A media manifesto for global media labs to be funded by global brands. The project calls for a new era of media labs merging realities and fiction–reflecting on universal topics and matters. The business model is provocative itself, inviting global brands such as Apple, Nokia, IBM, etc. to become the incubators for such projects. For their own good. A proposal to take action in the future of media, by Claudine Boeglin.

News media are reactive. The audience is hyperactive. Today’s audience uses all available technologies to gain a voice / raise their voices / interact / act. Online media that rely on the fate of breaking news is growing obsolete, useless, and powerless to the audience - with or without a business model.

To refuse the fatality of breaking news is to refuse the sensationalism of reality TV. Brutal news should make us angry for not having anticipated the problem–and acted on time. In March 2009, Haiti had already lost ground. In January 2010, an earthquake smashed the country into rubble.

The naked emperors
Most media groups have missed the opportunities to create media labs. Their internal and structural difficulties have turned them into Babel towers with conflicting languages and interests.

The absence of new business models has left corporate media and traditional ad agencies weak in their current state of hierarchical, expensive, sedentary, and predatory practices. The past was to capture creative minds in costly fortresses, minimizing creative risks with the most important news or oversimplified and sweetened messages. The future is to sustain a permanent creative flux, developing emerging talents and new visions through media labs supported by global brands, and fueled by participatory audiences.

MULTIPLE VOICES + MULTIPLE REALITIES = ACTIVE / PREVENTIVE MEDIA

Brands are the future of media. Brands are content and form. Brands must generate ongoing conversations with their audiences. Why will a media lab become an essential platform to any global brand willing to stay in the conversation? A global brand can develop its own resources internally for creative thinking, media building, and audience testing to become an experiment, instead of transferring charge to an external provider (the ad agency).

What for?
To control the source of the media and the direction of the conversations. To gain from direct conversations with each “cell production” creative team. To perceive the direct repercussions of its audience without filters. To change the status quo and think different each time necessary. To anchor the messages to the roots and the fundamentals of the company. To seed and feed a pole of emerging talents in multimedia who otherwise will not have the chance to team play in a one direction.

A media lab is a valuable mission for a brand and a rewarding sustainable ecosystem.