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Hi, this is Frank Radice with The Future of Content series powered by Red Touch Media.
Here at CES 2014 we spoke with Peter Weedfald, president of Gen One Ventures, on a variety
of subjects. I think that there is a fourth business, and that is batteries. Yes. It's
really simple, everything has to be done mobley. What powers mobile? Even if you've got the
pipe, if your batteries dead the pipe doesn't matter. Right, so Masayoshi Son, who you may
know from SoftBank, taught me something a long time ago to your point about batteries.
What he said was, you know, what we want to do is.. We'll let people build the highway,
but we want to own the gas stations. We want to owe the food shops along the way. That's
the printer model. Right, and so if you think about that with batteries right? There is
all this stuff. The three-legged stool I think we agreed to was it's content, it's the first
inch of a piece of glass and then it's the pipe right? While working perfectly and very
quickly together, the battery is the highway if you think about it, because once the battery..
Because remember what I said once before, you have a home life, business life and a
mobile life. It's all now a mobile life. Even when you're sitting there watching TV at home,
you've got a mobile device with you. So battery life, I agree with you extensively, is a great
weapon. And here's the good news, nobody has carved it out, nobody has taken credit for
carving out, giving us longevity in our mobile lives. Whether it's in our home or outside.
So I think that's a great one. You know the argument has been made that very much in the,
sort of the mindset in the way that a printer company operates is I give you the printer,
charge you a bundle for the ink which is going to run out very quickly so that you don't
have to go out and buy more ink, that continues to monetize greater and greater numbers for
that printer company whether it's Brother, HP or whatever it is. It's not about the hardware,
it's about the.. Think of the ink as the battery, that it's something that actually can be fixed
that hasn't been. So, it's really leadership, but it's leadership mindsets you know? We're
talking about batteries. The battery for all of this content is the leader of an organization.
The other ones that should be looking out and either discussing this is the path we're
going to take or not, i'm going to give you a primary example and i'm going to quote it
on record. So I call down compact computer, right? And I walked in there and the biggest
conundrum was how do we get into the printer room, because HP owned it so good. So compact
actually came out with printers. So I go in there as a representative of the Ziff Davis
Publishing Company, multiple publications, and I had this idea and I said look, the one
thing HP doesn't have and at the time they didn't, they don't have computers, all they
have is printers. So here's what we're going to do, we're going to run a campaign that
shows a compact PC with a compact printer and here's our headline. I'm going to give
it to you free of charge. In one compact, out the other. Nice. And to really make sure
it works, because even if it wasn't that technology, we're going to put an infrared light on here
and when you turn the computer on it automatically turns the printer on, this is years ago. And
then, you're now going to get into the consumer of a business that you're not in right now
and you're going to take them all because HP doesn't have a PC. Well I've got to tell
you Frank, what I went through, they beat the hell out of me. And then HP came back
with a PC right away. Thats right, the first thing the executive did was he looked at me
and he went,do you understand? Just like this, this is the same thing that happened with
Sony. "Do you understand that we have a PC division and we have a printer division and
those are two separate businesses and we don't work together!" That is an exact quote. By
the way, that is a very old philosophy. I believe we are seeing it today in many cases,
right? So when you look at content going forward and we were going to talk about wearables
being batteries right? Batteries are really big with wearables. I'd say, I don't know
how wearables work without batteries. Solar, but that's a battery. Well yes, but it depends
on what the application is of content to turn on and turn off the nodes connected to a hub
and the hub being a digital camber, the hub and then the node might be this incredible
new product called Smart Lens and Kodak JK Imaging actually owns the rights to Smart
Lens, right? But that Smart Lens has got to have a battery, which is the node that connects
to the hub and has to be on all the time, but I think if we talk about content in the
future. If we really think about what the CEO from Intel said on the show floor on his,
you know, keynote speech on Edison, which is the new product and the SD card that's
actually inside of Edison, His example was- Well what we want to do is, we don't maybe
want to directly connect content in the traditional way, but we want to put a sensor on little
Johnny who's 1 years old and mommy and daddy want to know if the babies crying, if the
temperatures right, if he's got colic or whatever, but we're not going to communicate with mom
or dad. We'll communicate with the coffee cup because the coffee cup is going to have
to know if it's connected to that. Well this is internet of everything. That's the internet
of everything, right. So those are the examples of content moving forward, but remember what
I said earlier about the one to one relationship? That content... Think it much more one to
one than carrying a baby. That's right, but if you think about it. If you know that there's
a parent with baby, where do you draw the line? Now I want to advertise. I want to advertise,
I want to market I want to bring my products out and I don't want to wind up having a niggling
post prout cheese pairing bagle Intel product, whose brain goes into the brain of operation
business. I want to get that time to volume in the first 90 to 100 days and I want to
learn to figure out who's got a baby, who's concerned about the baby, infact, which baby
is actually prone to the flu and that is where content must evolve to, otherwise.. I know
we're seeing all this content, I know we're seeing all these products. Hello! McFly! yeah,
there's something called a PNL and you can only live in the profit recession. I'll say
it again, the profit recession business and so on. Otherwise bye bye, your company is
gone. That's right, and that's why today when you look at the consumer electronics business
and i've studied this and you look at the evidot. of all the consumer electronic companies,
2 companies have over 55% of all the evidot globally, and that's Apple and Samsung. So,
you know, this business.. And by the way, they have a tremendous amount of cash. Yes,
tremendous amount of cash and by the way, they've earned the right for those positions.
I mean, they have actually earned the right. This wasn't lucky, the technologies and the
products that those two companies bring to market let people lean in and it's all about
content, it's all about inspiration. So Samsung, being at the far front of the smart TV revolution
was able to create a situation where they could collect their luck because of smart
TV and Apple had already done that by creating all of the things that it had created including
iTunes, where it could collect data and then figure out through the collection of that
data how to best present the next level of products to it's people. Collection of data
and understanding of that data was also involved in our DMX level of products. So forgive my
sagacity or lack of sagacity. When I was a publisher, it always blew my mind, I used
to say this to Bill Ziff. I used to say, when the internet started up. It would say the
following, "Hi, fill out this subscription for $19.99 for a magazine." right? "And also,
give us your email address." and it would always say get 60% off, if you fill out this
subscription and by the way please give us your email address and I used to say to Bill,
no no no.. Let's give 50% off to sign up for a subscription, if you give me your email
address and you allow me to build a relationship with you, I'll give you another 20% off. And
so I don't understand today, to your point. You're collecting all this data, you're collecting
all this information. You and I have a great relationship with an Amazon and Apple and
a Samsung. Why are they not asking us? Why are they not treating us differently? Why
don't they say, Peter. Like Tumi, I have so many Tumi bags just because I liked it. Me
too. Tumi doesn't know it, Tumi doesn't treat me any different, but i'm an evangelist for
them. How do we do that with content? So, i'm waiting for Apple or Samsung or even Sony
to recognize who you are and who I am and to not only deliver us content, whether it's
product whether it's apps, whether it's whatever, but treat us special. That sounds to me like
the most important thing of this conversation is personalization of presentation, when it
comes to marketing to someone that has to then go out and do something to buy a product.
Yes, and i'm going to give you one side board to that. I said to Mike Pitelli of Best Buy,
a couple years ago. I said, you know, the biggest conundrum you have is, you spend all
this money to advertise. You get 1100 stores in the United States, your SG & A is high.
It's toured at 26 to 28%, you've got to bring it down it's too high because of all the human
capital. And then somebody is hot and bothered, they wake up in the morning, they go "I want
to buy Samsung TV". They dress themselves pretty, take a shower they're thinking about
it. They've done their study, get down to Best Buy, they're panting right? I mean this
is dream inspiration right? They finally, they buy it, they drag it out of there, they
take it home, they put it up. What happened to Best Buy? Best Buy's gone. Best Buy, when
they look at that TV it says Samsung. It doesn't say Best Buy. But that's why they set up the
Geek Squad. Well.. So that they could have a continuing relationship with, i'm not..
No stop, it's not Devils Advocate, you're absolutely positively right. But then it brings
us to the genius of Jeff Bazos going, "Hi everybody, yeah i'm on 60 minutes. Yeah you
having a good day? Hey, watch this! We're going to have drones, they're going to come
along, of course after the Federal Aviation Administration says no a million times and
it drops on your head and somebody dies the first time, but we're going to do that and
we're going to actually deliver the same day. Anything under 5 pounds. I actually looked
up right away and I said, "Hello McFly, Best Buy can do that right now". For me, back to
personalization. Here's a real time example, right? So when you build retail stores. There's
big massive studies about it. Once the householding comes, what's the location, how many people
within the first half mile, 1 mile, 2 mile, 3 mile, after that we're going to compete
with ourselves cause our store will be here, it's 4 miles away. All of that work is done,
right? So explain to me, especially after Jeff said, "You know what, I took it from
you by delivering the next day and people don't have to get in the car and shop" and
nobody did anything about it. They started their own .com's and delivered all sort of
stuff, but he goes out and says, if you really want to win in the marketplace. That's the
lesson I got from him. Deliver the same day. So why wouldn't Best Buy with 5,500 Geek Squad
people say, go on bestbuy.com before 11:00 in the morning and we guarantee if you live
within, pick your distance Best Buy, half a mile, 1 mile. 10 miles. 3 miles. We will
deliver it by 7:00 the same day, no charge and oh by the way, Geek Squad will be delivering
it. If you want them to come in and set it up we'll charge you for that, but the delivery
is free. Back to your point about free, there's a great example of delivering free that has
huge value because I can buy it online, you're 3 miles from my home and if I have a problem
I can go back to the store with it, which you can't do at Amazon. And actually a good
reason for them not to close all their stores, quite honestly. If they would take that philosophy
and move it forward. Frank Radice, thanks so much for watching this episode of The Future
of Content, powered by red Touch Media. If you want to see more, just click on one of
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