Broadband is driving significant social change, said Tom, the director of digital at Belong. He rubbished the state of broadband in Australia, but he pointed to how his daughter and his wife were laughing in their living room as they watched video from YouTube.
• We are being saturated with new channels of information, and people are trying to adapt/shoehorn old media models into new realities.
• Consumers are now at the heart of the proposition. They are active not passive.
• The business of media is seeing rapid changing. TV still dominates, but it’s adapting. Newspapers and radios didn’t die as television started.
• People want to belong. They want to be part of something.
Mobile handsets now have 100% market penetration. Growth in the next five years will be from 3G services, and in the next few years 33% of users will be using 3G. The mobile phone is now a portable computing platform. It is more than a phone. You can browse the web, take pictures and shoot video. You can send e-mail and even do instant messaging.
Mobile is primed for personalised marketing, but permission-based marketing is key in mobile. You can’t interrupt people when they don’t want to be interrupted.
‘Intimacy’ of communication fuels communities. The devices are all interconnected.
It is not about the technology. It is what people are using the technology for.
Even though Big Brother’s audience in Australia went down 15%, voting went up.
The barriers to this is the high cost of data on handsets. It is killing each of our business models. He called data charges criminal. Consumer bill shock is real. The walled garden approach still dominates on mobile.