Why a flight to quality will hurt Google and Facebook

When I was a frontline journalist, the newsroom would frequently echo to the call to "make it happen”. It meant, get the biggest story in the world, or else. The else was always uncomfortable.

It was the catchcry of a particular deputy editor I’ll call Neil. Famously small in stature, but infamously vicious even by Fleet Street standards, he relished his nickname of The Wolfman, earned because once he had his teeth in something, he never let go.  Many reading this will know him.

I didn’t like him personally, and I’m pretty confident he didn’t care much for me either, but what he did was keep me perpetually energised. I grudgingly admired him for that, as did others. 

Media was elementary. Binary. Linear. If you didn’t have the best story for the front page, you failed, and millions of paying readers missed the front page their money deserved. 

The pressure was intimidating, but I knew a thousand wannabes wanted me to fail. It taught me well the concept of survival of the fittest, and moaning was just an excuse.

After 17 years, I became news editor, managing 70 reporters and the most-read front page on the planet. I rubbed shoulders with amazing editors. Smart, uncompromising, focused and scary, they all recognised their names and reputations were indelibly linked to their paper’s century-old brand. 

As news editor, it fell to me to manage them, as well as the reporters who were my direct reports. My natural sense of justice told me that if the rank-and-file reporters were to live under such pressure, the same should be applied to their overlords. This up-as-well-as-down accountability ensured everyone shared a common goal, and lived in the same electric anxiety that drove bigger and bigger wins. 

Today though, the once-proud Fourth Estate is battered and bruised. The proud lion resembles an injured gazelle.

Every few weeks, another editor pops up, whining about social media destroying their industry, pushing fake news, eviscerating their revenues and so on. It makes my blood boil because for all the visceral prose, and the power they yield, you’ll need to look a long, long way to find one offering a real solution, and that’s not good enough.

It’s their job, no-one else’s, to save the industry.

The great editors knew that. They struggled to get papers out the door during The Blitz or when the print strikes drove a stake into the heart of the industry. Who is leading today? And who is pushing them to lead? The relentless whimpering is unforgivable, inexcusable and dangerous. 

Fake news, increased central Government control, racist commentary and intolerance, the rise of Facebook and Google, clickbait, collapsing CPMs, diminishing trust, the rolling back of defamation laws are all symptoms of a neutered Fourth Estate.

It needs to end, and that needs a plan. 

We quit our jobs to create Oovvuu to rescue journalism by creating a new, immersive way of reporting the news with video and through that, repatriate billions from Facebook and Google back to the journalists and broadcasters who make the world a safer, better and more informed place.

Oovvuu keynoted at The International News Media Association’s Media Vikings Event in Oslo, Norway. Our message was simple: The media, both print and broadcast, must unite against the common enemy of Facebook and Google.

Any last hopes that they are a friend, or perhaps innocently misguided, must go and the war must begin.

For the past few years, Oovvuu has been building a consortium of broadcasters, who now supply a $250 million catalogue of long and short form video programming, from breaking news to documentaries via the cloud. It is one of the largest news and current affairs video catalogues to ever be collected.

Supporters include the BBC, Bloomberg, ITV, Thomson Reuters, Al Jazeera, VPRO, Australia’s ABC and SBS, and others covering most of the world. What they share is truth, and brand safety. Their reporting is what keeps us informed about the world around us, and by its very nature, it is critical to our way of life, safety and democracy.

At INMA, Oovvuu began the process of adding the print and digital media industry to the consortium. Among those there to listen were The New York Times, Schibsted, The Guardian, News Corp, Fairfax Media, The Irish Times, The Press Association, Trinity Mirror, Sanoma, RussMedia, Mail Online, Johnston Press, The FT, Axel Springer, The Telegraph Media Group, Express Group, Archant, Newsquest, Newsweek, adding to many others already working with us across India, Asia, Africa and the Asia Pacific region.

It’s a strong start, but there is still a long way to go.

Today’s media industry resembles two elephants in a sea of ants, yet the top 50 publishers combined have a larger audience than Facebook.

Consider this:

• Billions of people are watching video on news media sites now, and they want more
• Broadcasters have world-class and trustworthy video, and they want global distribution
• Publishers need more video to meet the massive demand of their audiences, and
• Advertisers want brand safety and engagement, at scale, that they cannot get from Facebook and Google

It creates the opportunity, but it won’t be easy.

The next step is for the industry to come together under a single banner against the common enemy. Broadcasters have already voted by sharing their video with Oovvuu on an unprecedented scale. When publishers take that video and expose it to their massive and engaged audiences, and that will drive the huge scale of brand safe video advertising that the big five agencies need to reduce their reliance on the networks.

Oovvuu can be a fulcrum, using artificial intelligence to read every article published by the world’s top broadcasters, and watch all the videos and match them in real time, putting a BBC video about Mars into an article on the other side of the world in the same topic in less than a second.

Oovvuu estimates a consortium of this scale will generate US$63 million-a-month in new revenues for publishers and broadcasters, and that will just be the beginning.

This global movement will end fake news, reboot the world’s media, make truth and information free to all, and start the process of repatriating the billions from Google and Facebook back to the broadcasters and journalists who make the content.

That will create the momentum that attracts more viewers, that attracts more broadcasters and publishers, and generates more ads. The timing is right, as the world is on a flight to quality.

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Consider the alternatives.

Facebook’s algorithms have enabled fake news, and its inability to combat it has exposed their failings.

Google is an advertising business that has failed to provide brand safety and puts its customers’ ads next to illegal content, while relying on third party data stolen from news companies, that is about to be rendered illegal by the EU.

That's before the sanctions they face for ignoring their tax liabilities.

Both recognise these failings are existential risks, yet they still can’t fix them. That means both have lost control of their machines, which makes them vulnerable.

Their actions in driving scale at all costs have made fake news real and brand safety unachievable. That’s why Oovvuu exists.

There is nothing more brand safe than a BBC video in a NY Times article.

A billion people are watching video, demanding the truth and they want more. That’s scale.

Engagement with real media is not 60 seconds spent watching a skateboarding cat, it is hours. People visit news sites 40 times a day.

And brands and ad agencies, already critical of the networks, want to spend their money on attentive people consuming information that makes the world a better, safer, more informed place for all.

Ricky Sutton is the founder and CEO of Oovvuu based in Sydney, Australia. This is an excerpt from his recent presentations at INMA Oslo and IBC Amsterdam.