A personal view of the digital media industry

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

August 28, 2007 [1993 views]

This session was run in both Karlskrona and Stockholm over the last two days. Thanks for all the questions and discussion in the sessions. Feel free to ask more questions using the comment facility below.

Goals of the session

1. Describe some of the issues surrounding digital media at the moment
2. Demonstrate some of the OTHER media’s work
3. Describe the skills required to work in a company such as ours
4. Make you think about future changes in the industry
5. Suggest some strategies for maximising the value of being at Hyper Island

10 interesting things

1. Power and dominance of Google (search, email, advertising, maps, storage, chat and telephony, SEO)
2. Customer journeys versus traditional advertising
3. YouTube, Broadband and high bandwidth applications
4. Social networks (Facebook, Trigg, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning)
5. Amazon (AWS)
6. Mashups
7. Mobile (applications, presence, location based services)
8. Rise and rise of ecommerce
9. Web services (RSS, API’s, integration, distributed web apps)
10. Ajax
11. Integration

What are the OTHER media working on right now?

1. Supply chain integration
2. 120 sites for a nightclub chain
3. Redesign for an ecommerce site
4. Shop integration
5. First stage build for a new entertainment project
6. Prototyping an educational community
7. Investigating social networking for a retail client
8. Marketing and SEO for another retailer
9. Redesign for charity site
10. Adding user generated content to a publishing site
11. Writing proposals
12. Marketing the OTHER media
13. Monitoring, marketing and supporting 40 other sites

So what do we do?

(% of our work in each area – some overlap)

1. Design and build ecommerce stores (50% up from 30% 2 years ago)
2. Design integrated “membership journeys” and communities organisations (50 % up from 30%)
3. Developing new content management tools based on Open Source components (10%)
4. Design within existing brands (90%) and create new ones (10%)
5. Provide content management systems for projects (nearly 100%)
6. Optimise conversion rates through analysis of market data (20% up from 10%)
7. Drive targeted traffic through search engine optimisation (35% up from 20%)
8. Research vertical markets (retail, visitor attractions) and technology trends (10%)
9. Support educational projects in Sweden and Kingston (15%)
10. Reuse successful ideas and technology (80 %)

Is digital media…?

• Maturing – many activities are well understood and can be replicated easily
• Consolidating – only the large agencies will survive
• Specialising – companies make money out of ecommerce or mobile or marketing
• Fragmenting – Websites for €200, Argos spending €150m/year
• Disappearing – now part of IT, advertising, marketing

What skills do we want/need from staff?

• Creativity – business and strategy as well as design
• Open Source (J2EE, RoR) development
• Accessible design (xHTML, CSS, AJAX, SEO, usability)
• Database and information modelling
• Budget and time planning
• Negotiation and communication skills (upselling)
• Attention to detail
• Research skills
• Selling skills
• Customer handling skills
• Flexibility and an ability to learn
• Sense of humour

10 tips for getting the best out of Hyper Island

1. Decide what you are going to be the best at
2. Learn to learn yourself
3. Step outside your comfort zone
4. Read and search lots
5. Understand the power of networks (technical, complex, marketing, personal)
6. Experiment and visualise
7. Ask lots of questions (of us and using your networks)
8. Set yourself impossibly high standards
9. Be more technical that you expected
10. Learn how to sketch and prototype

 

  

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