{"id":68633,"date":"2023-06-09T07:29:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-09T06:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/?p=68633"},"modified":"2023-06-09T09:34:16","modified_gmt":"2023-06-09T08:34:16","slug":"content-is-king-complete-bllcks-says-media-veteran-neil-thackray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/content-is-king-complete-bllcks-says-media-veteran-neil-thackray\/","title":{"rendered":"Content is king? \u2018Complete b*ll*cks; says media veteran Neil Thackray"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-background\" style=\"background-color:#fffeee\">With 40 years\u2019 experience managing a wide range of publishing businesses, Neil Thackray has earned the right to his views on modern media. The Media Voices team worked for Neil back in the day and one of our favourite things were the regular rants he\u2019d go on about the state of the industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For that reason alone, Neil was the obvious choice for the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/voices.media\/big-noises-neil-thackray-on-why-content-is-not-king\/\">first guest on our Big Noises season<\/a>. He\u2019s earned a formidable reputation for calling out executive BS at conferences and in his columns, and being unafraid to point out some of the biggest industry issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>His biggest gripe is the seemingly unassailable conventional wisdom that \u2018content is king\u2019, a platitude trotted out at every media conference since Bill Gates coined the phrase back in 1996. \u201cI put it to you, that is completely bollocks\u2026\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Neil explained, firstly, that while the content concept might work for print publications, free media on the internet is not contained within anything so can\u2019t be legitimately referred to as content. \u201cThe initial premise is wrong. It drives media owners to think that what they should be doing online is trying to work out how they do what they did offline.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Second is the \u2018king\u2019 thing. \u201cIf media owners really think that what they produce, the information, data, pictures, whatever it is, is king, explain to me why most of the publishers I see on the web give it away for free.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Drowning in terrible quality<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>I remember Neil ranting about the poor quality of regional news UX when we first started working together almost six or seven years ago, and if anything, the situation is worse now. He says publishers clearly don\u2019t consider their content to be worth anything when their webpages are \u201cdrowning in terrible quality\u201d advertising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If content was truly king, Neil believes the starting point would be a content-focused publishing strategy, but he doesn\u2019t see that. Instead, in the absence of strategy, media companies grab for whatever the latest thing is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI mean, please save us from media executives talking about pivoting,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen publishers are running out of cash and their investors are unhappy, they should be looking for products that will satisfy a customer need. Instead they latch on to whatever is the latest new thing. We\u2019re pivoting to mobile, we\u2019re pivoting to video, or probably this week, it\u2019s AI. People have been making this mistake for at least 25 years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Looking for answers, Neil thinks that media companies need to move away from a platform-centric philosophy. \u201cThey say they\u2019re in the magazine business or the news business, or they\u2019re in the TV business, or video, radio, exhibitions, whatever it is. If you pick the platform and then put a product on it, you leave a lot of money on the table. And it constrains your product.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><strong>Listen here\u00a0to Neil Thackray\u2019s full interview:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe title=\"Big Noises: Neil Thackray on why content is not king\" height=\"150\" width=\"100%\" style=\"border: none;\" scrolling=\"no\" data-name=\"pb-iframe-player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podbean.com\/player-v2\/?i=57qck-141b14e-pb&#038;from=pb6admin&#038;share=1&#038;download=1&#038;rtl=0&#038;fonts=Arial&#038;skin=1b1b1b&#038;font-color=&#038;logo_link=episode_page&#038;btn-skin=ff6d00\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">User-centric, platform neutral<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>When Neil set up TheMediaBriefing with Rory Brown, they decided the business was going to be user-centric, platform-neutral, but digitally underpinned. Their guiding principles were to ask:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>What are the problems these customers have?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Where is the friction in their lives or in their business?<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>What can we produce which will ease that friction?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Neil explains that products that ease the friction will inevitably have an economic value: the more critical the information produced is to a decision being taken by the end user, the higher the value. The more difficult it is for the customer to get that information for themselves, the further the value will increase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhere you\u2019re delivering something which is highly critical to a decision being made\u2026 and it\u2019s very difficult for people to assemble themselves, then you can charge a premium price point to the user. They probably won\u2019t even care what the price is.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The problem with that model, says Neil, is that you need to really act like content is king and invest in it. Instead, he says, since the start of digital media, companies have been focused on taking costs out of the business, primarily the people who create and manage the content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He uses the analogy of an aircraft manufacturer trying to cut costs and choosing to get rid of its quality control team. \u201cThat would be so dumb that everybody would say you are an idiot. Obviously, you\u2019re not going to kill somebody by producing a crap newspaper or magazine. But that, unfortunately, is the business that we\u2019re in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Accelerating revenue decline<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>He paints a picture where falling revenue means more cuts, poorer quality products and accelerating rates of decline. \u201cCutting costs in the vain hope that somehow this will improve sales is so baffling. You can\u2019t understand why every media company does it repeatedly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Neil acknowledges that media leadership, particularly in public companies with the pressure to perform every quarter, is difficult. \u201cThere\u2019s a timeline, right? You can\u2019t run that kind of strategy and have it all fixed by the next quarter. And that\u2019s a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He thinks that, despite its reputation, private equity is much better at giving leadership the space to work through a proper strategy. \u201cThat\u2019s not universally true; I think it\u2019s slightly more difficult in the US, but certainly in my experience here, that has been the case.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But money worries aside, Neil still sees problems in media leadership. \u201cThe point of leadership is not to get backed into a corner. I\u2019ve been a CEO for 25 or 30 years and it\u2019s difficult.You\u2019re always busy. You don\u2019t give yourself the headspace to think about these problems and actually step back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He urges leaders to find time to step back and find a strategy that is not grounded in aphorisms and the latest publishing trend. And he returns again to the customer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cOne of the most powerful things you can do is talk to people 10 minutes after they\u2019ve used your product and 10 minutes before. Better still, go and talk to your customers about what they do all day, be good at seeing where the friction is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m a sailor,\u201d he adds. \u201cI don\u2019t need to read about how to sail a boat, which is what a lot of the yachting magazines do because I\u2019ve been doing it for 40 years. But I\u2019d love a price comparison site for parts, which are notoriously expensive. I would like all the technical videos for jobs that crop up all the time to be collected in one place. You have to have a really deep understanding of the problem it is you\u2019re trying to solve.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:100px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Republished with kind permission of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/voices.media\/\">Media Voices<\/a>,\u00a0a weekly look at all the news and views from across the media world.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With 40 years\u2019 experience managing a wide range of publishing businesses, Neil Thackray has earned the right to his views on modern media. The Media Voices team worked for Neil back in the day and one of our favourite things were the regular rants he\u2019d go on about the state of the industry. For that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":30853,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17612,26],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[1692,1681,1396,22706,15135,17462,11766,1250,1812,2319,1769,1488,1462,1688],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68633"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68633"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68645,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68633\/revisions\/68645"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68633"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mediamakersmeet.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=68633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}