Just who in the media world 'gets' digital?

MEDIA & MARKETING:SOME DAY there will be a McCarthyite tribunal into whether or not media people "get" digital. You hear it a lot, these whispers, albeit usually on digital forums: "He/She/Company X does a lot of amazing stuff, but I'm just not sure if they really get digital."

Being thought to “get” the internet is important in a media world that digitises new colonies each week. There’s even one of those spoof Downfall videos about a traditional ad agency that doesn’t “get” digital. They lose their last account, sending Hitler into a rage about how he had only recently endured a webinar. It’s not particularly funny, but then maybe I just didn’t get it.

The phrase is irritating because it often seems predicated on faith in business models that remain unproven. The “unproven” element is not the problem – companies are supposed to invest in the company they want to be, not the company they are. In any case, an unproven business model is surely better than one that’s already proven to be faulty.

But there’s an evangelism about digital businesses that isn’t always matched by their commercial bona fides – it sometimes feels as if bottom-line naivety, rather than being a drawback, is actually a cherished ideal. The Venn diagram of media people who talk about others “getting” or “not getting” digital has little overlap with the faction who can be heard muttering “it’s the Emperor’s new clothes”, repeatedly, in their sleep.

Despite these misgivings, when I watched James Daunt, the man who runs the Waterstones book chain on behalf of Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut, explaining via YouTube why the company was going to sell Kindles in its stores, the first thing I thought was “this man doesn’t get digital”.

That’s not quite true – my first thought was not dissimilar to the video’s pithy top commenter: “He looks like he’s been crying.”

Only a few months ago, Daunt called Amazon a “ruthless, money-making devil” that had never struck him as being “in the consumer’s interest”. Now he seems to be knocking down his bookshelves and kneeling before its almighty power, yet simultaneously not “getting” the momentum that’s driving ebook sales. Ostensibly, Waterstones is throwing its lot in with Kindle in the hope that customers will retain so much love for physical books that they will use them as a shop-window for ebooks. It expects readers will wait until they cross the threshold of its newly wifi-enabled stores before buying an ebook title, so that it can get a cut.

Essentially, it’s a bid to persuade people to go to a special place – a Waterstones store – and browse-and-download rather than click-and-buy. The risk is that Waterstones will simply wind up converting Kindle refuseniks into ebook devotees and cannibalise its print sales.

But the question of whether Daunt “gets” digital is really about the language he uses.

“I think digital is very much an adjunct to reading a physical book,” he expounds, before talking about the “convenience” of ebooks while travelling versus the “tactile pleasures” of physical books – as if ebooks are not for life, just for holidays. The computer screen “is a terrible environment in which to select books”, he told the Independent in December – consumers want to “browse, see, hold, touch and feel”.

Selling print books is still the core business of Waterstones. But it all feels a little sentimental, like Daunt is giving the books he loves a hopeful life expectancy even as his deal with Amazon tacitly acknowledges, and even accelerates, their demise.

By contrast, there’s little that’s tacit about the digital strategy published by RTÉ on the same day as the Waterstones-Amazon deal.

It’s a mission statement that puts digital consumption at the heart of its future, promising mobile optimisation, new content distribution platforms, social media tools for second-screeners and, proving that it’s not averse to a dash of digi-jargon, “multiple complementary touch points for the public”.

The document’s stock photo of eight sofa-sprawling teenagers glued to individual smartphones, with not a communal television in sight, sums up the vision. “For RTÉ, our strategy is to make our content available anywhere and everywhere our audience wants,” said RTÉ Digital managing director Múirne Laffan at the launch of UPC’s on-demand television service at the Light House Cinema in Smithfield on Tuesday. It was, in truth, a happier week for Laffan than it was for several of her Oireachtas-bound colleagues on the RTÉ executive board.

RTÉ and Waterstones are not analogous, of course, and television companies, whether they are publicly funded or not, are always going to have an easier transition than companies with physical products to sell.

But it’s still interesting to compare Daunt’s consumer philosophy with that of RTÉ. One envisages a near-future where the mobile is an omnipresent entertainment device, the other seems to fervently hope that enough consumers will romantically cling to waning traditions in order for it to get by.

Ultimately, it might not matter too much whether Daunt “gets” digital, as long as he “gets” retail. His eponymous London book stores are beautiful, mahogany places. Maybe Waterstones doesn’t need to make much money at all from ebooks as long as it sells decent cakes. Other companies too poor to compete in their industry’s digital future could do worse than to follow the example.