Tony Shannon is a Business Adviser for the Creative Industries Innovation Centre, based in Sydney, NSW. He shares his views here on how Australia's creative businesses can harness the power of the Apple iPad.
By the time you read this – when, where and how that is, perhaps even on one of Apple's crystalline iPads – yet more hundreds and thousands of iPads will have been sold. Some will have been baseball battered; at least one put through a blender (done, tick that new-tech box); and many others scratched, scraped, scuttled and otherwise embraced in the interests of user-generated product testing and 15-seconds of YouTube fame.
Most won't have been left on buses or on taxi seats and precious few will have become wedged in the s-bend. Some will have been prised open, oyster-like, in the interests of technical-innovation and re-configuration; but mostly they will be sitting obediently in their owner's lap doing precisely what they were bought for and asked to do. To read stuff and watch stuff and app stuff and to buy stuff and subscribe to stuff when and where they please.
Hundreds and thousands of words – mostly on conventional keyboards on conventional desktops – will have been written about the iPad; half coming to praise and half coming to damn. The bookish will still be rumbling on about how much the anticipation of opening a new book gets their senses working overtime. And the mediarialists, desperate to switch on their iPaid digital-content business models, will gush glassy-eyed about how the iPad "may well be the saving of the [insert your preferred print format here] industry".
But what will this new flat screen world order mean to the Creative Industries? What new opportunities will be laid at your creative feet and how can businesses in the creative industries participate, meaningfully?
The opportunities might, actually, be limitless. But some things are certain (probably); the opportunities will neither wait for you, nor bend for you, nor do the work for you, nor be without risk. Creative industry businesses must seize the opportunity themselves and make of it what they can. And it is probably best to assume that those behind the iPad will be in control and stay in control and you will need to find ways to either work with them or work around them. So accept it and get on with it.
Innovation – creative and commercial – and boldness will be the day. Businesses that see this not as an opportunity but as a threat to their current core, traditional, intractable business model will miss out – creatively and, possibly, commercially.
Try to see the iPad as an opportunity to add to your business. To add another creative and business dimension, add another outlet, add another route to customers, add another customer or 10,000 – some or all of which you will never had before and could never reach before.
See the iPad as an opportunity to grow, to expand, to change, to modernise your business or part of your business. Nothing should stay the same forever. 570 years is a long time in anyone's language; even in moveable type.
I picture two broad ways to make money out of the iPad: sell stuff that people can consume on it; or use it to promote yourself or the stuff you sell elsewhere. Of course, if you're lucky enough to be in the advertising agency or graphic design or web building corners of the creative industries then there's money to be made producing ads or designing content surrounds for others (or promoting your own services).
Most likely you are not a publisher – old school or new school – but you need to think a little like one. You need to make your creative output work for you. Ask yourself: what creative product do I have – shows, performances, designs, words, opinions, thoughts, ideas, pictures, tunes – that can be reformatted and presented as content to tantalise, entertain, educate or inform.
It could be current (existing work), new (specially created work) or future (teasers of upcoming work). It could be catalogues or listings or presentations or stories or articles or videos or notes or show programs or guides or manuals or interviews or outtakes or news or any of the hundred other bits and pieces you think or know will interest your fans (just another name for customers really). You can display the whole piece or just part of it. Each has its merits.
And you don't have to do it all yourself. Think collaborations and alliances to spread any cost and broaden the reach and appeal. For instance, if you're a dance company or performance company or groups of troupes team up with people who know how to make films and produce iPad accessible content. You'll all likely benefit.
So you've compiled your shiny new content, how do you monetise all that effort and cost? The naysayers and doomsayers will come up with a million reasons you won't be able to (and you might not); but take a deep breath, step over them and wonder if you could:
• sell it as a stand alone product
• make it free to subscribers of your real work
• offer it as a premium up-sell to ticket purchasers or season subscribers
• offer it as a premium giveaway to clients of your major sponsors
• throw in some (paid) Coke ads
• hand it out – digitally – along with a ticket to the live performance/entry/whatever
• licence your content to some other publisher who has the toothpaste or soap powder advertisers at hand and who knows how to publish and is happy to take and carry the business risk.
Or simply give it away for your fans and soon-to-be fans to enjoy and to promote your real business, probably as the good lord intended.
In the end, as a creative industries business you need to unlock the value in every gram of your investment – be that, money, sweat, tears, inspiration, time or effort – in your creative output. You need to reuse, recycle and re-benefit from each piece of work/content/performance/story/picture/video/design etc. The value shouldn't, for example, die on stage when the curtain falls, the credits rolls or the building is opened.
And, if nothing else, the iPad might be another path to help you do that.
(PS. If you read only one other article about the iPad, try this one from Wired magazine. You may also be interested in Phaidon Press, which published of an iPad version of its Design Classics publication.)