So, how did it go, I hear no-one in particular ask…
That’s the presentation to Media Port at Ifra Expo in Vienna on October 11.
The answer? Hard to say, actually.
I could take the stoney silence personally, but I prefer to think it was the gravity of the message that made the audience think. After all, only a couple actually left during the delivery.
Basically, myself and Phil Walker, Managing Director of PCS, were expounding the view that publishers are being squeezed by the need to maintain print revenues while attempting to exploit the possibilities of digital publishing which, most experts agree, will never give them the same return.
We argued there was a two pronged solution to this: One was to rationalise and streamline workflows so that the production of content was faster and more efficient – for instance by using a templated workflow. By the way, Mark Wilkinson, the new Business Development Manager at PCS hates the term ‘templated workflow’. I don’t. Templated workflow… There, I said it again!
What that means, effectively, is taking what you do every day and making it part of your workflow. If you’ve decided that a particular look is what defines your brand, why deviate too far from it?
Why re-do every day what you do every day?
I argued that desktop publishing turned journalists into people who drew boxes on pages. In private, I call them ‘box-jockeys’. Journalists aren’t ‘box-jockeys’, they’re serious words and spaces professionals trained to tell the story in as few words as possible.
I said: “Let designers design and editors edit. Let the system do the rest.” I wasn’t expecting a standing ovation for the thought. What I perhaps wasn’t expecting was no reaction at all.
There may be a reason for the muted response – and I’ll come back to that.
The other strand to our presentation was HTML5. Again we were perhaps delivering an uncomfortable message to organisations that nailed themselves to the iOS Apps mast.
We offered a different perspective. HTML5 may not be the finished article, but it is delivering already. We know we can deliver content to HTML5 ‘applications’ that feed multiple digital platforms across mulitple operating systems.
If you’ve put all your eggs in the iOS Apps basket, that’s not a particularly comforting message. If as a publisher you’ve gone down the route of giving away 30 per cent of your revenue to Apple, you don’t really want to be told that you could have saved yourself a fortune.
The other thing Phil and I noticed about the presentation was that we thought we weren’t supposed to deliver a product pitch and that we had 15 minutes in which not to deliver a product pitch.
That message didn’t appear to have reached some of our co-presenters who seemed to go on much longer, shamelessly pitching their products. So while they were showing stuff on iPads and hooking into video and the like, we just talked over some fabulous graphics from PCS’s pictures guru, Rachel Crump. Hence, I think, the reaction akin – in something like the words of the late great Bill Hicks – to a dog that’s been shown a card trick.
We actually only mentioned the name of the product that allowed us to take content in from anywhere, template workflows and deliver to anywhere with no extra effort a few times.
It’s called Knowledge. It’s brand new and it has the potential to take the world of publishing and document management by storm.
You will be hearing more about it. Mark my words.