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Africa Gathering. Shift Happens!

Big thank you to Marieme Jamme, Ed Scotcher and everyone at Africa Gathering for inviting me to speak there last week.  There were some amazing stories from people making shift happen in Africa.  I was particularly mind blown by the work of Teddy Ruge and Project Diaspora. Truly inspirational work.  Someone I referred to in my talk as an 'Antibody'.  Was also great to meet Bill Liao after so long, another antibody doing some amazing work with Neo.

Shift Happens

View more presentations from Leon Benjamin.

My talk was on how entrepreneurs should look at completely different models of organisation, wealth distribution and ownership in order to avoid the inevitable inequality that arises from Western models of capitalism.  Ironically, it's in America that we're seeing these new models spring up as credible alternatives to command and control organisation.

A very eclectic mix of people with Nick Tadd epitomising the edgy, frontier nature of the atmosphere and ambience at the event.

A summary of fractional work at the Tory party conference

Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to actually speak about the rise of fractional work at the Tory Party conference on the opening day yesterday.  They outsourced the logistics of security passes to Fingerprint events.  Even though they acknowledge receipt of my application, passport and photo id my pass still wasn't ready. After taking two more photos of me at 7am in the morning, the police checking/validating id told me that due to my country of birth, extra checks have to be carried out.  Nice.  It was a Tory MP who invited me to talk there!  I got a text message saying it was ready at 10am, two hours after the speaking slot.  Thanks for that.

Fractional Work

View more presentations from Leon Benjamin.

The good news is that my hosts at JobsGoPublic and Career4Me presented on my behalf.  But here is the point I wanted to make.

The recent announcement by the Conservative Party's plans to cut the benefits of people on incapacity benefits is in some respects laudable because there are no doubt (statistically) some cheats, slackers and chancers on the list of 2.6m claimants.  But why such an emphasis on the supply side of the jobs equation? What's being done on the demand side, you know, to actually create work.  This presentation argues for the economic stimulus of an emerging form of work that has the potential to become the most dominant form of work within a generation.

As an aside, one of things that strikes me with all the political coverage right now on the EU is that politicians never, ever question the validity of their underlying organisational models.  In other words, it isn’t about ‘Broken Britain’ it’s about ‘broken system’.  Companies and governments won’t survive in their present form without decentralising some or all of their decision making.  But we can't go there can we?

From banner ads to banner apps

*****Fast Forward to 2013*****

A study by eBay Research Labs economists Thomas Blake, Chris Nosko, and Steve Tadelis — analyzed eBay sales after shutting down purchases of search ads on Google and elsewhere, while maintaining a control set of regions where search ads continued unchanged. Their findings suggest that many paid ads generate virtually no increase in sales, and even for ones that do, the sales benefits are far eclipsed by the cost of the ads themselves.

Barely anyone clicks on banner ads anymore

2009: With the recent historic news that the UK's advertising industry now spends more online than on print and TV comes a reasonably authoritative report from Comscore that 'barely anyone clicks on banner ads anymore'.  The findings are breathtaking;

"The number of people online who click display ads has dropped 50% in less than two years, and only 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks, according to the most recent "Natural Born Clickers"

Shock horror.

In 2006 academics reached this conclusion a while back, as far back as 2006 but Techcrunch picked it up earlier this year here.  Their research is based on the analysis of large datasets from Youtube, Flickr and others and concluded that the current model is unlikely to survive, principally due to lack of trust. Forrester predicted this scenario as early as 2002.

Isn't it interesting that banner ads are really broadcasts.  They don't speak with a human voice or meet a specific need.   Despite all the warning signs, brands still broadcast while consumers connect and they continue to 'preach' to people whose attention is focused elsewhere.  So the £1.75 billion size of the online ad market is a total waste of money.

So where's it going?  There's a glimpse of the future of advertising here - Pick 'n' mix business.