Friday, May 05, 2006

"Most people in an industry are blind in the same way - they're all paying attention to the same things, and not paying attention to the same things." Gary Hamel

This year's NAB was simply the best, a killer show start to finish. There are billion dollar opportunities in today's discontinuity (to paraphrase Gary Hamel - who goes on). "Keep asking yourself, What's changing? What's the opportunity this presents?" It's all about getting addicted to change. One of his best lines is..."There is no proprietary data about the future." Think about it. Keep thinking about it.

Congrats and kudos to Nigel Spratling and his maven.tv gang on a smash NAB HD "second-season". Bravos also to Mark Brown and his SignaSys crew from San Jose, they built 5,000 sf of leading-edge facility and studio from scratch. The NAB HD NewsCopter delivered amazing live video. Strong remote live shots, well-produced (taped and live) studio interviews, dawn to dusk event coverage. You had to see "the Nigel show" to believe it - outstanding by any measure. I am honored to have been invited to participate again this year.

Congrats to Joy 99.7FM, Ghana's first private commercial station, and the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), South Korea's national pubcaster on their NAB International Broadcasting Excellence Awards.

Leslie Stimson and the IMAS team provided fine coverage of the event, publishing their daily (bulldog and PM editions) onsite over the show run.

David Rehr made an outstanding first impression, his opening keynote hit perfect notes. Bruce Reese deserves high marks for his tireless work as joint board chair - he leads by example.

Tom Webster of Edison Media Research has written about radio's "HR crisis", while I have to agree to disagree on some of his points he deserves praise for starting a conversation on the subject matter (another symptom of radio's leadership problem). Join the conversation here.
P.S. The one and only living legend, and exceptionally gifted talent, Frank Kingston Smith (WFIL, WRKO, WABC, WVBF, WBZ, WODS, etc) weighs in among others.

Esther Dyson and Vint Cerf ponder the internet's future, a good read via WSJ Online here

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Webster obviously failed to do his homework on the matter of radio as a "small biz". He talks about radio needing to step up and provide benes that outfits like Mr Softie offers? Excuse me? Most of us have better os on our home gear. Our student station still operates in a non-supported win95 environment, the TV station where I intern is a win2k shop and this guy thinks broadcasters have the deep pockets to step up to Redmond standards? Huh? Robin B. UWM

David Martin said...

Robin,

I'll defend Tom's good intentions. His perceptual error about radio being a small business is a common one. I did respond to his response but he has not yet updated his comments. There are over 12,000 US radio stations, the large group operators own a bit over 3,500 of those (MIT est.), so the clear majority of stations are, in fact, small business operations. Having said that there are many good operators who provide excellent - and locally competitive comp - career opportunities for young people. Good luck with your internship.

Anonymous said...

good intentions? you are way too kind. TW lacks the cred, his bio has not one call letter. radio to guys like him is limited to the largest companies the ones that can buy whatever he is selling nuff said