How TED (the conference) Compelled Me to Change Jobs

I have a new job as a B2B marketer at http://www.northplains.com. The standard disclaimers apply: Test-Driven Marketing is my personal blog and does not reflect the opinions of my employer But I figured that since my employer does sell software that impacts content marketing, global branding, and marketing execution in general, I should let my readers know where I am at, and what is influencing my thinking.

North Plains is a company with some amazing technology. They manage rich media- images, photos and video- and pioneered this market sixteen years ago. The creation, management and reuse of digital assets is a core marketing and communication challenge. If you consider that large companies have millions of assets and thousands of users of those assets its easy to see how digital asset management is an important engine for powering global marketing departments the world over.

But why the switch to a Digital Asset Management company for me personally? Partially because it’s a natural fit for me- my career has been in content, knowledge and process management.  But mostly, blame TED.

No, not Ted. TED. The “Ideas Worth Spreading” conference at http://www.ted.com that I keep linking to when writing blog posts like these:

What Spaghetti Sauce Teaches Us About The Diversity of Marketing Audiences

Do You Need Obsession-Driven Marketing?

TED for Marketers

How to Manage the Coming Content Explosion (not TED but another video reference)

I finally clued in. The world has changed. Video is important. I kept referencing video in my posts, not articles. I thought about my study and learning over the last year- it was probably about 50% video. For me. A reading nut with thousands of books in his library.

I did the Inbound Marketing certification which had excellent video content from the leading minds of the online marketing world.

At home, I watched TED videos more often than movies or TV shows and was often compelled to blog about them. I met person after person who grudgingly watched a TED conference and was amazed at how good and addictive they were. I guess they were expecting something like high school or television documentaries (the signal to noise ratio of television documentaries is usually abysmal, probably due to their seeking to reach everyone- much like most generic enterprise marketing).

I started going to weekly webinars from companies like MarketingProfs and MarketingExperiments.

When I decided I needed to become a real soccer coach ( 8 year olds are almost coachable ) I went to YouTube and learned from the best European soccer youth coaches.

When I wanted to teach my eight year old some math that was fun, I found a ton of excellent content on YouTube. He even got his first introduction to quantum physics from YouTube- at a level he could understand no less.

Video is suddenly very, very important.

Why now, and not in the 1950s when T.V. arrived? Because with the modern Internet it’s become scalable, findable, and a result, personally relevant. Anybody can create video and distribute it themselves- something largely reserved for the written word ten years ago. And, more importantly, people can find what they are interested in and self-select what they watch. Search across a wide body of video content turns video into a T.V. channel dedicated to me. This in turn creates new markets for content, spurring effort and creativity and further growth of personally relevant content.

There was no room on broadcast television for personally relevant video content previously- it had to be mass media, targeted to the broadest set of interests. With no other viable delivery mechanism, there was no audience or feedback mechanism to drive that content. The Internet has changed that, and probably far more profoundly than most people realize.

This video sums it up perfectly and brilliantly:

TED’s Chris Anderson: How Web Video Powers Global Innovation

And that’s why I’ve joined a company in the Digital Asset Management market. My vision of the future, as shaped by TED and other rich media interactions over the last couple of years has made me view Digital Asset Management a landmark endeavour in human culture. Visual rich media is driving a cultural and knowledge revolution that is already stunning in its reach and scope. I want to be part of it and contribute to it.

But don’t worry -this blog remains and lives on, still focused on test-driven marketing. For digital asset management blogging, you can visit me at the North Plains company blog:

http://wespeakdigitalmedia.com

I’ve just posted my first post there- How to Overcome the Content Barrier in Marketing Operations.

Now back to my regular blogging