Power to the Pixel makes changes

By Liz Rosenthal

Power to the Pixel was founded 10 years ago and has been an influential voice in the most turbulent period of change in the history of the media and entertainment industries.

We decided that a decade in business was a good place to stop and take stock.

We will not be holding The Pixel Lab or Power to the Pixel: The Cross-Media Forum this year.
However we will continue to offer various consultancy services for media companies, organisations and creators in the innovation, interactive and audience engagement space.

When Power to the Pixel started out, YouTube was taking its first infant steps, Facebook was making a break from the dorms at Harvard, while Twitter and the iPhone were still a year away from release. The big story in new media was MySpace, which had just been acquired by News Corporation for $580m.

Technological innovation has continued at an astonishing speed throughout the life of Power to the Pixel, and there is no reason to believe that it will slow. Power to the Pixel: The Cross-Media Forum in 2015, for example, showcased the dramatic evolution of Virtual Reality, which promises to open up new areas of creative business.

Yet, while tech change is certainly a constant, Power to the Pixel believes that the direction of travel is now much clearer. It has argued now for many years that the underlying truth about the emerging creative and economic climate is not only to be found in hardware and software.

The opportunities and challenges lie in the changed relationship between audience and content. Fresh patterns of demand and consumer expectation may have initially been enabled by technology but those new audience realities are now actively shaping the development of content, products and services.

That influence is most obviously being captured and exploited through the use of Big Data by some of the world’s biggest global enterprises. Every online interaction creates and indelible footprint that can be transformed into business value and new interactive and intuitive products and services.

It has changed the way that major corporations, including world-leading marketing and advertising companies do business; and it is at the heart of the emerging online conglomerates, such as Google, Amazon and Netflix.

Access to, and exploitation of, Big Data has contributed to a growing polarisation of business between the giants of the Knowledge Economy and the independent media and entertainment industries.

It has created a huge competitive advantage in overcrowded and over-supplied markets.

The vast majority of independently-produced content is fighting for a share of precious consumer time and far too many strategic, creative and policy decisions are made in the dark, uninformed by facts or held back by weak analysis and knowledge.

And that is where Power to the Pixel is planning to focus for the next stage of its evolution.

It believes that the new environment offers major opportunities for those who understand:

• How to access and analyse audience knowledge
• How to build and maintain audience communities
• How to use new tools and services to create effective audience development strategies
• How to transform stories and creative ideas into Intellectual property
• How to identify and use collaborative partnerships in finance, audience building and product development
• How to create strategies to test and prototype ideas and content
• How to build business plans based on demand creation.

Power to the Pixel will demonstrate how knowledge of the audience and interactive strategies with participative communities can be an effective way to create original and challenging work.

It is important to stress that PttP was built on collaboration and networking. Success in the new world will be about shared knowledge, partnerships and using the right services for the right work.

We are excited to share our ideas and new projects over the coming months.

Finally a huge thank you to the many partners, mentors, experts and friends who made our Lab and Forum programmes possible. Looking forward to working with you again!

Power to the Pixel!