A word from the Executive Editor
There's one constant in talking to hundreds of people across marketing, media, agencies and tech: a desire for safe, intelligent conversation and analysis of global and Australian industry developments. Conversations that are considered, constructive and challenging. That avoid anonymity. Mi3 is a contemporary take on an industry journal - part journalism, part equities-style analysis. It's designed to be different in its conversations across the nexus of marketing, agencies, media and tech. Transactional industry news is not a focus for Mi3 - that turf is well served. The intent is to go deeper for leaders and emerging leaders in marketing, agencies, media and technology. Let's see if the pool of curious, time-poor, intelligence-hungry, considered industry folk in the marketing food chain get some value. Welcome anyway. Read on.
A tension that has long frustrated me as a journalist is the need to build tension into a story to get the hit. That's been a struggle long, long before clickbait landed as we know it today. It's human. It's a reality. I've done lots of it. Sometimes I've been good at it. Still struggle with it.
From the get-go in shaping Mi3 with the crew at Media i, we were serendipitously aligned.
We wanted Mi3 to be more about strategic tension, not personal, not even corporate, although that will be inevitable at times. Could we build a collective of people that would devour and contribute to considered takes on local and global developments?
"I'm into it. There's 100% a gap for Mi3. Will be interesting to see if people have been too dumbed-down with what they take in but I have faith they haven't."
Perhaps an iteration on the slow food movement: slow media. But slow in a considered, constructive sense; the antithesis of the Silicon Valley mantra of Move Fast and Break Things. That worldview remains ascendant but, in my mind, is nearing its downside in the Hype Cycle, so cleverly coined by Gartner in 1995.
Enjoyable moments come for those who push on, despite swirling doubt, and discover really smart people are truly quantum leaps ahead of the rest of us.
So it was in watching a conversation series between Seth Godin and Tom Goodwin last week. Godin made a stellar point about the mindset of Silicon Valley (of which he was one of the earliest musketeers in the 1990s) that he's not proud of.
Disruptive start-ups (I do try to avoid that word) which garner most VC funding are essentially based on breaking things to create tension so that people have to move forward to find some semblance of stability. Sometimes it happens. Mostly not.
Godwin cites social media dynamics as a proof point. Before Facebook, he says, you didn't know what people at high school were saying behind you're back was a problem. Having that information out publicly in the world creates the problem.
So the Move Fast and Break Things mantra tends to encourage tech disruptors to replicate a common cycle: create a "network effect" that leads to a technology trigger that leads to monopolistic behaviour so they can IPO (Uber, AirBnB, Google, Facebook et al). "So the question," Godin tells Goodwin, "is will that create destruction toward a world we want to live in or will it merely fuel the profits of the person who made it in the first place?" Could be a bit deep but I get it.
Tension can be good if it's creative and constructive. So to bend Godin & Goodwin's banter, that's what we want at Mi3.
It can only happen if we collectively participate and contribute.
What you see here, today, is a baseline experiment. Mi3 will perpetually iterate, as they say in the business, in our user experience and design, tone, structure and content themes. Tell us the good, bad and ugly. All the time.
We hope to produce something of value. I'll default to the words of one of our commercial partners who, after an early discussion about Mi3's direction, said: "I'm into it. There's 100% a gap for it. Will be interesting to see if people have been too dumbed-down with what they take in but I have faith they haven't."
That's our roll of the dice.
There's three things you can do to make Mi3 worthwhile:
- Participate by joining up as an Mi3 Member - do it, you'll be surprised at what's coming.
- Contribute via our Pulse Polling and Comments.
- Share Mi3 and discuss the conversations with your colleagues, clients and industry peers.
Two call-outs to go.
First to the Media i team - Chris Winterburn, Dani Harris-Walker and Mitch McGuiness in Sydney and Brendan Coyne, our Associate Editor in London. Couldn't have asked for a smarter, well-oiled, enjoyable crew to make this happen. And our experience design team at Aleph in Sydney and Singapore - they'll be ecstatic we've hit Launch Tuesday!
Finally, to those partners who supported Mi3 when it was just an idea, not a tangible. Impressive. Really.
So thanks to Bauer Media, NewsMediaWorks, Nine, Ooh Media, Southern Cross Austereo + PodcastOne, Twitter and Val Morgan. And a shout-out to Sophie Madden and her team and board at the Media Federation of Australia; John Broome & Co at the Australian Association of National Advertisers and Liz Miller at the CMO Council in San Jose - all of whom backed the Mi3 idea early on.
Hope you enjoy. Game on.
Paul.
