice they can’t just make decisions. They’re then looking towards brands a listening ear and wise inspiration. Guidance. It’s not that they’re giving less importance to brands, even though most of them didn’t succeed these last years to differentiate themselves from competition, it’s just that brands are now extended beyond their own boundaries.
It’s like the traditional parent/child relationship between brands and consumers is living at the same time a midlife crisis for parents and teenage crisis for consumers.

The essence of the 7 debates is there: how can brands (re)build trust in their consumers.

Talking about digital, the debates around Access to Information (focused on Internet), Diffusion (focused on Interactive Television) and Media portability (focused on Mobile Media) were very interesting too.

The web, as first really digital and interactive media to come through, has revolutionized many businesses: photos, music, movies… and created a new generation (digital natives, or Y generation) that works on new paradigms. And this generation will, in a few years, manage these new digital industries. Content, information, applications will in the coming years be ported to new interactive medias like IDTV or Mobile. It will be the same exact content, adapted to new screens and new ways of using medias. On the other end of the value chain, information will be created natively to support all these new medias. This portfolio of new medias will push media groups to optimize added value of each of these. This will lead to structural changes in organizations and cognitive changes in professional minds.

About Mobile, the coming out of Mobistar, a few weeks after insights from Proximus telling the same was quite interesting: Mobile Operators strategy is NOT to roll out and optimize portals like Orange World and Vodafone Live. They won’t go to war towards media groups and international players like MSN, Yahoo or Google. They did their job managing such platforms and making sure they’re accessible to any capable device. These portals are enabler for the new era of Mobile Content, Applications and Services. Not more, not less. Applications (available through Apple’s Appstore, Google’s Androïd Market and Microsoft initiative) and subsidization will drive Belgian market. Operator’s goal is to Aggregate interesting content, facilitate consumer’s access to these platforms, protect their customers against spam or media abuse and regulate mobile payments. Fair enough…

Tags: media, Melanie Mc Cluskey, mobile