AS LONG AS BROADCASTERS continue to get 98% of their revenue from the tried-and-true way of doing things – selling ads on TV in and around popular TV shows – it’s very hard for them to think about brand new trends and inserting them into the business model.
But getting them to think that way and move down that road will be Jeremy Gutsche’s job when he gives his keynote address during the Canadian Association of Broadcasters annual convention in Ottawa on November 4.
An “innovation expert” Gutsche launched Trendhunter Magazine in 2005 and it has rapidly emerged as one of the places to find the truly new, the incredibly cool. And, it’s Canadian, too. Trendhunter’s content is “a compilation of hot new trends discovered by our global network, thousands of influential Trend Hunters, Cool Hunters, Futurists and Innovation Gurus,” says the press release.
His day job is as the director of Upmarket, Capital One Canada’s largest acquisition business. And, he leads the company’s Competitive Strategy and Innovation imperative. A former Management Consultant for the Monitor Group, he has advised both government and Fortune 500 clients on top level strategy and the assessment of new ventures, according to his bio.
Last week, he and Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien chatted. What follows is an edited transcript.
Greg O’Brien: How are things where you are?
Jeremy Gutsche: We’re getting read to launch Trendhunter TV this weekend, so there’s a lot of last minute chaos so we get it all right, but it’s all exciting.
GOB: What’s Trendhunter TV?
JG: Trendhunter is a community source site, all of our articles come from about 20,000 members. And basically the way (THTV) will work is the community hunts the trends and we feature the best stuff in five-minute episodes that’ll be on our web site – and might be themed in each given week for something that seemed interesting. This week we’ll launch with the best viral videos of 2008 and then in the feature, for Halloween week, shockvertising.
GOB: Yeah, your site’s a little more exciting than mine.
JG: Well, you know we have some of these really edgy topics, so that certainly is exciting.
GOB: Yeah, I pursue less-than-exciting things like CRTC regulations and such, but people seem to like what they read anyway. You’re speaking on the Tuesday at the CAB convention, so what is the message you’ll be bringing to all these traditional broadcasters?
JG: My background’s all in the world on innovation and I talk about creating a culture of innovation, hunting trends and infectious marketing. The other thing that’s pretty big right now – with all this chaos, crisis and all sorts of different things – is that it’s difficult and confusing for companies to figure out what to focus on, so a lot of what I’ll get at is how do you filter out all the noise in order to spot trends that are truly useful.
And then, how do you make your messages infectious and viral. Part of it, for this particular audience, will get at the differences between that new online medium and the traditional broadcasting… when you think of that online world, it’s a totally different space that most Canadian broadcasters still lack in… (For example, at Trendhunter) it’s fun to be a Canadian startup, but it’s kind of funny to see that in two years we now have more traffic than most of the Canadian newspapers.
GOB: Well, most of the older media companies seem to be still struggling how to figure out for sure what’s next, or what to do to adjust their business plans to suit whatever’s next. Do you have much advice for them on that?
JG: What we’ll get into is to kind of reinvent and create that culture that can help them adapt and see new things. There are a couple of examples – and I don’t want to spoil them in the interview because they’ll be in the actual speech I’ll be doing live… but it’s this type of feeling that companies have right now… whether it’s broadcasting or whether it’s healthcare… is that people can see these new, emerging business models and they know that there’s a need to try and recruit that younger generation and adapt – and they want to try and do it. But there’s still a lot of structural and organizational things that need to be aligned before that can really happen.
GOB: What should broadcasters should be doing themselves? I mean is there a difference between radio and TV broadcasters or specialty & pay that you see? Or should they all be moving along down a similar path?
JG: In general, it’s going to be unique. People talk about trends and one of the big things is that people get focused on the big macro trends – and that’s not something that’s really useful. So, I thought of a big macro trend and just to make it easy, we’ll go outside of broadcasting and think of (the environment).
You could go and try and innovate around that, but the problem is everybody knows it. So, what really matters for you is it all starts with getting really a deep-rooted understanding of your customers and your own insights for what your strategy are and then the little micro trends that are related and adjacent to your industry and what you’re trying to solve.
Then you can come up with something more tailored. That’s the sort of thing that I’ll get into. But stay away from some of those macro tends, because I think they leave you in a generic place.
GOB: That’s interesting too, because a lot of the broadcasters, what they end up going to is that generic place, where they try to appeal to as many people at once.
JG: And it’s to a point right now where you think a one-day trend for media is: “well let’s get online.” But what does that really mean? And then companies race to try to get online and then the way they do it, it doesn’t turn out to be successful and then it feels like it’s a failure and then the budget gets pulled and they don’t try another experiment.
GOB: They’re all struggling to figure out what is going to be next. As you said, they’re doing little experiments here and there with wireless or with putting some things on iTunes or something like that or launching their own broadband portal online. But, in the end, they’re still – nobody in Canada is really committing to one thing or another, because you can’t yet.
What advice do you have for the broadcasters in terms of pushing them towards the next step, to go here, or do this. Or is it more along the lines of just innovation and creating that culture you talked about?
JG: We’re going to be looking at some of the cutting edge techniques that companies are using to reinvent themselves… the toolkit broadcasters can use. I’m not going to be getting specifically into “oh here is a new type of media, guess what people are using their mobile phones or they’re using their iPods now more than ever to download.”
GOB: It’s very difficult to talk trends and change with broadcasters who look at their bottom line and they see that 98% of their billions of dollars of revenue come from the old ways of doing things and 2% comes from the new ways. So it’s very, very difficult for them to push in the direction that they know the industry is going, when the way it’s still trundling along now is pretty profitable.
JG: Absolutely.
GOB: Will you present them a way to balance that and take care of the old way and push towards the new way at the same time?
JG: That’s the sort of thing that we get into, just trying to frame it up using some business cases where you can start to see how that matters because otherwise you find yourself relying heavily on your cash cow and when you get crisis and chaos like now, you’re marketing and innovation budgets are often in the first ones that get dried up.
You know you need cash now. And there are different case studies where you can see how that falls apart. But interestingly, crisis can become an opportunity.
