 In business, and in life, it’s not uncommon to come into possession of sensitive information. Whether we are managing people, processes or assets, leaders and team members are regularly confronted with the question, “What do we do, with what we know? This ethical and practical question comes up over and over again. I recently had the pleasure of watching elite rowers complete the The Head of the Charles Regatta in Boston, Massachusetts. These rowers, none of whom face towards the front, all rely on their trusted coxswain, the only one who can actually see where they are going. Over headsets, the coswain's job is to guide, encourage, pace and disclose. Not all the random activity happening on shore, but anything that is looming ahead, including competitors coming up, clear water, turns, bridges and impediments. During the race, cheering on our team, I was struck by how vital healthy and truly honest communication in the workplace is, where we place the futures of ourselves and our families into the hands of business leadership daily. As workers we row hard, pulling together as a team only to the degree that leadership guides and informs effectively. We may hear from a friend that a critical path colleague at work is unhappy and interviewing elsewhere. We might read a financial statement from our accounting department, that shows a shorter runway to hit breakeven, higher losses and lower revenue than investors were told. Perhaps a film has a release date that can’t be moved, but watching dailies tell us instantly that the story isn’t ready, there’s no way of hitting the delivery date. We might know about upcoming layoffs and have been instructed to remain quiet so folks don’t quit, before a project is done. The stress of being in possession of sensitive information can be overwhelming to any employee. Being at the executive or C-Suite level doesn’t necessarily make it easier to thread the needle of confidentiality, as it bumps up against the internal pressure of ethics and community care. I remember in early March 2020, returning from a film shoot in Brooklyn with a high fever, and rough cough. I had been shooting pickups there for about a week, and by the time I got back to Boston, we were all sick. My family and I went to the local emergency room. We tested negative for the flu and were diagnosed with an undetermined viral infection, sent home but told not to interact with any elder family members. Lockdown hadn’t started yet, and along with everyone else, we had been hearing the rumblings of a global scale public health event. I will never forget the ashen look on the face of the ER physician. My adult daughter, (who works in healthcare) and I reflected on the look in his eyes - a flatness, lack of expression, empty, looking way out over us in his mind. It wasn’t fear. It seemed past that point. His words, straight to the point - no emotion. “Go home. Stay inside. It’s going to get worse.” There was no further conversation because he clearly wasn’t talking. Looking back, it seemed like he was staring into the future, at the legion of people about to descend on his hospital, and weighing how he would manage. It was a personal, intimate, totally horrifying moment, all without words. The three of us sat in the examination room in silence, looking at one another over our face masks. We had talked about where we had been in Brooklyn, New York, on set. Unknown to us, these were the places they were already dispatching the refrigeration trucks to care for the deceased. He asked us if we had eaten in any Chinese restaurants, (many) how many people we had interacted with, (dozens). He stood up and shook my hand in silence and then he walked out without saying a word. He was clearly in some sort of state of shock, exhaustion, or trauma. He was somewhere else entirely. Somewhere bad. In that moment we understood something terrible was about to happen, something that we could not see and could not stop. We went home, ordered food supplies and two days later Covid-19 exploded. My daughter’s senior graduating class from college was removed from campus, she moved in with me, all doors to the outside world closed, roads fell silent and we waited. The previously hidden came out fast. I got a lot sicker, very fast, then a lot better, thank goodness. This isn’t a story about Covid. It’s a reflection on how we respond to sensitive or traumatic information in the workplace. Asking questions about where our ethical duty lies. When do we do more harm than good by communicating to people what is going on, people who we can see are standing directly in the line of what is about to hit them?  A long time ago, I learned some family history that had been buried for a decade. These secrets blew up my family of origin with the trauma of betrayal. I made a decision as a child not to lie and later at work, not to lie to colleagues and my employees. This has been very challenging, as most businesses do not operate in the full light of day. It’s common to separate information between the C-Suite and the staff on the assumption that if folks knew about the real challenges to the business, they would either quit, or be too distracted to work effectively. In my direct experience however, the opposite is true. In 35 years of filmmaking, working with all levels of staff and executives, I have consistently experienced that most people are generally fully capable of handling the truth, and making good decisions if they are brought into the decision making process with respect and professional guidance. The fear and paranoia that infect a firm, when there’s more going on than meets the eye, is the distraction, not the disclosure of difficult news. When the difficult news finally comes out there is usually huge relief because now folks are empowered to make informed decisions. And there is anger, but generally the anger is at the surprise and trauma of having been kept in the dark and disempowered, not at the information itself, but at the dissembling and cover-story that people are fed to keep them working in ignorance. I understand why executives hide information. They may feel frightened, guilty, unsure of what to do or be legally forbidden to disclose. Sometimes HR or HIPAA regulations require confidentiality, which is right. But the general tendency to assume that staff cannot handle reality is a wrong assumption. It covers up the laziness of leadership who may need to be trained in effective communication skills. It places unnecessary stress on those who have to keep information secret and those who are not informed, but know things are not as they seem. Those who don’t know what is going on, and can’t make a plan for what to do about it but can feel it. I’m of the opinion that trusting staff and problem solving together, with as much appropriate disclosure as possible, is the right way to create and maintain a healthy workplace. Being able to share with staff, “There are challenges right now that our leadership doesn’t know how to solve, but we are working on it - we will share as much as we legally can, as early as possible”, goes a long way to relieving toxic tension and instilling loyalty and protecting engagement.  Siloing folks and forbidding discussion of sensitive information is the business norm and a mistake.
I’m not advocating for careless disclosure or gossip. I’m advocating for really effective training of executives on how to communicate with staff, such that all employees experience respect and empowerment, to make informed decisions for themselves and their families. The world is changing fast. Maybe faster than ever. Learning how to communicate effectively and ethically, with authentic respect for the value of all members of a firm, or community is, I think, one of the pillars of success. It’s not easy and requires a commitment to accepting failures along the way. It requires knowledge of the self, and personal awareness. Building a team who communicates well and safely, a team who will ride out the bumps on the road to success together without the poison of paranoia seems worth it. Not all information is meant to be shared. But where there is trust, discretion becomes respected. Private is not the same as secret. I think people can handle the truth, and if they can’t, maybe it’s better to know that also. Sooner rather than later.  I fly a lot. Really, quite a lot. Every few weeks I board a plane and travel from the East Coast of the United States to the West Coast, either for business or family duties. I work professionally between Montreal, New York, Los Angeles and various locations in India. I have family in Boston, two sisters and a brother in California and extended family in Buffalo, New York. My two best friends live in San Diego and Denver. I've worked on many, if not most, of the Academy Award winning animated films over the last 25 years, and am currently managing a global visual effects firm. I'm responsible for delivering stories to the world, using technology unimaginable 40 years ago. My industry can convince audiences of just about anything through picture and audio magic. Most of the time it's cool, fun and inspiring. Sometimes it's concerning in the extreme. Chicago 35,000 Feet Around 3 years ago, during one of my coast to coast flights, I was studying the outline of Chicago, as we circled slowly over 20 minutes, descending carefully to land at Midway during a very windy day. Contemplating my duty to improve the world in some way, I began to think about life on our beautiful planet, in the USA, and eventually began to think deeply about the underlying structure of our economy and the resultant concentration of wealth and poverty that has arisen, as a result of the forces of business, global commerce, education and social mobility, or lack thereof. I reflected on the general public's inability to see this system clearly as it is constructed and operates. Most people functioning within it, living as consumers, struggling to manage their income and debt, do not have the time or resources to spend figuring out why things are the way they are, or how to change them. This was my own story until I decided to go into debt, and get an M.B.A. in 2010. Chiacgo 20,000 Feet The truth is that most people do not have access to, or ways to understand, the economic and market mechanisms that shape their daily lives. Consumers have controlled and limited choices and therefore controlled and limited incomes. I began to think about how and where our market system is hidden, how and where it operates in plain sight, without apology, explanation or remedy for the harm it creates. I began to think deeply about phrases like, "the hidden hand of the market" and the "global elite". Also about the use of the word, "market" at all, as if it were a separate entity from the human beings making business and personal choices every day. I thought about corporations having legal rights as people, which they do. I reflected on "solving for profit" and margins. I began to contemplate even deeper, opaque financial system realities like algorithmic trading, tariffs, subsidies, shorting commodities futures, capital markets, artificial intelligence, the value of money, and foreign trades balances. I thought about policy, public and private education, personal finance and how, for most kids in the US, especially girls, managing money is not a taught skill, until well into adult life, when people who might have been able to enroll in higher education find they cannot pay off a student loan or make a credit card payment. For people of color, women, marginalized populations, those at risk, veterans, the elderly, victims of civic, criminal violence or domestic violence, trauma, war or systemic racial bias, most of these concepts have even less relationship to the day to day personal struggle to survive. Chicago 10,000 Feet As we descended to land, I watched neighborhoods change from concentrated downtown skyscrapers, to homes with swimming pools, industrial neighborhoods with low income housing, that looked blighted - tract homes - obvious food desserts, visible from the air at that lower altitude. I thought about the people living and working across all those places separated by business structures that are a mere 4 minutes apart at 500 miles per hour. Finally these thoughts led me to a new set of reflections, which refused to be pushed aside. "If I were to suddenly be dropped out of this plane, with its pressurized cabin and video monitor that keeps me entertained and distracted, into any one of these environments, from the most comfortable to the least, how is that any different from a soul's journey on Earth? If I were to jump out of this plane right now, at this instant, over one of these spots on Earth outside of Chicago, USA, how is that different from being born into a system that I cannot see or understand? If I landed in a posh upscale neighborhood, educated, caring, two parent, two income household, I would grow up with a certain set of ideas and expectations of privilege probably white. If I landed in a food dessert, unable to go to the library, read about the world, did not see my race and culture reflected back to me as safe and honorable - how is that fair? How is that right? How is it ethical that the accident of birth is the precursor for all that follows in a life, here in the United States in 2017? How is it that we have paved over a planet that could easily sustain all the human beings on it, created and maintain a system that divides people into those who are worthy and those who are not, generated wealth for a small group of people by using large labor pools kept in ignorance, concentrated available capital, eliminated an entire middle class, hypnotized adults and children across all walks of life with small, 24-hour hand-held mobiles devices, generating data that is collected for even more wealth concentration, more commerce, product monetization and individual disempowerment? WTF is even going on down there?" The reality of something I have known intuitively for some years sunk in. The next thoughts that came drained the breath from me and my blood ran cold, horrified at my ignorance and passivity. "What have we done?" "We = White" "Whose house am I living in?" "Whose interests am I serving?" Chicago Landed I'm white, 58, with an MBA in finance. I grew up as the daughter of a Republican father who worked for Governors Brown, Reagan and Brown in Sacramento California. I have a Democratic mother, who pushed me in my baby stroller over the Golden Gate Bridge when Dr. Martin Luther King marched across it in 1963. I was 2 years old. My mother also led the Sacramento Chapter of The League of Women Voters in 1967 and 1968, a tumultuous time. My father worked for the kind of Republicans who initiated the Environmental Protection Act for California, protected water rights for the Central Valley and established the Veteran's Care Act. My parents, members of different parties, agreed on politics. They were humane. They fought for the poor, sought to overturn injustice, were mavericks in their day. Dad was Executive Director of the Intergovernmental Board of Electronic Data Processing for the State of California, announcing prophetically in 1969, "There will be no privacy in the future". He retired and left industry after two massive heart attacks and spent his last years in the foothills of California in a meditation group. Mom was complicated, opinionated, passionate, a homemaker, who later worked for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund before moving to LA to run an inner city preschool for 20 years before eventually retiring. That flight changed my life. The long wide spiraling circles over a large section of Chicago made by the jet, as it slowly descended - aligning for a safe window to land, allowed me time to see the world come more and more into focus, and along with it, the realization of the part I am playing in the current system. For the last 3 years the knowledge that I had to change direction has been on my heart, a persistent, at times inconvenient, pressure on my conscience. It has taken time to make the decision to come out as a force for change. Growing up the youngest of 4 smart and intense siblings created in me a deep desire not to rock the boat, to remain invisible in order to stay safe and out of the way. The belief that I could observe from the sidelines, make small contributions without upsetting anyone or drawing attention to myself has dominated my life. Now, events around the world, my own move to Canada and back, ethics and the current psychological crises I see gripping the world, especially young people, those I admire and learn from, have forced this craving for my own personal anonymity and safety into the background. My next set of blog posts aims to describe and explain in detail the economic system within which we live here in the United States and by extension, the world. My goal is to support the argument for a re-making of the current economy away from the an exploitative model to a rational and healthy alternative for human beings, animals, the planet and its plant life and natural well-being. As a futurist and global media maker, it's time to step up and embrace a re-making of the global economy, one that has wedged itself, and by extension the world, into a corner that leads to literally nowhere for too many, crushing opportunity and draining the planet of species, diversity and vitality. I hope you come along as we look at how the global economic system works, explore and unpack rational alternatives, ranging from food production, food consumption, energy and oil, to financial market behaviors, individual savings and investments to personal attention, time and identity harvesting by phones and devices. It's way past time to talk about what "we" are doing here. In peace, Julie Boston, Massachusetts 2020
Cloud computing enters a new phase of acquisitions, mergers and shake-up. Who will lead the pack?6/7/2018
 For me 2017 and 2018 were both the year of the animated cloud.
2 years ago I joined the cloud based platform as a service firm, Nimble Collective, striving to revolutionize the world of animation and cloud computing through its globally available streaming animation platform. With over 3 decades in animation production, the prospect of world wide, globally available streaming animation tools over the internet, delivered through a public, 24/7 cloud based infrastructure was music to my (probably somewhat jaded) animation ears. As Director of Business Development, I contributed to the firm's position strategy and operations. June 2018 starts a new chapter of global consulting for not only technology / cloud firms, but for companies whose mission and market application significantly re-tools a service, sector or business worldwide. The cloud is here to stay, and yet there remain significant impediments to fast adoption. What are these barriers and how quickly can they fall? What incentives are required to push or pull companies into the public cloud, regardless of whether much needed security, capital expenditure finance response plans and global labor solutions are in place? What does the future look like for those peering through the looking glass? Are we really on the edge of a cloud computing global revolution, similar to when the two Steves unleashed the personal computer? Will individual animated media making take off pulling revenue behind it. Or will the vision of a global independent creator environment find itself lagging behind snail's pace infrastructure deployment, archaic and complex international subsidy and labor laws, and a holy grail fantasy of territory-neutral crypto-currency transaction. The next 18 months will shake out the wheat from the chaff as current players position for market lead position and large service firms start to move in, having smelled the potential for profit. Who will survive the expected shake up? Who will pull ahead? Animation is only a small portion of the overall cloud computing market. So, let's step back a moment. In January Microsoft was compelled to take a $13.8b charge related to new tax laws connected to its cloud computing business. Already hot on the cloud path, this charge ignited a new fire in the belly of MS to turn its cloud position into a large scale profit center and take point in front of AWS. From WSJ Jan 13, 2018: https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-reports-gains-in-cloud-computing-business-1517434433 "Microsoft already has carved a spot for itself as the No. 2 company behind Amazon.com Inc. in renting computing power and storage over the web. For its fiscal second quarter, the company reported strong gains in the two biggest pieces of its cloud-computing business: its Azure infrastructure services and Office 365 online-productivity business.Though Microsoft doesn’t disclose revenue for those businesses, it said Azure jumped 98% and Office 365 grew 41%. In the previous quarter, Azure gained 90% and Office 365 grew 42%. Its Intelligent Cloud segment, which includes Azure, climbed 15% to $7.8 billion. Its Productivity and Business Processes segment, which includes Office, gained 25% to $8.95 billion." Microsoft's acquisition of the cloud based coding collaboration site: GitHub Inc. for $7.5b in stock focuses the company squarely in the cloud and moves its agenda forward. From WSJ June 5, 2018: https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-to-acquire-github-for-7-5-billion-in-stock-1528118504 Microsoft Corp. MSFT -1.57% agreed Monday to buy coding-collaboration site GitHub Inc. for $7.5 billion in stock, one of the biggest in a string of deals by Chief Executive Satya Nadella to transform the software giant beyond its legacy products and focus on fast-growing areas like cloud computing. The deal values GitHub at nearly four times the $2 billion valuation given by private investors in a fundraising round three years ago. GitHub has grown into a major nexus for software developers to share and collaborate on code—it claims 28 million users. The 10-year-old company, which charges corporate customers, doesn’t disclose revenue or profit, and its financial performance isn’t clear. Acquiring GitHub could help Microsoft persuade more developers to create applications for its cloud-computing business, where customers rent digital resources and applications on demand. Microsoft is racing to catch up to industry leader Amazon.com Inc. in that business. There is no doubt that Microsoft is on a mission to pull ahead of AWS and Google and assert its dominance. How will it go about doing this? Which firms might it partner with or acquire? We will follow this story closely to see what we can learn about not only MS and its cloud strategy, but cloud based tools world wide, especially open source tools, not bogged down by licensing requirements and reluctant CFOs. Next up: Who is Satya Nedella and what is his strategy? We will take a closer look at the man behind this strategy, his motivations, inspirations and sample his writing. The annual conference for the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers is here and I'm super excited to share that I'm presenting an economic analysis paper on moving to the cloud with co-authors Corban Gossett and Mac Moore. If you're at SMPTE - pop on over and say Hello!  In preparation, SMPTE did an interview for their Daily News Blog - re-posted here. Enjoy!
McDONALD INTERVIEW 1. Would you say that companies as a rule are either too slow to take advantage of moving production to the cloud, too fast or for the most part adopting the cloud at a reasonable pace? There's a sweet spot for early adoption of any new technology. For moving to the public cloud this tends to be mid-sized or smaller agile firms, with relatively low capital investment in current technology, or a division of a larger firm where risk tolerance is manageable. So, rather than saying companies as a rule are too slow or too fast to adopt, I would say that within the industry, the most successful early adopters are companies who can tolerate some manageable R&D experiences, for example remote collaboration or variable streaming latency. I expect companies will start to adopt quickly once a large studio makes a feature film totally in the public cloud space. At that point, companies who don't shift will start to feel left behind. Costs are going to drop significantly once the industry re-tools in this direction so there will be an increase in adoption as firms and marketers experience the benefits of cloud based pipelines, and feel secure. 2. Do most content creation companies today have people with the necessary skillsets to fully understand the risks and rewards of moving their IP to the cloud or should they be looking at adding specialists to their staffs? Because the cloud computing environment for media is relatively new, even large and well staff IT departments, with decades of experience, will find there are areas that are new or unknown to them. Advances in streaming and technology delivery isn't the only new area. New models for billing and licensing are also emerging. So even if a company has all the IT and Tech knowledge it needs, it will also need to look at its financial / enterprise model to review / grasp how moving to the cloud will change its return on investment. Adding specialists full time isn't a requirement. Attending conferences, reading journals, and engaging with small cloud projects to test the waters is a great place to start. A specialist in a defined engagement might be best applied to one off experiment that educates and informs internal stakeholders, being sure to include the finance team. As a CEO I would create a cloud task force assigned to investigate how moving to the cloud might be part of my company's long term strategic plan, with short term experiments to capture and assess ROI. 3. Would you say that there is an advantage to moving this kind of work to the cloud that a significant segment of the industry doesn’t fully comprehend yet? Yes, absolutely. One first advantage is a vast reduction in infrastructure costs. A second advantage is access to global talent pools and a third would be a potential explosion of creativity as collaboration across the globe increases. Once remote collaboration takes hold companies no longer have to invest in expensive real estate foot prints off shore, labor is free to work in proximity to family. The yearly costs of relocating labor are astronomical in not only media and entertainment but many other sectors as well. Lowering costs and capital investment in technology infrastructure is a major market disruptive force and significant advantage to companies. 4. Aside from the obvious concerns about security, which you’ll certainly go into, is there a drawback to moving from local storage to the cloud that a significant segment of the industry doesn’t fully comprehend yet? At this time the major challenges are around whether public cloud based tools are robust enough to handle large data synchs and transfers. Also, global internet infrastructure determines how fast data can move from point to point around the world. The internet backbone is present in most locations but not yet open and commoditized for public use. The main drawback, aside from security concerns is around "The Last Mile" - that delivery point to the end user working on their computer in their location and the latency requirements for an easy feeling to using the creative tools. 5. Do you see content archiving moving entirely to the cloud or do you think content owners will continue to want to hold onto physical media for the foreseeable future? As a member of the Association for Moving Image Archivists, AMIA, I can relate to folks who want to keep a local copy of everything. I think firms will want to hang on to their local storage solutions because the nature of archiving tends to be risk intolerant. However, in the long run, yes, I think archiving and media storage, media creation, the entire process will be cloud based. Why? Because costs, technology iteration is simply too expensive in the long term for a single company to take on and maintain indefinitely into the future. The cost of migrating archives from data storage solution to data storage solution includes maintaining the machines, skills and equipment associated with each media storage type. Eventually, not too long from now, visual media created at 4k or audio at a hit bit rate, is easily stored and accessed via the cloud. Our industry is moving to the cloud, there's no doubt about that. Sectors will shift in line with their ability to understand, control and forecast costs. The long term eventual costs for all media creation are going to be significantly lower than local solutions. Companies with strategic teams assigned to investigate and map out their cloud strategy will pull in front, as they lower their costs and are able to reallocate investment to talent and story-telling, away from capital investment that requires long term write downs. Story telling will move into the forefront - reduced labor costs, enhanced collaboration and reduced capital investment - this is what the cloud will usher in. A few storm clouds might appear on the horizon as companies learn and as the internet backbone settles into global robust performance. But overall companies who educate themselves and prepare will weather those and be well prepared for this new paradigm. While it's been eons since my last post, we've been super busy over here in the land where creativity meets the market. Nimble Collective continues to soar, releasing the 2nd to the last of its pilot films, and positioning for the long haul to deliver its animation in the cloud platform. Company confidentiality prohibits me from writing about too many of our internal learning experiences, but the work is rich with lessons across a wide variety of creative and business scenarios. Stay tuned for those articles when the time is right.   In news closer to home we've been head's down on a new film company, to be announced July 1. Our film company produces live action short and long form stories and documentaries from around the globe and will support new artists as well as established filmmakers who have a story to tell from their hearts. Submission applications for stories will be announced in September with principal shooting planned for early 2018. Today we're thinking about success, how to imagine it, how to visualize it, how to describe it, how to share it and how to empower oneself and others to engage in the sometimes exhausting process of creating it. The temptation to stare at the news is tremendous these days, but making the effort, even at the end of a long and tiring day, to structure time to work towards one's personal goals is vital. Success in a creative endeavor typically begins with passion.  Artistic or creative passion is that large or small emotion that quite frankly, never goes away, if we're lucky. It often arrives without invitation or warning, like inspiration, and creates a welcome, or sometimes unwelcome, pressure for a creative person to respond. Creative passion can be a welcome diversion from a monotonous daily routine, or a destructive pesky habit of distraction, leading us into dark backroad alleys and confusing life choices. Finding the right support structure for the successful expression of passionate inspiration can be a life long search. One needs understanding, acceptance, feedback, infrastructure, pencils, pen, paper, cameras, books, tools, reviews, editorial, you name it - the list is long - and expensive.
Reaching towards artistic expression starts with the thought, feeling or simple intuition that one has something to say, something to do, something to be. Then comes a long and sometimes arduous journey to bring together the elements to support a wholesome and experiential expression. On the journey it's important to be awake and aware - and not distracted by either a mismatched offer of help, or internal pulls to give up. Trusted and vetted structure around the creative are key. Next up is a deeper discussion of what it means to deliver on a creative vision. DELIVERY. What does it mean to pick a goal, move towards it, express it and then create and deliver it to market. How does the Creative position him or herself in the market, how is artistic output priced, how do we respond and re-align after market acceptance or rejection? This and more in this evening's post. This morning’s post is about power and voice.
With all the turmoil going on in the US political and economic spheres, it can be easy to slip into the feeling that one has lost power, copious amounts of it in fact, and daily. As headlines blare from all angles, and new voices compete for air space, the tendency to withdraw, protect and rationalize one’s own silence doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Rather than convince people not to silence their voices, or talk about volume, I want to talk today about the underlying experience of personal and social power. How we recognize it, what it means to me personally, and how it plays out in society and conversations. Not just in the national and international landscape, but in our personal, more intimate interactions every day, at home with our family, in meetings with our co-workers, and importantly, with ourselves. I recently asked a colleague in a technical leadership position how he responds when he notices he has fallen silent in a meeting, where he knows, or thinks he should be speaking up. Often, the competition for airspace, for the oxygen in the room can be intense. Top dogging, talking over others, swearing, denigrating, making fun of, these are all ways that people take power in a situation where they feel they need to establish their authority. It’s fascinating and refreshing to meet individuals who enter a new situation with an attitude of relaxed curiosity. I’ve definitely met a few of those in my time and they are such a breath of fresh air! Who do we know who has the self-confidence and emotional maturity to enter into a situation with relaxed curiosity as their first impulse? Not many! But they are a wonder to behold when they do show up. More often, there’s a subtle, or not so subtle competition for power, that plays out in eventually phasing out the diversity of voices in a room. When folks are insecure, eventually their need to reinforce their power dominate the mic, and others fall silent. Once silence has descended, it takes very little to keep that momentum going. The silence itself, the behaviors and emotions of the group will act as a dampening field to others so that once the airwaves are clear, it’s unlikely that a new voice will enter. I’ve experienced this played out in corporate life, family and even in my own head. Little did I know that yesterday a similar scene was playing out on the Senate floor between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Mitch McConnell. Let’s take a closer look at the mechanism of silencing dissent. Suppression of dissent occurs when an individual or group which is more powerful than another tries to directly or indirectly censor, persecute or otherwise oppress the other party, rather than engage with and constructively respond to or accommodate the other party's arguments or viewpoint. When dissent is perceived as a threat, action may be taken to prevent continuing dissent or penalize dissidents. Government or industry[1] may often act in this way. Direct action tries to silence the dissenter via factors or influences in a forthright manner, often coercive. Indirect action tries to silence the dissenter via intervening factors or influences, but not in a forthright manner. Self-censorship occurs when individuals are concerned about risking their employment status, standing in an academic course and/or ability to live without threat. It is a social action. Some dissenters fear direct actions taken against them. Self-censorship makes direct and indirect suppression unnecessary. It’s really this last sentence that is so intriguing to me. As we explore personal power and voice in this series of posts, we’ll think about the internal world, that responds to indications and markers of welcome or rejection. In this play of invitation and exclusion, lies our relationship to power and voice. It's Fall and Back-to-Business in the blog-o-sphere.
This week we're talking about audience building and the digital streaming space.What's happening and why... Here's a report I wrote a recently that celebrates some important changes in consumption patterns and chats about strategy. Launch positioning for digital distribution success. Mitigating short and long term risk through targeted problem definition and strategic responses Firms entering the digital distribution space, whether through licensing acquired content or through new content generation face an increasingly complex market, where a few wrong moves can wash your company up on the shores on the digital deep river. However, very high revenue is available to firms who position their launch strategies in line with controllable infrastructure cost, accurately predict consumer behavior and partner effectively with marketing teams, dialed into the triad of past trends, current opportunities and future consumption drivers, across short and long term time horizons. This 3 part white paper series discusses the digital distribution environment in 2016, analyzes major consumption drivers across live action and animated sectors and discusses a combination of factors that lead to maximum success and mitigated risk. It discusses common mistakes made that can lead to poor alignment between licensors and consumers, and de-mystifies the digital distribution pipeline for new firms. Each week we will review an aspect of the digital distribution eco-system and report on current trends. Week 1 Overview Expected continued growth in the digital eco-system – High revenue upside Market Factors to Watch: Changing gender trends, fan-based audiences, brand bias / blinders High upside profit remains a big driver for firms currently in and entering the digital distribution environment. Changing consumer profiles, less focused on ad-generated revenue and more focused on building and maintaining an audience eco-system, define current trends. Girls Girls Girls Tomorrow’s E&M landscape is most visible today on your teenage daughter’s smartphone, where users spend two out of every three minutes of their digital media time and where apps dominate. (http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/perspectives/2016-entertainment-media-industry-trends) Failure to pay attention to the girls markets and its early adoption of phone based media delivery is a current common mistake. For years firms have targeted the boys 18 to 24 market as the consumer space with the highest ROI. The gender landscape for high consumption is shifting significantly, both in the US and abroad. (http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/teens-social-media-technology-2015/) Consumption follows the fan trend. Audiences are coalescing, becoming more integrated and less fragmented. Girls and girl centered social networks are emerging as leading trend edges. From Pokémon to Mattel, the girl market is driving strategy. http://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/That-s-Ms-Pikachu-to-you-Pokemon-Go-9197882.php While playing, my husband noticed some Pokémon were listed as male or female. Curious, he consulted an online encyclopedia of all things related to the characters and determined that Pikachu—the bright yellow, rosy-cheeked rabbit-like creature that’s the face of the franchise—was a girl. Mattel Toys pivots in marketing strategy towards girls. http://fortune.com/2016/05/23/dc-super-hero-girls-diane-nelson/ Former Pixar technology leader, Oren Jacob, recently pivoted his start up firm ToyTalk away from the Mattel’s Talking Barbie in response to changes in the consumption trends of girls, consumer response, girl empowerment as well as shifting attitudes and market preferences, including parental aversion to technology and recording children’s conversations. ToyTalk has re-branded to become PullString bot authoring. The significance of this pivot is that ToyTalk course-corrected and re-aligned towards the bot market. A nimble start up, ToyTalk re-branded, didn’t apologize for the pivot and is on track. (https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/26/pullstring-bot-authoring/) Barbie, the doll, is about to become Barbie, the techno-conversationalist. And one livid consumer advocacy group says — for the sake of kids —Mattel must quash the new toy before it hits shelves for the holidays. At issue: Should a kid's conversation with a Barbie doll — or any play thing — be private? "Hello Barbie" is a $74.99, Wi-Fi-connected doll that uses a microphone embedded in Barbie's belt buckle to record children's voices and transmit them to cloud servers where they will be stored for up to two years. Mattel's tech partner, ToyTalk, leverages speech recognition with pre-programmed responses to key words or phrases, so that kids can feel like Barbie is "responding" to them. Mattel says it's simply doing what kids have been asking it to do for years. "The No. 1 request we receive from girls globally is to have a conversation with Barbie, and with Hello Barbie we are making that request a reality," says Stephanie Cota, Mattel's senior vice president of global communications, in an e-mailed statement. What's more, for kids to use the techno-doll, parents must sign on — and ultimately will have access to their kids' recorded conversations. But Wednesday, officials at Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, the advocacy group, posted a petition on their site, demanding that Mattel abandon the project. "This is really about Mattel eavesdropping on a child's heart and soul — and the most intimate things about their lives," says Susan Linn executive director of the group, in a phone interview. http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/perspectives/2016-entertainment-media-industry-trends If you are an executive in E&M, your formula for success is already shifting radically. No longer is it enough to develop content solely to attract eyeballs, seeking the largest audiences possible for advertising and subscription revenues. Now, you must create fans: active users united by shared ideas, interests, and experiences, who will return every day to your brands and properties. As a fan-centric business, buoyed by the loyalty of passionate users, you will command substantial strategic advantages. You will know more about who your users are, what they want, and how to deliver what they want. This will enable you to monetize your products and experiences more effectively and more broadly. Current fans recruit new fans. Best of all, fans spend more per capita and are less likely to churn. In every E&M sector, disruptive companies are racing against incumbents to drive fan value — to be the first to deliver what users want, perhaps even before it is clear they want it. In 2016, the pace will accelerate. Any companies hoping to join the fray will need to be better than the competition at locking up fan engagement, loyalty, and spending, and at investing in efforts that drive fan value. To succeed in this evolving video ecosystem, studios, networks, and distributors must embrace separate strategies. Studios have benefited the most from the proliferation of streaming services, whose thirst for unique, high-quality content does not show any signs of abating. To maintain this advantage, studios must aggressively invest in intellectual property, development, and production to build deep rosters of branded, repeatable content aimed at multiple revenue streams, including domestic sales to networks or streaming services, international sales, and licensing for video games, consumer products, and other categories. Common mistakes – Gender Bias and Brand Blinders Three common mistakes firms make are: 1) Overlooking the girls market 2) “I like this so you will like it too” brand bias 3) confusing artistic or creative success with market performance and revenue upside potential. Girls Market - For years firms have tracked the boys consumption market and aligned strategies to that demographic. Recent media consumption and technology adoption trends point firmly towards girls as setting new norms. Through social apps and cell phones, new audience eco-systems are rapidly coalescing. Much of the audience formation patterns can be traced to girls and their communities and patterns of communication. Smart digital marketing teams no longer leave girls out of the reach and build equation. In fact, girl behavior drives new market patterns and upside potential. (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/etudes/join/2013/474442/IPOL-FEMM_ET(2013)474442_EN.pdf) New data from the measurement company comScore has given us fresh insights into a number of key US media markets. As their report shows, “longstanding consumer habits continue to be upended.” (https://www.themediabriefing.com/article/nine-trends-in-us-media-consumption-in-charts) Brand bias - Many firms enter media markets driven by the personal passion of inspired founders. However brand bias and blinders can result in widely mis-targeted media releases. While personal tastes and passion are a great entry point for endeavors, success in the extremely competitive, rapidly changing media market requires a level of detachment that can rankle passionate lovers of media. Consumers fall in love with media and media personalities. Consumers fall in love with stories. Passion leads to brand loyalty and long tail franchises. Binge watching and ancillary purchasing. All good. However, passionate loyalty to a brand can blind marketers and executives to the realities of consumption. A fact-based analytic approach to positioning can offset this bias. “I like this so you will like it too - Live Action Example: Andrew Stanton and the John Carter failure. Many opinions exist around this colossal failure, but a key element that no one disputes is that being in love with a title doesn’t give enough voice to the kind of market reality that assures revenue success. (http://www.vulture.com/2012/03/john-carter-doomed-by-first-trailer.html), Eight months of indifferent and often confused chatter culminated in Disney's John Carter — which cost just shy of $250 million to make — grossing only $30.6 million domestically. Stanton had been waiting 30 years for someone to make a movie about his favorite character, and when he was given carte blanche to make his first live-action film, this was what he picked. But he had very specific and faithful ideas of how it had to be done. John Lasseter, the head of the Disney-owned Pixar, had convinced then-Disney studio chairman Dick Cook to buy the Burroughs series for Stanton, and also successfully made the case that the enormous past profits of the director's animated work earned him the right to full creative control. As a Burroughs purist, Stanton was determined to make the film in a way that completely honored the source material. In an interview with the aptly titled online movie site Badass Digest late last month, Stanton said he “felt like if anybody had a chance of making this without it being fucked up by the studio, it might be me. They’re too afraid of me – they want me happy at Pixar. So I thought, ‘I should use this for good, and make the movie the way I always thought it should be made.’ If at any one of these points [Disney] were going to push back, I would have pulled out. It’s the best way to buy a car — I don’t mind walking away.” The solution to the brand bias is to be willing to construct market studies with statistically significant sampling numbers across your expected consumers. This is relatively easy to achieve through SurveyMonkey and social media platforms. In this day and age of connected social worlds, there’s no excuse for firms that ignore the vital step of polling their intended target market for preferences. Marketing teams who fail to construct strategic questionnaires that can provide valuable data to position media releases increase risk. Forgetting to ask what people want is common for firms early in the development and launch cycle. Confusing market performance goals with artistic or creative success – and past success doesn’t ensure future success, critical failure but revenue performer. Animation Example: The Secret Life of Pets Falls Flat, or does it? (http://rockrivertimes.com/2016/07/06/secret-life-of-pets-falls-flat/) The main issue is the script which lacks the wit to make up for its generic plot. There’s a few laugh out loud moments but the film feels flat for the most part and never gets out of second gear. It’s difficult to look at the film without comparing it to the recent, and far superior, Zootopia. The comparisons are evident but the films aren’t in the same league. The Flushed Pets cult explores some social commentary but never goes into any depth, instead the story flounders into the third act failing to end on the euphoric high it promises despite its happy ending. There is little value for the parents in the audience with this film so maybe it’s best just waiting for the DVD release. However, the film had long legs in the digital market, after a reasonable opening. Illumination Entertainment and Universal's The Secret Life of Pets debuted to a bigger-than-expected $103.2 million from 4,370 theaters at the North American box office — delivering Chris Meledandri's Illumination its first new franchise after Despicable Me/Minions and eclipsing Pixar's Inside Out ($90.4 million) to score the best start ever for an original animated property, not accounting for inflation. It's also the No. 6 opening ever for any animated film, and Illumination's second-best start after last summer's Minions ($115.7 million). http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-secret-life-pets-909620 People who create media and people who sell it for them have to steel themselves for having difficult conversations. Bridging the wide gap in perspective and goal setting is a vital part of the C-Suite task. Many executive / artistic partnerships have foundered on these rocks of discord, as directors accuse marketing executives of co-opting their vision and marketing and sales executives throw up their hands at temperamental or worse, aggressively uncooperative directors. Finding the sweet spot can yield well aligned, beautiful story telling with long market performance and year over year revenue growth. Week 1 Take-Aways for Content / Media Firms Prepping Strategy & Position
Next week: Part 2 The allure of high ad based revenue, Myth or Reality? Build it or Buy it? Should firms create their own digital streaming infrastructure? Technical options and alternatives.  It started out slowly.... innocently enough... arriving home to Oakland, after a long work day in Mountain View, sitting on the couch while my daughter cheered on the Golden State Warriors mid-season with a friend. The next deceptively simple step was to attend a game in person, on Easter Sunday with our good friends Terry and Katie - incredibly fun, including selfies, beer, food, cheering Steph Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson on to the Warriors epic win record of 73 games, watching in awe as Klay made basket after basket from "downtown", then "waaaaay downtown". (I can say that now). The learning curve of writing "Clay" instead of "Klay" and getting smacked for that on Facebook. *After that things really picked up steam. After seeing my Facebook posts people at work started talking to me about sports, not just basketball but hockey, skiing, snowboarding, whatever, any sport. I was suddenly "sporty". 
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