Monday 1 October 2007

Throwing The Digital Babies Out With The Media Bathwater

Online departments at major content providers appear to be getting the Ax...According to MediainCanada

"Claude Galipeau ended his brief tenure at Alliance Atlantis Communications on Friday, joining the exec-odus of new-media heads from CHUM, CTV, CanWest and Corus, which - in a wave of post-takeover belt-tightening - appear to be gutting their online departments"

One has to wonder what is going on? It reminds me a bit of when all the Interactive Divisions got merged into the Direct Marketing divisions at Agencies. Rather than well thought out strategies, it always appeared to me that these decisions were based on fear, reducing head count, as well as an inability to understand how to integrate new media into their companies overall business vision.

You can't just tack on new media to an org chart and expect it to be successful.

It isn't about a blog strategy or what new web 2.0ey social networking new thingymabob you can launch. It goes much deeper than that.

IMHO it more important to understand the impacts of the new networked media environment and customer and how that could RE-IMAGINE where you are going as a business. REINVENT how you interact with your customers. And RE-VISION who you are as a brand.

Until companies look at new media in those terms, they will continue to struggle and throw the digital babies out with the media bathwater.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This isn't new, but I see what you mean. I was at the National Post when Conrad sold his remaining shares to the Asper clan. One minute, us folks in the Interactive department were working on our award-winning web site; the next, we were drinking our severance cheques away while the lacklustre Canada.com took over our content.

The internet industry has been taken over by cynics and bean counters. It's unfortunate that the freshness and excitement of the medium was killed off by the greedy frenzy of the dot-com stock bubble.

Leigh said...

It would definitely take a different mind set to turn it around. While the trend might be bean counters right now, the truth is that the beans are getting smaller…at some point it will be do or die but by then I guess it might be too late…..

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure a "do or die" moment will come. I'm of the belief that the epiphany will be more along the lines of what happened with Amazon and eBay: they tried something new and, for some reason, it just worked.

 
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