Wednesday, September 12, 2012
The 2017 Project: Looking Down the Road
by Deb Shaw
Centro Founder & President Shawn Riegsecker is a smart guy and he’s got the capital to prove it. In 2010 he took on the full time job (on top of his full time job) of raising venture capital and ultimately succeeded in raising $22.5 million that settled in December 2010. Good for him and Centro….bad for their 2011 strategy development because the capital raising process was so all consuming. So, as he started 2011, he took himself off to the desert for nine days to think, analyze, and envision what the future looks like so he could plan and direct the best use of his resources.
Centro Founder & President Shawn Riegsecker shared his media
vision for 2017 and beyond.
His prognostications took center stage this morning at the LMA Fall Conference as he took the audience of several hundred media professionals on a journey to 2017. Admitting that he’s going out on a limb with his predictions, he also pointed out that he was willing to do so because he believes very much that this is what the future looks like. Some of what he sees ahead:
- Disruption will be 10x the magnitude of what we’ve seen in the last 10 years.
- For newspapers, print large metros don’t exist; national print dailies are still breathing; smaller community dailies and weeklies are doing well. Capitalizing on the local connection is paramount.
- The tablet revolution continues and wreaks havoc on all traditional ways of consuming data.
- There will be a ‘to the death’ match between telco/wireless/cable providers. OPPORTUNITY HERE – these providers will need to advertise!
- Twitter is HUGE. Previously Riegsecker thought Facebook might own Twitter in the future; now he wonders if that might be reversed.
- Mobile phones become more powerful than laptops; the ‘screen’ is important.
- Video is ubiquitous thanks to technology advances in HD compression.
- The preprint problem – he says this business will fall off the cliff in 2014.
- Digital editions survive, and many thrive possibly if they get on the tablet bandwagon now.
- There’s a collapse of segregated and silo media – no more offline or online media. It will all be just media and the choices will be Text, Image, Audio, Video, Social.
- On the buying side, audience and media fragmentation is enormous making the media buying process even more complex.
- Publishers of quality content are the proxies to audience. Local is key. Local media companies, exactly like LMA members, are sitting in the cat bird seat. “As an industry, you guys are in the premium bucket.”
Riegsecker captivated the standing room only audience with these and many other predictions. Time will tell….
Visit www.centro.net for more on Shawn and his company.