Media owners: how do you achieve cultural change?
We asked Peter Kreisky, chairman of the Kreisky Media Consultancy, how media owners can better prepare for, and implement, cultural change within their organisations.
Is cultural change the biggest challenge facing the media industry today? (0:03)
Well you know the magazine industry has gone through a massive transformation. They have the business models in place, they have a huge range of new skills that they need to introduce into the company. What they all say is that the toughest challenge is culture change, and how do they achieve culture change?
The first step towards implementing change (0:29)
The first is a very simple one, which is that you need to bring the audience inside. When you look at the audience that is your target audience for digital products: millennials who check their smartphones 100 times a day whose smartphones never leave their hands. Then put a mirror up. And you’ll see that same audience inside your company. You have to identify them and empower them to bring the audience inside. To bring their ideas, their passions, their energy, to developing products, services, etc. for you.
And the second… (1:17)
The second lesson, and this is much more complex, is to build a culture of co-creation. By which I mean a culture that extends a network between the inside and the outside of your company and develops through a change in values, through changing behaviour, change in eliminating the barriers to collaboration, clear communication and so on. And that is one of the most difficult and complex things but this, the leaders in this field ae achieving that and they are pushing those kinds of agendas with great vigour.
Taking a huge, potentially game changing issue in the industry today such as ad-blocking, how can publishers begin to think differently about this sort of challenge? (2:00)
This is a big issue in the industry at the moment. I certainly don’t have the answer to it, but there are minds much better than mine who are going to be wrestling with this and how to deal with it! But the key message really is: don’t build your future business on the basis that advertising will be there to support it. You have a lot of great value content that you have to learn how to monetise in a variety of ways. And what you have to do is employ the audience inside to figure out how to do that.
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