I'm at an away-day for the entire marketing and communications department of ITV, and the aim of the game is to get everyone up to speed on digital media.
Ben Hammersley caused a commotion earlier by saying that viewers don't care about the ITV brand, and Jay Stevens of MySpace told everyone how Channel 4 nearly tripled its TV audience for Skins by partnering with MySpace.
The new digital environment means joining things up and not leaving it to the guys in the corner, says new marketing director David Pemsel. And that includes being able to understand the 120 people building the broadband site, he said.
10:30 Futurist Gerd Leonhard on the changing digital landscape
Gerd Leonhard has a background in technology and music, including working for the Grateful Dead for two years in California. He covers all the basic principles of "digital Darwinism" in his opening talk: "It is not the strongest or most intelligent that survive but the ones most adapted to change."
Everybody is encroaching on television - even Budweiser has an online TV channel, and search has become a medium.
Television 2.0 is essentially television plus the best of the internet, so content and quality plus place-shifting, time-shifting, feeds, folksonomies, interactivity, remixing, community and navigation.
Video on demand will be about niche markets - how to fix a motorcycle, for example - and that's exactly how YouTube got so successful.
Personal media has not taken over from mass media, but it has become harder for mass media to keep up. MTV has completely flatlined for the last nine months and that's because it's still top-down, trying to tell kids what's cool. The new networks are about about being part of a network that you can't control. MTV used to dominate music TV and now YouTube does.
"You will not be controlling the ecosystem," he said.
"How do you get to these people? Give them TV clips to play with, give them ways to redesign things and mix things up. When there are millions of users there will eventually be some money somewhere."
"Sharing is a great vehicle for marketing," he says. So study what the music industry does and do the opposite.
He cited Marc Prensky's work on digital natives and said they may well have different brain structures because they think and work in such different ways. ("Not unless they've learned how to open doors.")
They function best when networked, prefer games to work, can deal with a large amount of information very fast and have amazing multitasking skills.
Peer-to-peer technologies like Joost, RawFlow, Swoosh and Kontiki will play a major role in the future of TV. Marketers have the opportunity to join this network, but have to participate in a new way - the talk is in a new language through IM, Skype, chats, video and so on. That's where the marketers need to be.
"In five years be lucky to have 500,000 viewers watching the same show, not because the shows aren't good but just because there will be so much more niche content. That means the entire business model is changing."
"TV going forward is not defined by a method of distribution, a particular device or a degree of professionalism. It will be defined by soft facts like relationships, trust, relevance and authority. People will watch your stuff because they trust you - that's a trust and a perception issue."
"It's about people telling other people what's relevant."
He showed a mocked-up Google search results page for an ITV show with added options to download the show, add to recorder schedule, get RSS feed and add to Tivo. Great practical idea for demonstrating where and how things are going, even if the implementation of that has to resolve more than a few licensing and delivery issues.
11:30 Jay Stevens from MySpace on social networks
Jay is vice president for MySpace in London, and wasted no time in getting a bit of Google baiting in: he said that half of YouTube's traffic is generated by videos posted on MySpace user profiles.
"While they haven't figured out a way to monetise that, we have. Which is nice," he said.
There are 9m MySpace user profiles in the UK, he said, although I'm sure some of those will be registered on the behalf of various cats and concepts. There are 163m profiles worldwide and that's growing by 300,000 per day.
Brand networking: users can take on the role of a brand champion, evangelising about that brand to all their MySpace friends. Stevens showed the profile of a Madonna fan who used the page to rave about her and also used the official H&M Madonna theme.
The brand has to go out and provide something of value to the community, and users then become advocates for that brand. This is a new social currency, he said.
Two-and-a-half million people signed up to be friends of the new X-Men movie - so that led to tens of thousands of millions of free brand impressions, as he described it.
He said the MySpace deal with Channel 4's Skins has been the most successful of its kind through a combination of an uncut version of that (brilliant) party trailer, a competition, catch-up episodes and, most significantly, a web-first showing of the first episode. Skins on MySpace has 40,000 friends, has had a 300,000 views and is a great model for cross-platform marketing, said Stevens.
On copyright protection, Stevens said MySpace is trialling and rolling out various fingerprinting technologies. Around a third of MySpace staff are dedicated to safety, security and copyright protection, he said, and "human eyes" review every piece of photographic and video content that goes on the site. He also acknowledged that advertisers particularly expect content to be vetted, which we know.
But I had to chuckle when he asked how many people in the audience remembered where they were when Netscape went public. I think that was a different meeting.
12:40 Ben Hammersley says that people don't care about the ITV brand
Ben Hammersley has a glint in his eye and kevlar in his bag, apparently. (He's done some stuff for the Guardian, including building this blog, if you haven't heard of him before...)
I'll spare you the complete history of blogging, but really - Hammersley gives good quote. He did say at one point that Twitter is like crack but that's a bit off-topic.
Hammersley caused a bit of a stink by saying that nobody gives a toss about brands - only the content. Consumers aren't going to ITV because they love ITV, they go to ITV because they want to see a particular programme or an actor.
He started by vilifying Viacom for the Google lawsuit. "There is a big trend among big companies for beating the shit out of people for liking the stuff too much - Viacom is a prime example."
People aren't trying to be criminals or mischief makers - they just don't care where they get the content from but they want it on their terms.
"Nobody cares about ITV. But they love the programmes."
I have to add that he prefixed that with "Outside this room, and outside the MediaGuardian office..."
"They don't care what channel Lost is on - they just want to see Lost. This is really important to understand. They will conspire together online in communities to get more stuff. The only thing you can do is help them."
The online community is three billion and growing, so you can always find someone else with the same interest. Whatever show you like, there will be someone out there that likes the same stuff as you, will want to buy the t-shirts, the box sets and watch every series.
"These are the people we need to start talking to. They gather online because the tools to do so and cheap, or free, and easy to use."
"Enable your fans to talk about you - and don't hinder them in any way, even if it's copyright infringement. Don't produce your own blogs but aggregate what everyone else is saying. And don't astroturf - fake grassroots support."
Blogging has gone from being a hobbie to being recognised as a new medium. The upshot is that people want to talk about you, but people have always wanted to talk about you. Now they can do it worldwide and when they talk, lots of people listen.
"You can only get four or five people around a water cooler, but I get 50,000 reading something on my blog."
Battlestar Galactica is doing amazing things with its digital marketing, including giving them clips to mash up and inevitably loads of those end up on YouTube. But that's a good thing, said Hammersley, and "it doesn't cost anything other than getting the finger out of the lawyer's arse".
