check please…mobile electronic payments are the missing plumbing we need

(eyeball time: 2.2 minutes unless you fast-scrub the video)

the dea skinny on what’s happening:

www.google.com/wallet

by now you know we are not anybody’s lapdog (we tastefully forgo using the rap music alternative submissive relationship adjective here so please note our class).

look, you have lots of stuff to track and worry about out. so we bring this to your attention because it is one of the most non-glamourous but important things you need to track so pls listen up:  it’s how you get paid. we have discussed micro-payments and all the other plumbing needed to power games and all other forms of digital entertainment. but let’s get real. digital entertainment isn’t a big enough tail to wag an electronic commerce payment solution dog. even with facebook credits. but retail business-to-consumer sure as hell is…but you already knew that. besides amazon’s, apple’s, ebays’s and paypal’s legendary contributions in the digital payment space, google now makes it possible to purchase stuff on a mobile basis in physical retail outlets with their initial wallet offering.

google, with mastercard, is blazing a trail here with no help from our friends at the telcos. verizon just delayed allowing google’s electronic wallet solution on the samsung galaxy phones. we won’t waste your time or your pixels on a deep dive on this, the la times already did a brilliant job so check this if you need more.

the stakes:

think of it this way. basic trans-platform digital currency. digital currency which works the same in ALL worlds…on all devices and all services the same way: game worlds, movie worlds, tv worlds, music worlds, real world restaurants, stores and any point of sale. the same consolidated financial transaction records and interconnected devices. beyond paypal, ebay, second life world lindens or game coins, frequent flyer points,  way beyond amex, visa or mastercard or even square up. the ancient long-gone roman empire sorta pioneered this concept with the “coin of the realm” idea. the euro, which ain’t so hot these days, is a build on it since charlemagne.  the stakes are so huge it would be an insult to even try and convince you because you are already there.

we believe telcos are in a unique position to move the mobile payment world forward, despite the vision-impaired executives at verizon (who would now go work in the netflix marketing department where they belong). players like sprint already are leading as a small mighty mouse as usual in this area,  but asia, as with most things, is way ahead of the u.s.a. on this. so we don’t see them doing it in the u.s.a. we believe all new digital payment innovation will come from asia, driven by a.) smart innovators, b.) a mobile computing-based population of 4 billion people, c.) lots of great mobile device manufacturers who work well with infrastructure players like telcos.

the dea takeaway:

if your are a creative industry content creator or publisher, get educated fast in this area and built these digital payment solutions into everything you build at the service layer. bet on multiple tables and allow your customers multiple payments options. don’t worry about accepting diners club though. we think that is over. (as they say in japan, “we just told a joke to you [now laugh or I lose face]”

if you are a telco executive, try and forget that fact, “think differently” to quote our patron saint steve jobs, and do something your industry never does: innovate. no more excuses about massive capital deployments, security, etc. that is just too lame a set of luddite excuses. all cell phones now have security built in and players like google have baked it in already. wake up and answer the phone! hellooooo! you guys need to lead. you finally woke up to the net at the turn of the century, after pushing stupid failed isdn concepts for decades, don’t make us wait on this for pete’s sake! this is huge! what are we missing here? and revise your tariffs now to make it work and don’t be so greedy like you have been with sms fees which are so high they have completely stifled innovation.

if you are a credit card player like mastercard, visa, amex, etc. continue to make the smart moves you are making with micropayment and mobile payment companies. if you don’t, risk adjustment notwithstanding, you will lose. but the good news is that you guys get it. sorta. keep pushing and spending. this is the future and you know it.

if you are a retailer, check out new alternatives in the payment space. small businesses are loving square up despite some of its severe limitations. monitor google and the phone companies if the later ever start elephant-lumbering forward soon.

the kids are all right… the new trans-media audience

(eyeball time: 2.5 minutes but you might read faster…)

the dea skinny on what’s happening:

trans-media is a trendy word destined for the dust bin of history like convergence and new media… unless content producers, advertisers, brand managers, ratings and survey companies, services and hardware and infrastructure players….basically everybody… start to get it and embrace the new nature of audience experience. something is going on and you don’t know what it is…do mr. jones? traditional media audiences have left the building for several years now and are having radically different digital entertainment experiences. brand managers, media buyers and advertisers, who are spending billions on shrinking audiences, can’t measure the new audience behaviors so they continue to spend on traditional media like television. but audiences are watching across media…in different locations (thanks to mobility and smart phones) and multi-viewing and interacting on a simultaneous basis…ah hem… it is a trans-media audience experience. and nobody really understands what is happening and operating on old business models. at least that is what our new research shows at the digital entertainment alliance.

youth audiences, in particular, are not watching television on set top boxes anymore mr. nielsen, so watermarks which you hoped would streamline the old audience logs won’t help much in measuring anything but old fashioned tv. sell that idea to mad men’s don draper at his new agency…if you can.

the stakes:

billions of dollars. again. simple. in the 1960s, audiences had pretty basic experiences. not many tv channels, no cable, no internet…blah blah blah. don draper woke up each morning in the good old days when still married to betty draper (and when he was home) read newspapers, listened to the radio and watched films or tv for a few hours a day. that was pretty much his “entertainment day.” here’s don draper’s audience consumption experience on a 24 hour basis…

Don Draper's Audience Experience in the 1960s (c) the digital entertainment alliance llc

sometime in the early part of this decade, traditional broadcaster and other media content providers, a well as advertisers and brand managers, started seeing their traditional audiences shrink, fragment and, in some cases, disappear. one of the dominant theories at the time was that they were simply spending more time on the internet. many agencies conducted studies to understand what was happening on the digital side of their businesses but television media sales and the audience assessment and measurement parts of their business could not track anything more than interactive statistics (e.g., click though rates, etc.). all assumed it was simply internet interaction experience and walls of data was produced. but the audiences still shrank and shifted.

the digital entertainment alliance has conducted research in this space and discovered that something entirely different is occurring. we have looked at what college kids are doing, run 24 hour time logs and found a number of things.

• typical college kids have 3-5 multiple and simultaneous concurrent audience experiences throughout their 24 hr. days
• their experiences vary widely by content type, technology platform, and location
• based on the activity, each media experience has both extremely long (3-8 hrs.) and short duration across a 24 hour clock.
• they “mash-up” their entertainment experiences and are quite comfortable leveraging disparate and fragmented experiences together
• their current, almost a.d.d./a.d.h.d. audience experience patterns which may well persist into later adulthood. audience experience may have morphed and mutated forever.

The Kids Are All Right - Audience Experience in 2010 (c) the digital entertainment alliance llc

the dea takeaway:

there are too many implications and takeaways.

for content producers, you should develop content for an audience that is multi-tasking as they watch. think about strategic partnerships with players in adjacent spaces and look for trans-media ways to share your content or story across media.

for brand managers, you should insist that your large media spends are accounted for by your agencies and make sure they don’t simply stovepipe you into television spends, for example, principally because that is all they can measure (or web interactive.) insist that they address the problem holistically. acknowledge that even though we are in cost-cutting times and nobody wants to do risky things, work to develop viable performance metrics. this is a huge opportunity area of epic proportions.

for advertisers, start breaking down your organizational stovepipes and listen to some of your more visionary digital people….but only if they are talking about the whole picture. spend money researching new audience behaviors and develop case studies.

for service and infrastructure players, make sure you build out comprehensive services across platforms. yes, an open architecture is a beautiful thing (but most television sets and dvrs have 3 controllers) so don’t hold your breath. work supporting disparate standards will be a reality while you attend endless meetings to discuss open standards and solve world peace. be realistic and focus on solving your part in the overall puzzle…deal with what you can control. that’s was steve job’s approach and it worked for apple!

for more information, please contact us at 512.825.6866 (voice o text) or email us at bhollyman@digitalentertainmentalliance.com to discuss the issues more fully and the specific impact & implications to your business. it’s free!