The BrandForward Blog

I got this thing all figured out.

The universe, you know.

Once upon a time there was nothing. And then after a “Big Bang” there was something.

And as things started expanding there was a lot more of this something. And then the universal momentum waned and gravity took over. Things contracted. Once again there was nothing.

You’ll have to forgive me. I saw Star Trek this weekend.

So even if Jean-Luc Picard had never lost half his humanity and William Shatner had never traded the 1701-C for a hippie beater van, we still know the universe starts from nothing and ends with nothing. It’s a cycle. The universe expands and eventually contracts.

Now, more than a few scientists out there might want to debate my cosmological accuracy. Not everyone agrees in the closed universe. But that’s okay. We’re not here to analyze the space-time continuum or get published by the Scientific American. We’re here to talk about a business model. Scientists go back to the lab. Everyone else, thisaway.

So as we know, the universe is expanding. (Which for us humans is really the preferable thing.)

But let’s take a look at the media industry. It’s doing just the opposite. It’s contracting. And to provide some movie-worthy visuals let’s just say it’s about to reach the event horizon.

The point of no return.

End of movie.

After reading yesterday’s Mashable article by Stan Shroeder about News Corp’s plan to install the Great Paywall of China, and proclaiming it would be “rightfully high,” it looks like Big Media isn’t exactly caught up on their Sci-Fi (or SyFy). Because they’re on a collision course with a big sucking black hole. Haven’t they heard of Stephen Hawking? If you’ve made enough missteps to find yourself approaching the edge of a black hole, things are about to get a little discombobulated.

But wow. By thinking a paywall is the way out of this mess, Big Media is basically putzing around at impulse power. Hoping it’s a mirage. Assuming if things get that bad they can just dial up that fancy warp core so the lumbering mothership can continue on its merry way through the Milky Way galaxy.

Going where every man has gone before.

Ho hum.

Sorry, but it’s time for the Big Bang Business Model. Where outdated business models collapse, and new sparkly ones emerge from the primordial soup.

Yeah, there’s a chance Big Media can make a resurgence. Expanding out into the ethers with its long tentacles.

But it could also make like a Monty Python parrot and cease to be.

If Big Media wants to leverage getting sucked into a black hole, and hope that its particles cohesively reassemble during the Big Bang, it has to figure out that it isn’t in the information business. It really never was. What made Big Media ubiquitous and highly in demand was the human desire for personal power. No, not information. Not spreads with Annie Liebowitz photographs. Or articles written by Pulitzer Prize winners.

What readers really wanted was the personal power the information gave them.

I mean that’s why business executives read Time magazine or Newsweek or WSJ or Ad Age, right? To amass more knowledge that can be leveraged for power. The more information you possess, the higher-level conversations you can have. Your critical thinking skills might actually improve. Your value to your company increases. Your boss stops asking you to bring him coffee. People want to talk to you more. Listen more. Your mind expands. You revel in acquiring even more information because you like the result of having it. By absorbing and sharing information, you increase your personal power. Why do you think 14 year-old girls read Cosmo or Glamour? It’s about increasing their ability to have presence and popularity. Forget information. It’s just that thing you have to get through to attain personal power.

But somewhere Big Media got lost. The powers that be couldn’t stand to lose what they felt they owned, and chose to engage in an epic struggle to control what they think they offer of value: information. They ventured into the internet-planetary system but once they realized what Web 3.0 is all about, they reversed engines and started planning how to keep their “valuable” information away from users who expect it for free. They started strategizing ways to shield it from pesky blogging parasites.

The problem is that the internet is all about sharing, which is at direct odds with Big Media’s old business model. Big Media placed an arbitrary value on information because they erroneously thought information was their business. But now that the information has lost its monetary value, they’re apparently still not ready to accept that the singularity is near. They’re thinking that by installing paywalls, preaching about expenses, and calling their news “premier” they can miraculously grind the reverse Big Bang to a screeching halt. The problem is, “premier” information is losing its value.

Because free information can grant personal power, too.

Ouch.

To survive, Big Media has to realize that information is no longer scarce. The proprietary information that used to give readers an edge, give them more power, respect, and influence is now available for free. But there’s a way to capitalize on this. Want to solve Big Media’s business model dilemma? Use a little physics. The whole equal and opposite action thing:

When the amount of information increases, there’s something conversely decreasing.

And when the value of information is decreasing because there’s so much of it, there’s something else increasing in value because it’s harder to come by.

If Big Media would analyze their greatest offering, personal power, they’d realize that to attain personal power you need both the access to information and the time to go out and leverage it.

But with so much information out there, we’re experiencing an ever-increasing scarcity of time. More information, less time. And with millions of new web pages every day, it’s not going to get any better.

Anyone who’s lost five hours googling in one sitting, or has 1,700 unread RSS articles in their feeder knows what I’m talking about. The last thing anyone wants is to pay $2.99 for an a la carte article or subscribe to one more news feed. And a paid one? Forget it. Dream on. We’re already overloaded with great stuff. Great free stuff.

What we humanoids need is a way to synthesize information. We need a serious time-saver. We need access to the best information customized to our personal preferences. New stuff. Old stuff that’s relevant to our new stuff. “Trusted” stuff. And untrusted stuff. Articles and blogs and social media conversations that represent our favorite products and brands, complement our daily activities, reflect our personal goals. All mishmashed into an aggregated system that we’d swear was magic. Super value efficiently delivered so we can be on high receive, while still having spare time to act on it and share it.

There’s the value. That’s where the next business model is. Once Big Media crashes into the singularity, there will be an explosive opportunity to harness information.

Not paywall it.

What Big Media should be doing to save themselves is cornering the market on personal power. Developing a property that allows users to aggregate their own “personal power interface.” A truly ubiquitous aggregator. With Big Media populating what should be some of the best content, of course. But also populating from across the web. Being okay with having their stories aggrega
ted along with pesky bloggers or websites they don’t own or control. Drawing in the best articles, blogs, tweets, and updates on the issues and activities and people that shape a person’s world. An individual’s world.

Realize it’s no longer mass media. It’s individual media.

And instead of selling advertising onto a newsprint page or TV commercial, develop innovations to integrate relevant brands and companies into interfaces in a way that doesn’t feel like advertising’s unwanted guest. Take a serious look at the core of social media, maximize its strengths, and create interwoven sharing opportunities. Not just sharing news, but sharing brands. In a way that’s not already being done. In a way that advertisers will pee their pants over.

Seriously. If Big Media had been focusing on innovating instead of quarterly profits, they might have realized that the portfolio of media acquisitions they’d acquired during the 1990’s gives them an advantage to merge content through an interface that has real value for individual users. If Big Media wants to emerge from the Big Bang, it has to embrace its core value and realize what it’s offered all along: Personal power. And create something that maximizes it.

Hard to believe the trick is something as simple as a set of aggregation algorithms, huh? Who wouldn’t love something more relevant than a Google search. Something more focused than an RSS reader. More personal than Alltop. More customized than Twitter. Less asinine than Facebook. Imagine something that creates a powerful information efficiency, aggregating what matters to an individual. Creating a “life channel” that saves time and increases personal productivity. The perfect storm of personal power.

That’s the Big Bang Business Model: Monetizing the value of information, not the information itself. Making aggregation the focus of innovation. Placing importance on the benefit, not the product. Recognizing the emerging problem: too much information and lack of time to leverage it. And solving that problem, not adding to it.

A lot of companies are toeing the line of this hot, new mystery property. But none of them have yet to capture the magic. A few are getting close. But by creating an aggregator that’s truly revolutionary, one that seriously impacts the ability to gain knowledge and personal power, Big Media could get back into the game.

This is our new universe. The race is not going to be won on control of information. It will be won on the aggregation of it.

Aggregation turns information into personal power.

Information is cheap. Personal power is priceless.

And if Big Media can’t deal with that, not even Captain Kirk with the Enterprise (or William Shatner with his tricked-out van) will be able to mount a rescue from that big, black hole that’s quickly emerging.