Interviews

In conjunction with the Implications for Action Camp that took place in May 2011 to explore implications arising from the 2020 Media Future scenarios, we set up a Speakers Corner. Participants were asked to express their critical thoughts regarding opportunities, challenges and strategies for success in the face of internet-driven disruption.

Interview participants represented a range of industries and perspectives including: publishing, interactive digital media production, transmedia, social media, business development and investment.

Participants were asked to consider the following questions, in the face of internet-driven disruption of the "creative cluster" — the books, magazines, music, film, TV, and interactive media industries:

• What are the major challenges for your industry or community?
• What are some key emerging opportunities?
• Which of the 2020 Media Futures Scenarios represents a preferred future?
• What marketing and distribution strategies will be critical for success?
• Which changes or innovations do you think would be most helpful for organizations in these sectors?

We produced a series of videos from this interview session which may be viewed below.

Interview Highlights

Includes answers to each of our questions selected from all the interviewees



Following, we present the complete interview for each participant, including his or her answers to each of the five questions posed.

Madeline Ashby

Author, 2020 Media Futures researcher

"There are more and more types of ways of writing to make money. Your career can have as many branches on it as you allow to grow there. If you define yourself solely as a print media writer then you’ll die. But if you open yourself up to all the opportunities that are available you’ll probably do quite a bit better."

"If you are good at what you are doing, if you have a strong audience base behind you, all four scenarios look fantastic. Whether you are being sponsored by BellRBC as in Ministry of Investment, or you are being fought for by an IP lawyer in Lords of the Cloud, or if you are alone in a cloistered enclave on the outskirts of town with your community as in Anthill, or you are creating on-the-fly as in Wedia... What you have to worry about is not being successful but rather doing the best you can. I think the solution in all four scenarios is to have a really strong community behind you... For the artist, for the creator, for anybody in this line of work you have to make those connections and build that community."

Michael Cayley

Cdling Capital Services Inc.

"One of the things that is happening globally — and we see the effects of it here domestically as well — is that the costs of launching a global start up have dropped dramatically... What’s happening in other places is taking off here as well. We have all kinds of new start-ups that are getting out of the gate and have prospects that weren’t present, say, three or four years ago."

"Distribution has evaporated as a competitive advantage globally... The ability to capture attention or shift attention becomes the rare item, the most important element in an overall strategy. If you look at those two factors, marketing and distribution, the emphasis is on marketing: grabbing attention, or what I call building social capital. Social media is an artifact of social capital indicating that you have connections with people. I think that is the primary strategy moving forward."

"The preoccupation with distribution is all about broadcast, because broadcast is capital intensive... You can rent time and attention over a broadcast network with financial capital. But in the new world of distribution you earn time over social networks in order to become mediated. Social capital becomes the medium that is most important. You can, to a certain extent, buy attention, but at the end of the day people are only going to rebroadcast what you’ve got to say for one or two iterations; you really need to be adding value to their networks or they’re not going to be a repeater for you."

Trevor Haldenby

Digital content producer, graduate student

“One of the biggest problems...is the huge surge in innovation that we’ve seen in the last fifteen to twenty years, particularly in digital content production, distribution and consumption.... Because there’s been a huge surge, a lot of people think we can slow down a bit; that there’s another twenty years ahead before we get into the next big paradigm shift in media.... We need to come to terms with the possibility the next shift is going to come soon as five or ten years."

"The most helpful changes, in terms of keeping the digital content and entertainment industry viable and growing into the future, are new delivery systems. It’s about taking lessons learned from healthcare and biotech, in terms of design process and technology, and trying to see what happens when you mash those up with entertainment. What kind of possibilities open up that people either shunned ten years ago or hadn’t even considered possible? The entertainment experience of the future, I think, is that you don’t pay $15 to go sit in an IMAX theatre with a bunch of people you don’t like. You pay $25 to take the little pill that lets you live inside Avatar for a day and a half. And that’s how you experience that immersive, virtual world."

Robert Hayashi

eBound Canada/ACP
"Our challenge is 'discoverability'. The consumer with their laptop or tablet or smartphone has a worldwide array of choice in front of them - is how to bubble up Canadian content. Be it in ebook format be it in print book format, video, streaming video, film whatever. That’s the true challenge – is how to make that discoverable for those people who are interested. And not just for Canadian content but for just true relevant meaningful content that they can use."

"In all four scenarios, you have to have a combination of social drivers, economic/commercial drivers and there’s also a layer of public policy that has to be interwoven into it. As we go forward into the new economy, going towards 2020 and what that future looks like, it’s the interplay between all of those, and the content originator and content providers like publishers who will ultimately determine what that future’s going to look like, what that landscape will look like."

David Plant

Cameron Thomson Group

"The reality of Wedia is that many are called and few are chosen. That’s the world of YouTube. Thousand, millions of pieces of content, but really, there’s probably only 100-200 memes that have come out of YouTube that will have any lasting value, that people will remember five years from now, ten years from now. Big media needs big money and big media is what has the lasting value. If there was no Hollywood, it would have to invent itself."

"The next big thing is the area of content discovery. Artists and creators should really rush to embrace the meta-data around their work because that will define their ability to be discovered. It’s not just about the idea and the expression of the idea. It’s about understanding and communicating effectively what the underlying elements of that idea are."

"Decreasing the levels of funding in certain . . . legacy institutions . . . there is less need for those things to be supported and more need for the monies that are spent supporting that extremely expensive infrastructure to be turned into research and development. I think we would find that there was a great deal more innovation in all aspects of content creation if there was more investment being put into content R&D."

Allan Novak

Independent Producer
“In Canada, we have great access to subsidies, tax credits, seed financing. So I think leveraging the advantages we have as Canadians is a great thing to do because we are actually the envy of a lot of other countries in the world. For instance, US TV producers don’t often own the copyright to their own shows for cable TV, whereas Canadian do, because of the government regulations. So we’ve actually got a leg up and if we can leverage some of those advantages, we can make content on a global scale out of Canada.”

"I’d like to see more flexibility with unions. For example, the actors’ union does not currently allow for sort of incubation kind of projects. Kind of the old, as I see them, 20th century models of labour do not take into account the new realities where content might have to be incubated on the internet, for example, with no revenue as kind of a sweat equity kind of proposal. Whereas a 20th century models presuppose a large, well financed entity exploiting powerless people, whereas actually I think what we’re finding is kind of a more flexible scenario. I think that the jurisdictions need to be more dynamic and allow for the fact that sometimes content needs to be incubated and to come from the grassroots. And there’s no paradigm or model right now to do those contracts. So we need a bit of forward thinking with collective agreements."

Priya Rao

Jumpwire Media
"For us one of the challenges has been to have authentic conversations in the social space. It’s not just about selling something or telling a story . . . it’s about creating a relationship."

"Opportunities are really endless because now social media is opening up the world to communicate with one another on a more instantaneous basis.”

"I would prefer a future in which the artist is more respected and art was more respected and had a higher place in society."

Karl Schroeder

Author, 2020 Media Futures researcher

"I would say the major challenge facing writers right now is the decision of how much personal control do we want over the marketing and creation of our own work."

"Having a website of my own and the capability of creating ebooks I can theoretically cut out the middle man and sell directly off my website. Do I want to do that? How far down that road do I want to go? Or do I want to stay with the traditional publishing apparatus, which may or may not survive the next few years."

"Obviously being on the Internet and having a strong, visible personality is extremely important these days. But I think for authors, the old adage is probably truer now than it ever was – you need to have a day job, or at least you need to have more than one identity. . . it’s very difficult to simply be a storyteller in the new world."

Additional Video:

Chris Stevens

Atomic Antelope, Creator of Alice in Wonderland iPad app

"I come from a background of storytelling as a journalist, so what’s really important for me is communicating ideas rather than getting tied up in the idea of what’s the most exciting thing we can do technologically."

"Not only has Apple’s iTunes network liberated the creative process for me, and the illustrators I work, with but it’s also the whole reason I got involved in commercializing what I was creating. There’s probably a lot of people who would not have started business had they had to run the infrastructure that Apple now automate."

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