nextMEDIA conference: how to win people and influence friends

You got a problem with the future? Then they don’t want your kind hanging around nextMEDIA, a two-day conference at the Design Exchange to wind down another year, as the pause button pushed last fall amidst the economic meltdown gets lifted a little bit. What awaits on the other side? A service from Rogers allowing their customers across Canada to access TV shows they weren’t going to watch on TV won over attendees. Also, smartphones that push information people barely care to know. Gavin Purcell, supervising producer of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, turned up to tell attendees that you can’t predict which online bits will go viral — “so stop trying.” And certainly, if there’s anything that Toronto-based content providers have experience with, it’s stopping trying.

Not everything produced for the web needs to be so self-consciously clever, though — the ones making money aren’t fretting over the future of journalism, or delusions of creative integrity induced by rock ‘n’ roll rebels like Pearl Jam. So, if 90 per cent of Canadians are really visiting a social media site every month, as claimed by perennial enthusiast Bryan Segal of comScore, best to figure out how to adapt topics of interest to 90 per cent of the population. That means deferring to regular folk few media types care to meet.

“Crowdsourcing might be the biggest thing since radio,” proclaimed advertising executive Chuck Porter this morning, while citing the shift from a read-only society back to a read-write one, which sounds familiar. “Someone’s doing Larry Lessig’s bit,” observed a lurker already on the cluetrain — but if it’s new to you, it’s still new!

Consider how, over the past decade, most conversations about media were guided by the assumption that all media was better in the preceding decade. Yet, the same sentiment was expressed throughout the decade before that, and so on. These past 10 transformative years will merit no such fond reminiscences — the high-wired Millennial generation won’t buy that one. Where does that leave a grown-up trying to generate an advertising buck or two today? Cashing any cheques they can while waiting for somebody else to figure out a formula that works. This ain’t an art form worth starving for.