June, 1985: At a conference on film financing, a banker from First Boston asks a crowd of film industry executives to name the most valuable thing in the movie business. None of them have the answer she’s looking for, an answer that was prescient at the time, and never more relevant than it is today. “The most valuable thing in the movie business,” the banker informs them, “is 52 weekends a year.” In the banker’s opinion, it is the film studios’ ability to capitalize on the 52 yearly opening weekends that determines their status in the marketplace. Not long after the banker makes this observation, the Weekend Boxoffice Report begins appearing for the first time in newspapers around the country. For better or worse, who ‘wins the weekends’ becomes a new metric for a film’s success, a new context for audiences to consider, and a driver of a film’s revenue in ancillary markets.
In the Networked World, as the costs of producing media and other forms of intellectual property dwindle, and your blog about your dog has the potential to reach as many people as Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, the big business opportunities for brands and entrepreneurs are not so much in the creation of content, but in creating and owning context. In other words, you can have the swellest piece of content — a great product, an incredible film, a breakthrough technology — but if no one can find you or your content does not connect in a meaningful way with your audience, your tree will fall in the forest and will not make a sound. In the Networked World, context is king. Context makes the falling tree mean something to the forest, gives it its sound, its flavor, its grain, its significance.Creating context has, in fact, become a whole new occupation, one that didn’t exist three years ago: the Pollinator. Pollinators are experts (or fast-becoming that way) in cobbling together social networks and communities of interest that connect brands with their audiences. Pollinators are skilled listeners, and know how to turn ’suggestions from the audience’ into productive brand behaviors. They understand a brand as a fluid experience for the customer, an experience that requires continual nurturing to evolve. Pollinators design the context in which these experiences can transpire. They are professional contextualizers.
YouTube and Google are the highest-profile examples of brands that create and own context. They do not create content or experiences, but give content a home and make useful experiences possible. Everywhere you turn these days, you see brands shifting their focus from static content to the fluid context that keeps their narrative lively and engaging.
Here are three other companies who are in the business of creating context:
Mochila is an application with widgets that let owners of content connect with distribution channels and advertisers in a win-win-win scenario. Mochila’s Chairman, Ben Chen, describes his company as a ’syndication engine’ that automates and simplifies what would otherwise be an enormously complicated process of defining relationships and revenue streams between large numbers of producers, distributors and advertisers. What had been difficult if not downright impossible for the average content-creator gets made easier by Mochila. The enormous 24/7 appetite of distributors gets fed. Advertisers can tie into channels and content that contextualize their brand.
Morf Mobile is a mobile content provider founded by Van Jepson, who created the well-known site, Hot or Not? That web phenomenon invited its audience to contextualize random photos. Morf, geared toward a young adult audience, contextualizes content by parsing it into mobile channels and communities of interest. It adds context by tying real world experiences to online ones. Impulses to buy, connect, alert, comment — action! — become more immediate options when mobility gets added to the mix. For further context, Morf enables its licensees to private label their channels. Your brand can use the Morf technology to create its very own context. For example, fans of Artist X can dial up the Artist X channel to share news and keep current with the community and its favorite performer. Artist X, meanwhile gets a channel that lets everyone at a concert become an ambassador for the brand, or buy Artist X’s music and merch before they leave the parking lot.
It’s not only newbie brands who are generating value via context. Procter & Gamble’s Connect + Develop site lets people outside the company have a shot at making money by developing new products and innovative ideas. Applicants can browse a list of P & G’s ‘Needs,’ which includes items like “Packing for Cylindrically Packaged Food,” “Pain Free Hair Removal From the Roots” and my favorite, a call for a “Unique In-Mouth Experience.” P & G calculates that there are 1.5 million people in the world who have engineering and product design skills comparable to the skills of its own engineering and product development staff of 7,500. Changing the context of its development process by opening it up to the world and incentivizing participation enables P & G to increase its potential development staff by 7,500x. They call them ‘Game-Changing’ deals, which is not a very unique in-mouth experience, but we are flattered by the imitation flavor ; )
Tags: Branding, Connect and Develop, Content, Context, Context is King, Contextualization, Google, Innovation, Mochila, Morf, Networked World, P & G, Social Engineer, Social Networks, YouTube
This concept strongly resonates with me Mike. I am in the process of creating a context myself with an idea called ConvergenceDC that I am developing here in the Washington metropolitan area. We are creating an environment or as you put it a ‘context’ that allows for entrepreneurial thinkers to gather, brainstorm and then create business opportuntities where none currently exist. Its crowdsourcing meets a conference meets a think tank. But you are definitely spot on with this idea of ‘context is king’! Another idea great example of this is Nextnewnetworks.com.