Peter Lamb Speaks at WAN-IFRA Conference
With the decline of the print media, and emergence of new ways of delivering the content, revenue streams also changed their paths in order to get along with the new trends. As digital media and emergence of new technologies was the centeral topic at the WAN IFRA Middle East (World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers) in Dubai, which took place 24-25th of February, Peter Lamb, the President of Lamb Consulting at USA, delivered his speech on “Diversifying Revenue Streams”.
Despite Mr Lamb was delivering the last speech of the conference, it was still the essential part of the conference in terms of exploring ways of raising revenues. The president of Lamb Consulting started with key idea of the whole presentation, that the best way according to his company’s strategy is to narrow content down for specific group. As he commented later after the conference, “Money can be made if an app applies to specific niche.” After introduction of the core idea, Mr. Lamb started to analyse different countries and their different approaches to make money, supporting with advices for increasing over existing ones.
Started with United Kingdom, the speaker mentioned the narrowing down the content creation, calling it “niche”, and described a point of “full service”, when instead of each company creating whole department it is easier to call for specialists who would maintain technical aspects of the digital production for the publishers. Also, Mr. Lamb mentioned “experience” and “immercion” days, when a marketing company can help a publisher or a producer to launch the product and teach people how to use those new products. One of the most important strategies which UK busineses is the attention that is paid to the millenials. Mr. Lamb explained that the key feature of the generation is the passion for music, and the music is something that needed to be implied when a business wants to use this market.
Continuing with United States’ models of business, the presenter re-introduced the idea of narrowing the content to specific groups, and brought up new concept of “events”, saying “young 15-years-old girls like celebrations,” pointing out that the just having the specific content is not enough, but engagement and celebration will allow to gain more customers and investing in such projects. He also mentioned some points about event teams, opportunity seeking, and separate units. Separate business units will allow those publishers who have main app or printing to narrow down some of the “niches” without withdrawing the core print.
Switching to Canada, for the third time the speaker rei-introduced the concept of narrowing down, underlying the local Canadiann concept of “passion project.” He explained that the most of people have their hobbies, which they are passionate with, providing an argument “you can make tonns of money out of it.” Moreover, he introduced “nieche in nieche” by giving some part of the speech on the “ethnic secrets”, which will allow to use some cultural products in relation to the narrowed topic.
After the discussion on the Canada, Peter Lamb described some business concepts in Finland, and the most attention he paid to the idea of “reverse mentoring”, where young people are hired in order to teach “old folks” to use emerging technologies and new trends, “Bring them to the office, let them teach you what you do on a daily basis.”
The last region Mr. Lamb discussed was Asia, and its model over marketing and publishing businesses. He offered some companies to separate businesses, create nieches, and to do research programs. He implied that companies need to gather data as much as possible, and to pay attention to the events and their management. One of the ways to increase a profit through the events is to focus more on kids. According to the speaker and his statistics, parents in Asia spend less time with the kids, therefore spending more money on them due to “the feeling of guilt”.
The speaker finished his presentations with some questiones hee aadressed to the Middle Eastern companies representatives. The first question asked whether the company is a technological or a media company, pointing out the fact that those two types of companies merge together each year more and more. The second question was in the form of suggestion, “Your future is permanent beta,” saying that Middle Eastern companies should have a courage for experiments, and always try to innovate something new.
