Dr Jeffrey Cole is not the sort of man you’d expect to get into fights. Nor is he the type you’d associate with the flashy excesses of the US media industry - which is probably why people take what he says very seriously.
Cole has spent the last 25 years as a media trendspotter, most recently at the impressive sounding Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School in California where he is now director.
He has seen the inside of the White House on numerous occasions, sharing his ideas on the future of media with the likes of Clinton, Gore and Bush.
Cole - speaking at Engage in Singapore this month - is one of the world’s leading experts on media matters, and with this authority comes a tendency to say things that the establishment doesn’t like to hear.
Cole made no friends at News Corp earlier this year when he suggested that the website it had paid millions for would struggle to hold on to its young users. “News Corp didn’t like what I said about MySpace,” he says.
“It fought back by saying that it got it for a steal compared to what Google spent on YouTube. Which is probably true. But it’s wrong if it thinks users are just going to sit there. Social networks are like nightclubs. If they become too popular, their clientele will go elsewhere.”
Cole is not the first person who comes to mind where nightclubs are concerned. But he knows plenty about the youngsters who frequent them.
Worryingly for club owners, Cole’s seven-year, 20-country study has found that almost half the number of people who use online communities value them equally to real-life offline communities.
The impact of social networks on offline media is starting to show too, says Cole. But not necessarily in a bad way. He uses YouTube as an example: “Despite the popularity of amateur videos, YouTubers are more interested in mainstream media - music videos clips, sports highlights and so on.”
Teenagers still love television, he insists. But they don’t understand why they should watch it on someone else’s schedule.
Youngsters are making connections that wouldn’t have been possible before peer-to-peer online networks. And they are protective of these new relationships.
“That doesn’t mean you can’t advertise on them,” says Cole. “It’s just that the rules are different. If you run a bad ad on TV, people will ignore it. Run a bad ad in an online community and you make people angry.”
Marketing within these communities takes a lot more effort, he adds. But this is less of a concern in this part of the world.
While social networking (the rise of Facebook, the fall of MySpace and Friendster) and other web trends are truly global, in Asia what impresses him is the rise of the mobile phone. “The US trails Korea, Japan and Singapore in mobile. And Asia’s less developed countries - which are further behind than they’ve ever been — will catch up on the tech front through mobile,” Cole observes.
Countries such as the US, Canada, the UK are among the only ‘PC-centric’ societies left, Cole points out.
“In emerging markets such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Cambodia, the internet will be used exclusively via the mobile phone. Homes are getting smaller - there’s less space for a chunky PC. The only thing missing is a bigger mobile screen. But we’re seeing real progress on the development of foldable screens.”
The US is the only country in which people value their televisions and computers above their mobiles.
“Everywhere else, people would ditch their TVs and PCs first if they had to,” he notes. “Mobiles are so popular that teens are no longer buying watches.”
The latest trend Cole has spotted will certainly raise eyebrows in Asia. “We’re seeing a little bit of disenchantment with peer-to-peer downloading - that is to say, music and film piracy - as files are often filled with viruses,” he explains.
And there’s another observation won’t make him any more friends at News Corp.
“Within two years, governments are going to be cracking down on the big users of carbon, and near the top of list are newspapers,” says Cole. “The New York Times prints 175 million pieces of paper a day and uses thousands of trucks to distribute them. We’re going to see a real move to get all newspapers online.”
But there is better news for advertisers. “People don’t want to pay more for newspaper subscriptions or music, which is where advertising comes in,” he says. “In the last few months, we’ve seen a real welcoming of advertising on the internet. It’s not love, but it’s an understanding that advertising can keep the cost of content down.”
Jeffrey Cole’s CV
2004 Director, Center for the Digital Future, USC Annenberg School for Communication
1987 Director, UCLA Center for Communication Policy
