Five more takes on online media and publishing in 2018
Tags: Diversity, Innovation, Digital Media, Digital Publishing, Technology

#5 Innovation Is Possible Without Big Funds In-house

The panel moderator, our own co-founder and CEO Mads Holmen, asked the panelists how they make new technologies work from a commercial point of view. How do you manage the cost of creating new, high quality products and formats? Ben kicked off by explaining how this worked when VICE started pioneering videos at scale:

“At VICE Media, we’ve always seen a video as an economic multiplier. When you’ve shot a video, you have stills you can capture, stories you can write, brands you can represent, and a multitude of formats, existing and yet to be imagined, you can transfer that content to.”

The focus on a different format to text also started out with bootstrapping, Ben continued:

“We only had money to do ‘this one thing’. So you need to ask yourself how we can create the most value possible out of everything we do. It really has to be worth it.”

Zahra staid that the same is true for their work at Contrast VR too:

“One of the toughest things we have to do at the studio is justifying why we are doing a certain story in VR, AR or using whatever technology and spending that amount of money. We could devote that money to 5 other stories we could do. If you’re able to answer that question, if we convince ourselves that this format will have a great impact, only then do we move ahead. Most of the pitches we receive, we don’t do.”

Fast-forward to now, and she shared with us how she’s been making things work by reaching out to brands and organizations:

“When we launched Contrast VR in April 2017, Al Jazeera gave us a budget. I quickly realized that with this budget there’s nothing I could really do in our space. It’s so expensive to create — and this budget was created having a ‘text’ editorial in mind, for which the budget was shrinking too. I decided to focus on sponsored content to get the money in that was needed to make this technology come alive.”

“Our authentic coverage led to a business model where organizations would come to us because of the kind of storytelling we were delivering; the narratives we were drafting. One of those organizations was Amnesty International, who sponsored us to create more content around the Rohingya crisis at the end of 2017. Our reporting was then offered to representatives of member states at the UN too.”

Earlier this year, World Vision sponsored Contrast VR to produce Dreaming In Za’atari: Stories after Syria, an immersive film on young people living in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp.

Veda explained that the immersive studio at The New York Times found a different way to fund innovation. After working on The Daily 360 from the end of 2016, which was funded by a technology partnership with Samsung that ran for 14 months, they haven’t done any sponsored content:

“We don’t work with other organizations to directly fund the creation of our content. The several New York Times VR projects do have spots available for brands to run advertizing — the practicality of that is taken care off by another team than editorial.”

For the media studio’s innovations to come alive, she says educating the newsroom at The New York Times has been critical:

“As an innovative studio within your organization it’s a big effort to educate the newsroom and all the journalists you work with — there’s so much storytelling going on we want to align with. The crazy amount of training, conversations and offering VR experiences in the office did pay off.”

Marty concluded that for new technologies like VR to become truly viable, they need to scale on the consumer side. He observed that an average household doesn’t have a headset at home yet:

“I expect, and I’m hoping, that a big player will step in and make the headsets as affordable as the Echo Dot made it for smart assistant tech now.”