MEDIAIZING IN MONACO

Monte Carlo, Monaco: My expectations of Monte Carlo were James Bondian in the extreme. I wanted to feel personally part of his classic adventure in what looks like a movie set in a plush corner of Southern France’s Cape May.

And I soon was, ensconced in a luxury hotel, standing in front of the real Casino Royale, and later meeting the man they call “Monsignor,” the Prince of the Principality, His Serene Highness, Albert, son of Grace Kelly the beloved American movie star whose marriage to Prince Ranier put this enclave of affluence on the map of American consciousness. He rules over a nation of only 22,000 and also appears to be a sincere environmentalist despite overseeing an environment known as a tax haven with more surveillance cameras per capita than any other country in the world.

Monaco is a mini-state known for Banks, Beaches, Bays, Bulgari and Beautiful people. ( An army of fashion-magazine perfect, long-legged and well coiffed Russian Hookers, said to be “gold diggers,” appear to be on permanent patrol to part suckers from their Euros).

But now: perhaps to emulate the World Economic Forum that brings the movers and shakers to Davos each year in the Swiss Alps, Monte Carlo is playing host to its first Monaco Media Forum which they intend as an annual extravaganza and talk-a-thon for global media “leaders,” among whom I was pleased to have been invited. The World Economic Forum’s founder, Professor Klaus Schwab, an old hand at cobbling together international conferences was on hand to drop some knowledge about how it is done and why it is important.

The mighty French Advertising and publicite’s firm Publicis was given the task of organizing three days of heady exchanges dealing with media issues. A number of top media moguls lent their names including the Saudi Prince and US TV investor Prince Waleed, NBC’s Bob Wright and the head of Shanghai ‘s TV group. None turned up, but that was ok because the conversation was less about Old Media than the New, and how new interactive bottom-up technologies are reshaping the media order.

Maurice Levy, the CEO Pasha of Publicis set the tone of the event by talking insightfully about what’s new, “from search engines and social networking platforms to bloggers—the emerging models for the media in this revolutionary world of digital media.” He cited a recent study from Deutsche Bank titled, “Media Industry Facing Biggest Upheaval Since Gutenberg.” He outlined how new media has impacted time and space as well as the personal and the political and why consumer desires to participate has led to the current media upheaval with defections from the old media world to a growing and intense immersion to the new from Google and You Tube to My Space and Face Book

www.facebook.com/

To his credit, he raised a deeper question that was all too rarely returned to in the plenaries and panels—what this all means for citizenship, culture, and global consciousness.

“We need to remember,” he added, “that this debate about the future of media has important implications for all our societies and all our countries. We are defined by how we communicate and how we transmit information and our democracies are guaranteed by a free and enquiring press.”

Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel would return to this sub theme a day later by arguing that the fight for a vital and free media was really a fight against Indifference and for caring about the world. He is heading up an effort to create a Nobel like prize for communications.

What was missing was a frank assessment of how media often behaves in socially irresponsible ways from selling war in Iraq, reinforcing genocide in Rwanda, or even as feeding into hate crimes. An Australian Commission of Inquiry just condemned radio shock jocks for inciting violence against minorities. Does media promote democracy or undermine it?

At the same time, there was an underlying tension summed up at the meeting’s end by France’s Jacques Attali who noted that globalization has done more to spread markets than democracy, and that if more is not done, a free press could erode and democracy disappear, despite all the new technologies that promise interactivity without any checks and balances or accountability of those in power.

Giving consumers their say is great—but what do they have to say? It seems clear that creating forums for self-expression and search technologies may become platforms for distraction, amusement and identity more than any engagement with the weighty issues of the world that were barely touched on. (It was noted that Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are often the most popular subjects for search–not how to change the world.)

The focus, introduced by Spence Reiss of WIRED was disproportionately on technology with innovators and entrepreneurs offering up product demos, Internet wiz kids galore, with their own next big things, some gimmicky, many not. We heard about the latest in peer to peer, and downloading, the coolest new phones and mobile media. It was fascinating.

NetVibes offers templates so you can personalize or “remix” the web to your own liking. Some like Steven Starr’s Revver reward creators by sharing advertising revenues. Others like Sling Shot allows you to watch your local TV station no matter where you go. Snap.com and Ask.com offer innovative search. Pixsy is a leader in peer along with AllPeers.com Media Zone offers up a way to experience a diverse range of new internet channels. Motion Box gives you a new way to upload videos while Blinkx offers up a video screen to see all the new video on line.

There were several hot search engine specialists that claim to way ahead of Google, especially with the intriguing new category of Video Search. VPod TV offers simple ways for folks to join the online video revolution. And Dot Mobi’s dynamic CEO Neil Edwards is not only working to make the internet mobile but also battling for net neutrality against avaricious telecom giants who want to monopolize the mobile phone future.

HTTP://dotmobi.mobi

(I will have more on all of these media leaders and others and technologies with URL’s later this week when I have time to sort through and decipher my voluminous notes.)

What was fascinating was how global this all this has become—with Indians, Sri Lankans, Dutch, French and Chinese competing with the Americans and Brits. At least in this sector McCluhan’s Global Village has come to pass in a brave new world of capital from South Africa and traditional newspapers adopting and offering new media forms.

This has led to a world of engineers reborn as CEOS and pitches delivered by young execs who have only been on the job for weeks. It all had some of the feel of the first wave of the Internet explosion that, lest we forget, ended up crashing to the ground. Michael Wolff’s brilliant book “Burn Rate” is still a classic in telling that story.

The buzz word of the weekend was “jazzy” as defined by a new guru, Rishad Tobbaccowla who gave the keynote reminding us all that just three years ago, today’s big brands were not so dominant. He spoke about Google. You Tube, Flikr, IPOD, I Tunes, and My Space. He then referenced what new in just the last three WEEKS:

NBBC—NBC’s Broad Band Network
Goo Tube
Windows Live
Amazon’s Box
IP TV
Hong Kong’s Interactive Channel

The new just keeps coming. Three words are said to define the future: interactive, digital and mobile. And what will define their success, he says, is their “JAZZINESS’ which is defined as openness, interactive capacity, linked potential and openness to improvisation. We are moving, we were told, from the Web 1.0 to 2.0 and even 3.0—all promising more data, faster access, rich visual experiences. (I often felt like Danny 6.4, thinking back to my first email account in 1986, and Osborne even earlier.)

Today whats cool is “Software light”—and yet all influenced by the “wisdom of the crowd.” Translation: what sells prevails.

Ironically, we were told, this new world of “and,” not either-or, of people first “with a new kind of soul” derives its future from the past, from the jazz age and the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (Ironically, it was Fitsgerals who responded to Hemingway’s observation that the “rich are different than you and me ” with the comment, “Yes, they have more money,” an idea that seemed prophetically relevant in the posh playground that is Monaco. Fitzgerald also said wisely was smart to keep two opposing ideas in mind at all times, so this may not be such a contradiction.

(Just by chance, last night, the OVATION channel carried a provocative documentary on Fitzgerald’s classic “The Great Gatsby” which lambasted the lifestyles and empty values of the ultra rich. The program indicted the instant computer millionaires who revel in the wealth is life mentality. Fitzgerald may have glamorized the jazz age but he was also scorning the rapacious capitalists of that age who have become today’s masters of the universe living for the next IPO. They build businesses not to serve the public but do prioritize lucrative exit strategies. That’s jive, not jazz.)

There were some other more political panels—one on the Middle Easter pitting AlJazeera against two US government apologists including PR strategist John Rendon. One of them, a State Department spokesperson now posted in London was almost as critical of the government’s communications screw-ups as his colleague who spoke out only to be slapped on the wrists and forced to recant in a replay of Stalinist Russia. (On that panel the ex-CBS and now Cairo-based journalist Lawrence Pintak argued out against limits on Freedom of information and government distortions of news.)

But critics like myself were confined to questions from the audience (when there was time for questions( and famous African journalists like Reed Kramer of AllAfrica.com, Namibia ‘s gutsy Gwen Lister of the Namibian and Mary-Roget Biloa of Africa International Magazine were given no opportunity to speak.

There was too much on offer and not enough time to savor it all—but at the same time, it brought together a wide range of media heads—from the NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde and, yes, even Media Channel—to chat and confront key problems and each other. Newspaper websites now fuse old credibility with new technology. 37 percent of digital media is said to be transmitted through them. Bob Guccione Jr, now of Discover Media, was particularly articulate in defending the importance of thoughtful journalism and print media.

There was a panel with newspapers that are going through hard time but are expected to survive because new media rarely totally displaces the old—ie. radio is still with us even if typewriters are not. Satellites and conventional TV channels are here to stay at least in the foreseeable future.

In many ways the casino world of Monte Carlo is an appropriate setting for a Forum like this because so many of the companies present are gambling that they will score big, and hit the big time since many major media outlets today prefer to buy smaller companies rather than build their own.

Hundreds of bottles of wine were consumed these three days of surprisingly uninteractive discourse. I learned again that I seem to be more in the Shmooze Business these days than the News Business, but even if I am often the maverick in residence, and patted on the head for “good questions,” it is worthwhile coming to these events—for the contacts I can make, the platform they permit and for what I can learn and share about what’s coming down the media pike.

Many other bloggers wrote about this “off the record” event. Here’s one:
http://www.hebig.com/archives/004031.shtml

And another:
http://strange.corante.com/archives/2006/10/20/blogging_the_monaco_media_forum.php

You can also check out the Forum website:
www.monacomediaforum.org/