SIIA Executive Summit: The Heavies Weigh In

(by guest blogger John Blossom, President, Shore Communications Inc.) Save the sweets for last, our mothers tell us, and the panel of leading content execs chaired by Jim Kollegger, CEO of Genesys Partners, provided some sweet fare at the end of an interesting day. CEOs Tom Glocer of Reuters Group PLC, Patrick Kenealy of IDG, Jonathan Miller of America Online and Steve Rattner of Quadrangle were also joined by Steve Lohr, Technology Reporter for The New York Times. The consensus of the panel seemed to be that both the content industry and its audiences are busy absorbing a wide array of new technology-driven content experiences that are still fairly klunky in spite of their high-tech underpinnings. Pondering his fritzed-out TiVo and a houseful of other information appliances that don’t work particularly well, Jonathan Miller acknolwedges that “getting it easy is a big deal,” as AOL has shown by adding easy-answers value to Google search results that now make AOL’s the preferred search results content for its users. Tom Glocer noted that people may be “overegging” the death-of-I.T. issue and sees us in a kind of interregnum in which XML, Web services and weblogging’s collective impact are not yet felt as key drivers of industry change. Part of this might be because much of the technological impact on content is no longer centralised: as Patrick Kenealy observed, most of today’s technology revolution is in the “last five feet” of delivery and experience - broadband, new devices with new formats that are oftentimes vying for a proprietary advantage. The other interregnum is in busines models, where money has not yet shifted fully into its proper alignment with where content value is being provided. Steven Ratner noted that just as broadcast TV advertisers have not yet shifted dollars to more targeted and cost-effective cable, online ad dollars have not grown in proportion to online audiences – in large part because it’s still pretty hard for ad agencies to craft, deploy and measure successful online campaigns. An interregnum in which it’s not clear who own’s the crown, but that’s what makes for a good story, isn’t it?

That’s it for our coverage of the SIIA Executive Summit on PaidContent.org; you’ll find our usual coverage of content and related technologies at shore.com. Our thanks to Rafat Ali for kindly allowing us to be the blogger of record for this premiere event. Hope you enjoyed it!

This coverage is sponsored by HighBeam Research.

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