MPI magazine just published a nice piece about my work, here. Some snippets:
"...he collects data from all manner of sources, talks to as many experts as possible, understands the whole context of what is happening in a given field and then articulates how trends will most probably move over the next three to five years. He says his ideas are often things people are already aware of but they either haven’t had the chance to crystallize the new focus in their own heads or haven’t taken appropriate action in their operations.
Working with the common threads that tie adult education, travel and event planning together, Leonhard shared his thoughts on the futures of these industries. For meetings among far-flung colleagues and education, he sees rising Internet technologies, with high-speed connections, 3D monitors and augmented reality tools making virtual gatherings more feasible. This will be especially true as travel costs rise. Businesses and students think twice about the cost of travel to particular locations for a meeting or education, so in many cases, the virtual meeting room or classroom will trump the brick and mortar kind.
But there is something technology will not be able to replace: human connection. “Any digital interaction creates the need for the live face-to-face interaction,” Leonhard says. “It doesn’t replace it.”
For instance, in regard to the learning process, he points out that it isn’t merely about information gathering; conversations with peers and teachers help people digest and fully comprehend all the information given to them. The need for social interaction, while at the same time saving costs, poses a conundrum for education and meetings. But it provides an opening for planners to exploit: They have to up the ante, specifically in terms of content quality, venues, food—the entire experience. “If the experience isn’t good enough, people will just stay at home and watch TED.com,” Leonhard said.
...as a futurist, Leonhard has to keep up with always-on sources such as Facebook, Twitter and Flipboard that spew out prodigious amounts of data all the time. One of the necessary prerequisites of his job is the ability not to be overwhelmed by never-ending data and to know exactly which sources of information need to be studied.
“It’s like cooking—you can’t use all spices at once,” he says, “you can only use some!”
As for his own future, Leonhard has big plans. He’s casting himself as a “green futurist” and moving into sustainability and environmental issues. He is also looking to launch a TV show where he says he will host discussions on “future issues in a way that will interest everyone, not just geeks or intellectuals" Fully embracing the life of a futurist, a role he absorbed a mere six years ago, you can’t help but believe him when he says, “What I do for a living is fun!..."
According to leading music futurist Gerd Leonhard, such diverse approaches are just the start of the “complete fragmentation of the music format”. With the convergence of audio, video, graphics and gaming via the net, he predicts the album will soon be eclipsed by the music ‘experience’, embodied in any combination of apps, interactive videos, augmented reality apps or a 3D television concert using interactive controllers like Microsoft’s Kinect. “We’re going back to the understanding that playing music is about an experience, not about a download for the cheapest possible price,” he explains. ”With apps and websites and 3D, I’m given an interface which makes it easier to immerse myself in the experience… You can’t copy that. If you can get immersion from your fans, you have their wallet.”
Gerd Leonhard, media futurist and CEO at The Futures Agency, opened up the general session at the FPA Business Solutions 2011 conference in Boston yesterday to a packed room of advisors. His message: Dive in to social media. ‘Faster Horses’ Leonhard started his presentation by explaining if Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, “faster horses,” because they didn’t know there was something completely different and better. It was a thought-provoking comment, setting the stage for his views on the future of businesses, technology and how advisor business will be impacted. Why Networks Are Important Leonhard showed how companies like Texas Instruments used to be known for calculators, but not anymore. Today it has adapted and individuals can just download the app. Another change is that customers now have more power than they did before. For example, individuals can use Kayak and other services travel agents would only have had. What has changed is that there used to be broadcasters sending out information. Now it is about being a network. Successful companies like Amazon and Google connect people. “They are ecosystems.”
Leonhard proved his point by asking, “Why would you connect your Facebook account to Amazon?” He then explained how Amazon was able to cross reference individuals in one’s network to see what others are reading. “It resulted in a 13% increase in one sweep,” Leonhard shared. Although the United States has leading companies, “America has fallen a bit behind on mobile [usage], but the country is catching up,” stated Leonhard. When it comes to falling behind the times, the music industry is a perfect example. From $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, it has seen a 71% decline. Conversely, Leonhard gave the movie industry as an example of adapting, with a company like Netflix doing it right. More Fragmentation Social media is shifting from social conversation to social commerce. Leonhard said, “It’s not a better mouse trap, it’s a whole new logic.” I Love Lucy used to pull in a huge percentage of the country’s TV viewership, now American Idol, the biggest show, only captures 4% of Americans, because today people have so many more options. Leonhard advised, “Expect more fragmentation.” Leonhard is certain that disruption is something businesses will have to face. The only question is whether they do the disrupting themselves. Case in point, look what Craigslist did, taking all the business from traditional classifieds. Opportunity For Advisors A crazy amount of information is being put on the Internet. For example, 26 million photos are uploaded to Flickr every day. People are publishing more and more information, which can result in just noise. “A connected world can be noisy. The noisier the world gets, the more everyone will need better filters,” Leonhard said. The overload of information actually presents an opportunity for advisors to play the role of disseminating what is the most important and relevant in a timely manner. “Your job is to filter the ocean of information. Your clients don’t have time to go through it all.” “Add transparency. Declare what you are doing. Trust is crucial,” he recommended.
Leonhard encouraged advisors to become active with social media if they are not already. “Anticipate what is on the horizon,” he said. “What is coming up next?” For example, some see newspapers dying, but what about e-mail? He shared that 75% of kids in Brazil have not seen a book, they use their mobile device. To push the envelope, he showed a video of an Audi that drives itself. Ask These Questions Leonhard said the key questions are, “Why are you in business, what do you do, and how do you do it? We are living in a knowledge economy. We are no longer living in an economy of stuff. So how do people use the knowledge? Are [advisors] people of the paper? [If so, are they] working with people of the screen?” Real-time Engagements People don’t want to wait anymore. “Think about now-ness. They are not interested in last year’s info. What is happening today?” He gave this example to illustrate his point: If you want to know the best place to get sushi in New York City, do you look online at reviews that could be two years old, or do you search Twitter and find reviews from people that are probably still at the restaurant?
Ideas For Advisors When it comes to deciding how to use social media, Leonhard said, “It depends where your clients are.” It is easy to see the huge amount of stuff on YouTube, Leonard said, and he told advisors to “sit down with a flip camera and get started. There are two billion videos watched per day on YouTube. If you don’t have videos, start doing them!” When it comes to the importance of being on social networks, Leonhard shared, “Facebook is the biggest broadcaster in the world. Every fifth minute on the Internet is spent on Facebook ... You can run ads on Facebook and they are very efficient.”....
"One of the most important trends is the transformation from a Copy Economy to Access Economy. Traditionally media business models have been based on selling copies of content: A printed newspaper, a book, a DVD, a music record, even a digital copy of a song. That model is about to disappear, claims Leonhard. He compares Internet to a giant copy machine. Selling “copies” is a model of the past. Instead the entire world shifts to a world of access. If you are in the media industry you better get used to this. It is a whole new industry...." Read more.
Source: AMEInfo (thanks!): 'Data is the new Oil' according to Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard who explains the concept to Phil Blizzard during a discussion on media innovations. The CEO of the Switzerland-based Futures Agency also talks about the need for creating networked societies, social engagement and creation of tribes in order to survive online. Note: this is where I found this powerful meme.
This is a nice, short video (8 Min 20 sec) that was recorded right before my presentation at ICTQatar, in Doha, on December 6, 2010. I cover various topics including what a futurist actually does, what my new company, The Futures Agency, does, where the music industry is going, what is happening as far as privacy is concerned, my thoughs on digital content piracy, and much more.
Here is a video interview with me, recorded at one of the nicest hotels I have ever been at, the fabulous Lydmar in Stockholm (in September 2010). Sounds Like Branding presents Heartbeats In Conversation With, a series of short conversations on relevant topics for marketing and communication; first out is a conversation between Heartbeats’ CEO Jakob Lusensky and me. The video is subtitled (in English) because the background noise is fairly loud (sorry about that). Jakob and me covered quite a few topics here, from the rise of the connected, digital, mobile economy, the future of advertising and the current status of the advertising industry, to the shift from buying copies of content to just having access to media as a service, and the future of TV.
"This guest post was written by media futurist Gerd Leonhard. Named "one of the leading Media Futurists in the World" by The Wall Street Journal, Gerd works as a futurist in the media, telecom, technology and communication industries. He is also an author, blogger, keynote speaker and strategist and is the CEO of TheFuturesAgency and a visiting professor at the Fundacao Dom Cabral in Sao Paulo / Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
With the explosive growth of the Internet, mobile devices and social networking, a connected world is indeed a very different world. Just witness the meteoric rise of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the demise of the recorded music industry as we knew it. I would go so far as to argue the only reason advertising in its pre-Web 2.0 form (a global business worth approx. $400 billion per year) ever existed was simply because we were not yet truly connected as today's mobile, social and real-time Internet did not yet exist.
Now that it exists, most of us will no longer tolerate interruptions, meaningless pitches, garish popups, Las Vegas-style skyscraper ads or junk email. We are looking for truly personalized offers, real meaning, solid relevance, timeliness, and yes, transparency and truthfulness. In other words, we will be looking for merit and values that are geared 100% towards us, not to everybody else, or someone else. Think micro-sprinkler systems, not fire hoses; droplets of expression, not spigots of noise exploding off empowered consumers (many of which in fact loath that very term).
Clearly, if brands and their marketers, ads and messages do not provide real value (remember: only time is a truly scarce value now), we will quickly lock them out of our lives and put them on the 'infinitely ignored' list. One might therefore argue that advertising is indeed becoming content (contvertising, anyone?), since relevant and desired, opted-in and followed content is usually quite valuable to us as we spend time on it, while irrelevant messages that encourage us to purchase items we don't even need are just noise. And the Internet has been so fabulously great at increasing the noise level that the time has come to turn that noise into meaning, to take the firehose of data and turn it into a clever sprinkler system.
The key question for marketers, as ever, is: how can you cut the noise, how can you be relevant, be truly wanted, make a better match, and benefit from meaningful connections? How can you turn the act of selling into content, into engagement, into mutual appreciation? Is that even possible? This is where we get to the enormous value of Data.
According to an April 2010 Wired.com post and a related IDC study, the total universe of information available to us already amounts to 800.000 petabytes of data. If you stored all of this data on DVDs the stack would reach from the Earth to the moon and back! By 2020 the digital universe will total 35 zettabytes, or 44 times more than in 2009, keeping in mind that an estimated 75% of all data is already generated by the users themselves.
This makes total sense when you think about it: forwarding a link, rating a site, commenting on a blog, twittering, sharing bookmarks, allowing cookies on your computer, sharing your location, logging into websites, liking something on Facebook -- everywhere we go, everything we do, every move we make around the Net (and soon, elsewhere, as well) -- creates click-trails, leaves digital breadcrumbs, produces data exhaust, and creates what I like to call meta-content, i.e. content around content.
Now, just imagine faster mobile Internet access at a much lower cost (or even free, courtesy of Google and O3B); much cheaper, yet more powerful and smart, mobile devices, connected devices that are not phones or computers but things, objects and products; BRIC+Africa coming online at a furious pace; and computing shifting from tethered computers and mouse clicking to tablets, touch-screens and finger-sweeping, and from downloading to cloud-tapping, which without a doubt will generate seriously more data than ever before, and at an increasing faster rate. The mind boggles (and possibly recoils) over the possibilities and over the huge challenges that these changes will pose, as well. But no matter what one's concerns may be, I think we can safely state that data is indeed the new oil, a metaphor that originated not with me but most likely with the ANA's Michael Palmer and Clive Humby.
Whoever gets to sift through this data, slice and dice it, move it around, make it useful, clear its legal and fair use, and just make sense of it all, is probably going to be more powerful than Shell, Exxon or Mobil have ever been (BigG and BigF emerge as distinct options here). This will, of course, require very careful and sensitive fine-tuning, with utmost attention to giving full control to the user, period. Regulation will be required but should, in my view, not be hastened; however, something that we must certainly come to grips with is that privacy will become something that we must act on to get back, rather than attain or retain by mere default. Those shiny new and very powerful tools of sharing and self-publishing do require that we accept and handle new responsibilities, as well - now that all of us can easily and constantly connect, we also need to learn new limits, new do's and don'ts - and the purveyors of this new power need to help us rather than merely seduce us.
The bottom line is that the data that all of us are increasingly generating and constantly spreading as most of us are switching to an always-on mode, will be at the core of all future success in marketing, branding and advertising -- and for that alone it's roughly worth $1 trillion, already (counting advertising spend, marketing and communication budgets, data-mining etc).
In a truly connected world, i.e. within the next few years, marketers will need constant and deep access to that data, in all its various forms and levels of permissions, because without this data their efforts will be utterly useless to the people formerly known as consumers ( today's users, followers, friends and participants). If the future TV does not know a fair bit about who we are, where we are, what we have watched, for how long, who we have shared shows with, what we have commented on, how we rate things; or if - worst case - we decide to just pay a bit more and keep our click-trails and our data off the grid (yes: Think The Matrix), then the marketers' job will become a lot harder, if not impossible. Matches can't be made, relationships can't be forced, brands can't be followed, connections are interrupted. Yelling is dead, and engagement needs permission - a tough but extremely rewarding challenge.
Getting too little or bad data -- or not understanding it-- will literally mean running out of gas in the middle of the desert. Therefore, the mission is to keep it all fueled up. And just like oil, there will be a myriad of issues (hopefully, not wars) that will arise with the responsible and fair practices of drilling, pumping, shipping, refining and dispensing of data. But without a doubt these issues will be solved in due course because this Data-Oil is very potent and because the responsible use of it will light up so many households that sufficient incentive for problem-solving exists. Telecom companies and mobile operators will want in on this game, as well - after all, it's their networks that make this all work (for now).
My prediction is that we will see a huge influx of companies dealing with the various aspects of data drilling, shipping, refining and remixing, and that the next Exxon or Mobil may well be a data-slicing company. Agencies, marketers and brands need to embrace the challenges and experiment: Get into the new Data-Oil ecosystem. "
Posted in Strategy on November 8, 2010 DDB BlogStrategyNovember 8, 2010
Digital city. Composite image of a city skyline
superimposed with alphanumeric digits. Photograph: Christian
Darkin/Science Photo Library
From transport to entertainment, work to education, our lives are
already being transformed by high-speed internet that will help create
the fully wired city. Within 10 years, faster, comprehensive, wired and
wireless networks will not only become the norm, they will become free,
says Gerd Leonhard, chief executive of the business thinktank The
Futures Agency. The reason? The enormous benefits to government and
education.
Many of us are familiar with the internet telephony
tool Skype. But an even more advanced, 3D and interactive virtual
version of the technology could revolutionise education and business
(among other areas), putting anyone, anywhere in the world, in visual
touch with anyone else.
"The telepresence business is going to
become huge and it will be standard for people in workplaces to connect
over screens," says Leonhard. "There will be virtual schools for
education and training you can access anywhere, especially in
developing countries." He predicts business travel will be
substantially reduced, saving money and the environment.
Retail
will be revolutionised by 3D printing, technology that is already making
it possible to "print" clothes. And while the debate about appropriate
use of our personal data will continue, consensual services could be to
our benefit.
"You'll walk past a department store and the window
will show a personalised display with your size and preferences," says
Leonhard. "We'll also be able to download and make things at home,
including electronic devices – it will just be a question of downloading
the blueprint."
For travel, our behavioural patterns will be
studied and utilised by tools which then advise us of delays in realtime
and suggest alternative routes. While some mobile phone applications
already do this, the system will become more comprehensive, connecting
trains with buses, planes and road information according to our
schedules.
By 2020, 26m UK homes will be fitted with a smart meter
that monitors energy use and encourages homeowners to be more
efficient. At IBM, Andy Stanford-Clark, the company's chief technology
officer for smart energy, has been exploring how wiring our homes to the
web could make them more efficient.
"The autonomous homes of the
future can monitor everything on our behalf," he says. "The dishwasher,
tumble dryer and washing machine will talk to the electricity grid so
they could turn on in half an hour at a cheaper rate."
I am honored to have the pleasure of working with Ericsson on a few of their pretty cool future-oriented activities, including the 2020 ideas project and the PressPausePlay movie. Here is what Ericsson says about the 2020 project:
"...Broadband connectivity and mobility are changing the way we live, the way we work, the way markets function, and the way societies operate. At Ericsson, we need to collaborate and get inspiration from people outside our business in order to adapt to these changes - people that take a stand, and that want to share and work together. which I think is just fabulous. In 2020 – Shaping Ideas, we ask 20 thinkers to share their view on the drivers of the future and how connectivity is changing the world. They describe a future where a growing population faces never before seen challenges and opportunities; where digital natives will shape their lives and the enterprises they work for, and where technology could create a global golden age...."
Naturally, there is a ton of stuff available online, on the Music Like Water riff, but if you want to start somewhere, check out my follow-up book Music 2.0 (free online / mobile version here), my MidemNet 2009 video "Compensation not Control", and my various slideshares on related topics, here (one of the best ones is 'making money with music when the copy is free')
8 months ago, I was interviewed by the House of Radon people for a movie called PressPausePlay, a really promising film that is presented by Ericsson and is scheduled for release some time later this year. I have embedded the trailer below (yes, it includes my 15 seconds of micro-fame) and really look forward to seeing the whole thing when it's ready.
Kudos to Ericsson for sponsoring a very powerful film about the huge changes in production, distribution and consumption of creative works - this is a crucial topic that is, of course, very close to my own work (see here, here, here and here). Eric Wahlforss (SoundCloud's Founder) is involved, as well, btw.
From the film's web-site: "A new generation of global creators and artists are emerging,
equipped with other points of reference and other tools. The teachers
arenʼt certified schools anymore - itʼs web sites, discussion forums and a
“learn by doing”-mentality. We see the children of a digital age,
unspoiled or uneducated depending on who you ask. Collaboration over
hierarchy, digital over analog - a change in the way we produce,
distribute and consume creative works. PressPausePlay is the first film to capture this new ecosystem.
We meet the creatives at the frontier of production, the technical
enablers of collaboration and distribution, the artists, the pop stars,
the film makers, the business men, the visionaries and the ones left
behind. Itʼs a story from the smallest molecule to the largest
corporation. Itʼs a snapshot of today, but at the same time predictions
of a near future.
Weʼre not creating a documentary in the classical sense of
shaky cameras, bad lighting and unbearable sound. Although we have a
small budget, we got big aspirations. The film will in itself be a proof
of the evolution story weʼre telling, shot in digital 4K and finished at
the end of 2010. Ready for both the big (cinema) and the small (mobile)
screen. We will release rough edits and interviews as well as the final
film free for anyone to use, broadcast and distribute. PressPausePlay will be an observation, a testimony and a
tribute"
With the explosive growth of the Internet, mobile devices and social networking, a connected world is indeed a very different world. Just witness the meteoric rise of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the demise of the recorded music industry as we knew it. I would go so far as to argue the only reason advertising in its pre-Web 2.0 form (a global business worth approx. $400 billion per year) ever existed was simply because we were not yet truly connected as today's mobile, social and real-time Internet did not yet exist. 
DDB BlogStrategyNovember 8, 2010 
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