Communication: The City Acts As A Framework For a New Business Model
While communication is right now facing some major changes (advertising services revenues uncorrelated from GDP growth for the first time in decades, brands going in-house, paid media increasingly challenged by shifting consumer habits including ad skipping and blocking), a new strategic communication model can be developed from what used to be called “Smart Cities”. Let’s remind that “mobile” over the last 5 years was just a smaller screen but the same old business model. Thanks to the research we’ve been developing with experts at USC and UCLA universities we have redefined “Smart Cities” as an overarching strategy encapsulating most of the current major culture and tech development. Following the communication industry focus on organic media these past few years (led by the capillarity of social media platforms), we have focused on the city space as it logically expands the definition of organic media beyond traditional media.
From Organic Media to the Playful City
The media landscape is hyper-fragmented as much as driven by multi-platform ecosystems. Brands and agencies have to fundamentally rethink their approach in order to be relevant in front of demanding consumers. It’s for sure not about digital, neither is it about post-digital as described by Forrester in 2013, as all these approaches are conceptualized upon one layer of interconnections. But we now live in complex world made of different layers of social connections through a multitude of platforms. It’s the whole concept of organic media as explained by Dominique Delport in the foreword of Agnes Yun’s Organic Media. It’s not just about getting rid of old silos to appear integrated, it’s about reframing the question to go beyond 2 dimensions marketing strategies. It means going beyond media as we know it, as every consumers and every pieces of content are now a media.
One of the main concept behind organic media it’s the morphing of the container which has lost its physicality over the past decade. Media used to refer to device, a specific screen, to exist: a TV, a theater, a newspaper, even a mobile. But now with social media and the digital platforms, this physical container notion has disappeared as the content evolves from a container to another depending on user interactions and contexts. Then, if the media is now emancipating from a physical barrier, the logical extension of its playground lies in the day-to-day environment of global consumers, the cities. And especially now, the connected, smart, playful, engaging cities.
Who’s the boss?
Living in Los Angeles, the past mecca of the car industry, I’ve observed and read on how our consumer behaviors, our economy, the politics and our city infrastructures have all been somehow structured by the energy, and especially fossil fuel over the past century (see Carbon Democracy by Timothy Mitchell). Wars, social conflicts, political elections, colonizations, etc. You name it. A lot of fuel-related economic equations. I especially love the story of these US companies indicted for dismantling the shared transport systems in major cities 70 years ago, especially Los Angeles, leading to the famous movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Firestone (tires), Chevron (oil), General Motors (cars), Mack (trucks) and Phillips 66 (oil) were behind the move and reportedly conspired to develop a whole new system, that we know well today.
But the last decade has shown major changes in terms of power. Tech companies have replaced the oil companies (and industrial like GE) as top market capitalizations, and by far. Firstly because the energy industry is drastically changing, but also because consumers data from digital platforms prove to be more valuable to investors.
Key players of this game changer scenario are the big tech platforms (GAFA, BATX, and NATU) which built the leading digital ecosystems. They are now moving into physical spaces by investing billions of USD in smart cities (smart mobility, smart business, smart energy, smart education, smart living, etc.); their ambition is to create a continuous and integrated marketplace spreading from consumer’s messaging app and local store to local-based entertainment. By definitively controlling the ecosystem and taking advantage of network effects, these new leaders will rule over all consumer usages and related outcomes.
Impression of network liveness
It’s important to explore the current evolution of the media industry to understand the future of the city. These two areas are more related than we could expect, firstly as they’re driven by the same people as shown above, secondly because of the organicity of media expanding to the city space as explained in the first part of this post. Talking about media…
With content ubiquitous, the role of the interface has shifted. It has evolved from providing a portal to massive content catalogs to connecting the right consumers with the right content. The future interface is about minimizing choice and cutting through the clutter to the content consumers are interested in (think about the Netflix homepage). That being said, the future of the interface lies beyond the home screen/homepage, which means near-total data-driven recommendations for the developers and brands.
As such, ecosystem management through ongoing media consolidation will grow to achieve competitive scale and drive cross-platform expansion. This consolidation, that we can see at Facebook notably (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger leading users charts), can also be extended beyond digital media. The recent acquisition of WholeFoods by Amazon is a perfect example, as it reinforces the presence of Amazon, especially in the home where its leadership is growing through the Echo hub and related devices.
The ultimate converging space
Thanks to technology, smart cities close the gap between brands and people (would you be spectator, consumer, entrepreneur, and even citizen). It includes Augmented Reality (new IRL gaming practices), Internet of Things (from wearables to drones through smart buildings), blockchain (local cryptocurrencies), AI (to leverage this massive data generated), and more, which also require investments in topics like cybersecurity.
In terms of strategy, this topic, Smart Cities, has the advantage to reflect both global tech-heavy automation trends (consumers want everything on their doorstep the day after) but also rely on hyperlocal strategies (this complex last mile where communities are fighting back), requiring a strong consumer knowledge, creativity, and investments in engaging content.
This quote below, from Helsinki’s director of strategic urban planning Rickkard Manninen, perfectly illustrates this duality and the current transformation of cities and the behaviors of citizens within these organic ecosystems. It echoes the phrase “Think Global, Act Local” especially used to discuss environmental challenges. The focus on “main street” (check this photo project incubated by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society among other organisations), and its parallel to local communities, is as important for organisations nowadays as is the adoption of relevant and scalable new technologies.
‘In many cities, the era of the suburban commuter, along with the era of the car, is drawing to a close’. Manninen no longer wants a city with a single centre; he envisages a multi-polar city with half-a-dozen hubs where people live, work, shop and play. ‘This will reduce transport congestion and generate a series of vibrant, efficiently organized, semi-autonomous units — that’s the plan, anyway.’
A larger skill set
The brilliant John Winsor recently posted interesting thoughts on how brands have to adapt their mindset and structure in order to deal with the new communication era, especially focusing on open systems and therefore open tools.
Brands now have to be part of a conversation, a community, and be defined by the bigger group. Brands need to reflect this new medium by building open structures and platforms to facilitate people creating culture together with brands.
The communication industry has always learned a lot from other fields, such as finance for high frequency trading or healthcare/virology to deal with social media propagation. It is likely time for the industry to familiarize itself another time with existing practices from close “neighbors”. A relevant strategic approach to engage with this great city topic is World Building, mastered by our friend the production designer Alex McDowell. At his lab at USC, Alex is leveraging his past work for Hollywood (especially for Minority Report) to define, I quote, “an experiential, collaborative and interdisciplinary practice that integrates imagination and emergent technologies, creating new narratives from inception through iteration and prototyping into multimedia making”. In my own terms: Alex, with a college of interdisciplinary experts, created an amazing world for Minority Report with the first few lines of the script, a world tending to be true almost 20 years later, and in which tens of stories could have been developed.
Last June, Alex shared the stage at the Cannes Lions with Havas Global MD and Vivendi Content President Dominique Delport in order to explain how his approach is now being adopted by forward thinking brands (find an interview of Alex in Cannes here). I’m not gonna develop the whole rational behind world building here, but in a few words, it seems to me highly relevant in light of its systemic approach of “problems”, its great mix of expertise and the attached fast prototyping. The media landscape is now complex, even for those trying to convince themselves it isn’t, and it therefore requires an holistic approach to build a world for the brand to create an organic narrative able to navigate from a platform to another while engaging consumers. World building is by definition consumer centric, but goes beyond with a 4 dimensions strategic mindset, where time and scale augment existing in-silo 2 dimensions communication strategy.
