Could "Context" be the New King?

In January 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled “Content is King”, which was published on the Microsoft website. He began by saying:

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting.”

Needless to say, he was correct, as evidenced by the massively profitable businesses formed by media giants from Facebook to Viacom who heeded this business acumen.

So what has changed? Well the truth is cloud computing and advanced data analytics tools have finally created a real challenge to content’s seemingly unchallengeable position as king of the castle. By providing a new reference set to help businesses better understand how one customer’s actions or outcomes compare to those of a larger population, context can be a source of incremental new value for both businesses and customers.

During our leadership program Accelerating Digital Leadership, based on Professor David L. Rogers’ best-seller The Digital Transformation Playbook, we study Nike+, an online community that lets customers capture their running data and compare their performance to other members of the Nike+ community. Supported by consumers’ increasing interest in diet, exercise, heart rates, sleep patterns and other markers, the Nike+ platform started out as a simple shoe sensor customers could link to their Apple iPod to monitor their performance, but rapidly evolved into a global runner community and website collecting data from millions of runners around the world.

Nike customers who track their running data don’t just want to know how they did today; they also want to know how today’s performance compares to their own performance over the last week or month, to the goals they have set, and to the activity of friends in their social network. The ability to compare their own data with the data of others adds additional value by helping customers understand the probabilities of different outcomes. Context is king.

But Nike isn’t the only company moving beyond content to context. Naviance is a software platform for American college hopefuls. One of its services allows students to upload transcript results and compare them to Naviance’s database of other students who have applied to the same schools. The result is a ranking of the student’s probability of being accepted at their top choices.

BillGuard is another example of a firm using context to drive greater value. This popular financial protection app tracks its customers’ credit card statements and helps identify both fraudulent billing (e.g., whether or not the card was one of the 50 million hacked in the latest cyberscandal) as well as “grey” charges (hidden fees customers likely weren’t aware they were being charged). The firm’s algorithms are effective precisely because they compare a customer’s bills against the anonymized bills of peers and against whatever charges may have been flagged as questionable by other customers in its community.

So, as we begin 2019, which really is king? In the ongoing quest for dominance of the Internet, perhaps my claim that context could be the new king is simply too bold. After all, content has ruled for quite a while, remaining almost impenetrable in its dominance.

Until you compare it to something else—then it becomes really valuable.

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The content for this article is drawn from CX Workout’s Accelerating Digital Leadership program which is based on the book: The Digital Transformation Playbook—Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age by David L. Rogers

Want to learn more? Visit us at www.cxworkout.com/digital-leadership/.